Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.
Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.
We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.
As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.
In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.
If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?
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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/losing-faith-in-atheism