Let’s start at the very beginning as we try to make sense of things. There are two primary positions that someone can have, and these are 1) our universe is a fluke, came into existence without meaning, and 2) the universe was purposefully created. If we are humble and honest about it, both answers have absurdities, yet one must be true.

Why Bad Things Happen in a Spontaneous Cosmos Without a Creator

My atheist friends will disagree, but if you begin without meaning, the cosmos appeared out of nothing and for no reason, the impersonal workings of the nature of time, space, matter, and energy, you cannot add meaning later. All things do not happen for a (good) reason in that case.

My atheist friends would say that their meaning is existential, writing the script while the play is being performed. Without an intention within the origins, that makes no sense to me. You can explain the why. Why wars start, why people get cancer, and why car wrecks happen. But you cannot find an overarching meaning to any of it. Complete madness.

In the impersonal origins world, there are also competing arguments for determinism and free will. I know of physicists who believe that every action that happens was predetermined billions of years ago, held within the entropy at the moment of the Big Bang, and is working itself out in our present time. There is nothing we can do to change that, as the laws of nature are fixed. But it doesn’t matter if it was predetermined by natural laws or humans had a choice; there is no meaning to good or tragedy. So, I will end this part of the discussion here.

Why Bad Things Happen in a Created Cosmos

Without getting into the weeds with religious dogmas and culture, I want to look at the possible ideas associated with tragedies in a cosmos created by a person with a purpose (aka God). Here are the options: 1) the creator is either weak, evil, or incompetent, and that is why bad things happen, 2) the creator is omnipotent and good and creates tragedies for a reason (punishment, teaching, other mysterious reasons), or 3) the creator is omnipotent and good, but for reasons that are beyond our understanding, allows nature to take its course for good and bad.

As a novelist wannabe, I should know better, but I will give away my plot. I spent my 28 years of being religious like other Christian-religious people, believing in # 2, but now I’m confidently in the camp of #3. So now, I will spend the rest of this series of discussions writing about the problems I see with #2 and how I came to hold the third position.

In 1990, I went through the first great tragedy of my life. I came out of a “prosperity gospel” type of Christian culture, where good people are rewarded with good and bad people with bad. A world that made sense.

Tom, who introduced me to the Christian culture, told me, “When you follow Jesus and obey him, your life becomes abundant, and God builds a hedge around it so nothing bad can happen. Good Christians don’t have to wrestle with all the problems that other people do, and bad things like cancer don’t visit them.”

I will share this again, and this is not boasting, as I am embarrassed by it. But I was so committed to this idea of following Jesus that I gave up dating from age 18 to 26. I went to an intensive 4-year Navigator Discipleship training center (some blog visitors were part of that same center and can vouch for this). Later, following Jesus’ example, we gave away all of our possessions, I gave up a great career, we lived in a van for two years with two little boys, and we went to the hardest mission field in the world, trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. There, we lived in a slum on $300/ month. After all this “good Christian behavior,” we were struck with tragedy. My world was turned upside down. Nothing made sense anymore; the prosperity gospel had failed.

I had some very dark years. My entire world was in a tailspin. I walked through the Valley of Death, where I contemplated suicide. However, I began to study. The cage of religion that had been built around my brain was gone. The untouchable topics, like the sciences and philosophy, were now available to me. My natural curiosity exploded, a personal Renaissance. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg described it well: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

When I came back to believing in a creator and in the historical Jesus of Galilee, it was profoundly different, so much better than my previous religious rendition of such a relationship. It was about emotional and factual honesty. But as I’ve described, trying to reenter the religious Christian world has been difficult.

I find religion is about conformity, not seeking truth. It is about people wanting to feel pious, and that piety is very competitive. “I have the right dogmas, you don’t.” “How can you believe that?” “You’re spiritually, unlike mine, is no good.” “Mike, you’re a very bad man, a God hater, not a ‘real’ Christian, etc.”

This is so hard because my relationship with God is wonderful right now. It’s like I’m living in the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, and no religious person wants to hear about it, but to prove I’m of the devil because I’m an enigma. I don’t see them that way. This is not a competition. I assume the religious Christian has a fantastic relationship with God, too. I’m not better than them, just that world doesn’t work for me anymore.

This is why it is my passion to communicate to the masses who are leaving the Christian religion that the creator of the cosmos, the Jesus of Galilee, is bigger than religion and can be found in peculiar places without the trappings. But I digress.

In closing this part, I must add that the key theological concept that saved me during my dark years at the bottom of the valley was why bad things happen to good people. I found that breakthrough not in hours of Bible study or many books of philosophy and science, but in a humble bumper sticker:

Respectfully, Mike