Facing Cancer Without God

By Matt L. Miller

This is a personal journal of an atheist, Matt Miller, facing
death from cancer. It is not a "God-bashing" book. It is his
philosophical musings about the sources of solace in atheism and discussion of the question, "If I exist in an uncaring universe, and have been raised from childhood to believe in the process of evidentiary reasoning, can I find the emotional support I need to carry on in the face of a devastating disease?" His answer, in his plain-spoken and often amusing voice, is a resounding Yes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780966857320

Book preview

ALSO BY MATT MILLER

Digital Watermarking

Cox, Miller, and Bloom. 2002. Morgan Kaufmann Publ., Academic Press, a Harcourt Science and Technology Company

Copyright © 2014 by Natalie Miller

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means or altered or translated without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

COPYEDITING:

Kate Zentall, Los Angeles CA

DESIGN, LAYOUT, AND COVER ART:

Glenn Wong, GW Graphic Works, Los Angeles CA

ISBN 978-0-9668573-1-3 (Printed Version)

ISBN 978-0-9668573-2-0 (E-Book Version)

FORWARD PRESS

3594 Ocean View Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90066

Contents

A Word About Matt

Acknowledgments

The Big Change

An Ugly CT Scan

The 800-Pound Gorilla

All In The Family

An Empty Heaven

What I Believe

What Is I?

The Wonderful Brain

Questions from the Deep End

Near-Death Experiences

Afterlife?

Ghosts

Reincarnation

Seventy-Two Virgins

A Word about Foul Language

The Christian Heaven (and Hell)

My Life So Far

Bell Labs

College

California

Europe

Giedre

Coming To America

Machismo

The Challenge

Where to Draw Strength

My Temple

What Mystics Mean

Intercessory Prayer

Meaning vs. Value

Sisyphus’ Joy

Walter Mitty vs. Rambo

Machismo in Practice

My 23rd Psalm

A WORD ABOUT MATT

Matt always wanted to be a hero. As the family story goes, one day when he was a teenager he answered the front door to a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Good morning, one of the ladies said, launching into their prepared message, do you believe that one man can change the world? Matt, genially and without hesitation, replied, I’m sure as hell gonna try!

He grew to be a respected and passionate computer programmer who hoped to do things that mattered. Unfortunately, lung cancer cut him off much too early. In the two-plus years between his diagnosis and his death in 2010, he spent time putting his thoughts down on paper, principally to leave a firsthand record for his wife and daughters. Friends who read early drafts convinced him that his slightly off-kilter take on the mysteries of existence and the sources of solace for an atheist deserved a wider audience. It has taken the family time to heal before we could gather up his notes and put them together in readable form.

The result is the book you hold here.

NRM

Cape Cod

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is a substantial gulf between believing that Matt's writings deserved a wider readership than the immediate family and actually getting them pulled together and edited. The encouragement, early on, of Matt's friends Peter Brown and Christian Wildberg fired up Matt to keep writing as his death approached. The unfinished manuscript was shown to Daniel Mendelsohn, whose extraordinarily positive response strengthened our resolve but whose detailed suggestions for revisions proved daunting. In the emotional wake of Matt's death the task seemed insurmountable, and the project languished.

Eventually it was borne in on me, Matt's mother, that I was the logical person to take on the task. I had the time, and I must thank Richard Whalen for convincing me that I had the ability. I took the manuscript as far as I could and then stalled. Enter Kermit Moyer, writer and teacher, who fell in love with the project and did the heavy lifting of re-arranging the notes into a whole. Through the good offices of Barbara Ravage—always prodding me to keep at it—I met Kate Zentall, whose injection of energy, passion, and expertise brought us to the finish line. And thanks to Glenn Wong for his thoughtful and caring design.

Thank you all.

I am eternally grateful to Giedre, Matt’s wife, for her emotional support and for clarifying some history, as well as to Matt's brother and sister, whose love and encouragement have meant so much.

Most of all I thank my husband, Lorimer, who read every single permutation of this testament and kept me from meddling too much with Matt's unique voice.

SCIENCE

When Adam bit the apple

God took away the tree.

But Adam didn’t wallow

In hopeless misery.

He finished up the apple

And planted all the seeds.

Now Adam has an orchard

Where God had had a tree.

MLM

1979

THE BIG CHANGE

Like most people, I’ve lived most of my life in the shallow end of the pool. I’ve splashed around, doing things that seemed serious—meeting deadlines at work, traveling to distant places, making financial decisions, falling in and out of love. I’ve amused myself with what seemed to be the grand topics of history, philosophy, science, and religion. I’ve thought what I thought were deep thoughts. But all the while I had my feet safely planted on the bottom and my head well above the waterline. Then one day a brief conversation with a doctor dragged me into the deep end, and suddenly I had to find out whether I knew how to swim.

From that day to this, my decisions have not merely seemed serious, they’ve been literally matters of life and death. Those supposedly deep thoughts are no longer academic amusements; they’ve had to keep me afloat through truly terrifying times. They’ve had to help me keep my nerve as I underwent dangerous medical procedures. They’ve had to keep me sane through long, sleepless, cavernous nights. And hardest of all, they’ve had to keep me getting up every morning, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, eating, taking my pills, and attending to such minutia while all the time faced with the threat that I may very soon leave my two daughters fatherless and my wife a widow.

On the day of my diagnosis, I became much more particular about what to spend my time on—what conversations to have, what movies and TV to watch, what books to read, and so on. When you’re in water over your head, anything that doesn’t look like a life preserver becomes singularly uninteresting. What I was after fell into three basic categories: I wanted information, but only in forms I could use, from sources I trusted, and in amounts that wouldn’t terrify me. I wanted escape, but it had to be flavored to my taste, capable of taking my mind off the situation for a couple of hours and giving it a rest. And I wanted encouragement, but it had to be the right type of encouragement. Few things are more discouraging than encouragement that doesn’t encourage.

As I write this, I am imagining a very specific reader: an atheist with cancer. This means I assume that, like me, you believe that God, Allah, Yahweh, Vishnu, Zeus, Baal, the Man in the Moon, and Mickey Mouse are all equally fictitious. I assume also that, like me, you have been diagnosed with this wretched and scary disease. If you’re an atheist with some wretched and scary disease other than cancer, or an atheist facing some wretched and scary crisis other than a disease, I hope you’ll be able to relate to the thoughts I’m writing here. Perhaps you fall into a group for whom the physical crisis being faced has precipitated a crisis of faith—those who always thought themselves believers but when told the bad news from the doctor suddenly began to question God’s love. I hope people in this fix might pick up a book that features without God in the title to take a peek at how things would look if they just gave up on faith entirely. On a wider scale, I imagine (fantasize might be a more appropriate word) that there could be some interest in this book among people who are not in crisis—atheists who want to look at ways of facing crisis in a godless universe, or theists who are wise enough to know there are such things as atheists in foxholes and who want to learn about how we cope.

In the first decade of the 21st century, a number of books on atheism suddenly appeared on bestseller lists, most notably Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. These books, by and large, try to convince readers that faith in God is a bad idea. I call them God-bashing books. It’s true that I’m already part of the choir they preach to, but I’ve enjoyed them all greatly because they gave me a sense of camaraderie while I was going through chemotherapy.

But what I’m writing here is not a God-bashing book, and it’s a good thing too, because I’m not the least bit qualified to write one. To write a decent God-basher, I’d have to plow through the whole damned Bible, the Koran, probably the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, and maybe even Dianetics for good measure. You can’t formulate a sound argument against something unless you’ve studied it thoroughly, and I’m not about to waste the time I have left on such a project. Now, I can hear believers saying, Ah, if he’d only read [fill in the blank], he’d see the light and realize the Truth. But believers tend to dismiss all the books except their own. How many Christians dismiss the Bhagavad Gita or Dianetics without reading them through? That’s the same thing I’m doing, except I’m dismissing all these books without reading them through. I’ve read and heard enough to know that none of them seems at all realistic.

Over the centuries a body of Western philosophy and science has grown up around atheism, skepticism, and existentialism. Unlike most Americans, I was raised from childhood to believe this philosophy—or rather, to believe in the process