An Atheist Grief Observed

Skeptic religion editor Tim Callahan reflects on the loss of his home in the Altadena fires and the subsequent suicidal death of his daughter

Note from Michael Shermer: This heartbreaking essay began with an email from my long-time friend, colleague, and religion editor Tim Callahan, who was also our neighbor in Altadena when our offices were located in that now-fateful city. On January 15, 2025, Tim wrote to let me know that he, his wife Bonnie, and their daughter Ari were safe after the devastating Eaton Canyon Fire destroyed thousands of structures (including the old Skeptics Society office):

“While we got out safely, our house and everything in it was consumed in the fire. We've lost everything we couldn't carry out at a moment's notice: all our books, our record and tape collection, all our artwork, everything. As yet, we've not been allowed back into our neighborhood to be able to sift through the ashes.”

Ten days later Tim wrote me again to tell me that their daughter Arwen had taken her own life, in part due to the fires that were the final straw after years of intermittent bouts of depression. Tim closed that email with this thought:

“Bon and I reflected that evening on the condolence of atheism. Not only do some religions, particularly Christianity, stigmatize suicide, but as well many of the religious wrack themselves over why a loving God did this to them or what they did wrong to incur God's wrath, etc. Accepting the absence of supernatural agency, we don't have to deal with all that emotional noise.”

Moved by this reflection, I invited Tim to expand on it for this special guest edition of the Skeptic column.

Tim Callahan is Skeptic magazine’s religion editor and author of the books Bible Prophecy and The Secret Origins of the Bible, and co-author with Donald Prothero of UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says.

An Atheist Grief Observed

On the evening of January 7, 2025, my wife Bonnie and I lost our home and nearly all our possessions in the Eaton Canyon Fire that swept through Altadena. On the night of January 21, our daughter, Arwen, committed suicide. She had been living with us for many years and, while she had suffered from clinical depression and substance abuse issues, had recently been making great strides in dealing with these problems. However, the disruption of our lives in the wake of the fire proved too much for her to deal with. Following this double tragedy we have been the grateful recipients of compassion and generosity from so many friends and family members. This outpouring of compassion has greatly softened the impact of our refugee status.

While devastated by the loss of our daughter, Bon and I found a degree of consolation in our atheism. This may, at first, seem counterintuitive, in that one would think that a belief in the immortality of the soul and an all-powerful, compassionate God should instill a sense of peace and acceptance in the hearts of the bereaved, while the finality of death experienced by atheists would make their loss all the more devastating. However, unexpected bereavement can result in a crisis of faith among believers. They either wonder how a loving, compassionate God could allow such a thing to happen, or they may blame themselves and become wracked with guilt, wondering what they might have done to incur God's wrath. Since we don't see supernatural agency in either the abnormally high winds that spread both the Eaton Canyon and Pacific Palisades fires, or the ravages of clinical depression, we neither rage against a seemingly uncaring God, nor blame our own sinfulness for the disasters that befell us. Nor do we see sin as a factor in our daughter's suicide.

Our acceptance of our daughter's death stands in stark contrast what the great twentieth century Christian apologist C. S. Lewis experienced at the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Lewis. In his self-examination of his response to her death, A Grief Observed, Lewis reflected:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

Lewis even doubted the consolation of the assurance of the immorality of his wife's soul:

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about [Joy]. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. “Them as asks don’t get.” I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came, I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

These doubts, finally, led Lewis to doubt God was the loving, merciful being he had believed in before his wife's death:

Sooner or later, I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

Eventually, Lewis was able to rationalize his bereavement and God's seeming callous indifference to his wife's death, to some degree seeing this as a test of his faith:

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Lewis rationalized God's seeming silence not as evidence that God didn't exist, rather putting the cause of this silence on his own human frailty:

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.” Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.

As atheists, invoking Occam's Razor, Bon and I don't have to rationalize God's silence with such convoluted arguments. The simplest, most direct explanation for God's silence is that it's strong evidence of his nonexistence.

It could, of course, be argued that, regardless of the experience of C. S. Lewis regarding bereavement, religion does offer compassion and consolation, not only to the bereaved but to those suffering in general. Unfortunately for those who would make such an argument, the record of religion on this issue is checkered. This is particularly true with respect to suicide. Traditionally, had we sought a Christian burial for our daughter we might well have been rebuffed by church authorities who considered suicide the one unforgivable sin. There is neither compassion nor consolation in such an attitude. Fortunately, this traditional view has been softened over time, as church authorities have come to understand the role mental illness plays in the despair of the suicidal.

As to C. S. Lewis's feelings of bitterness and despair, it would be dishonest to characterize his experience as necessarily typical among the religious. We have friends—staunch Roman Catholics—who have experienced bereavement and found strong consolation in their religious faith. Thus, we cannot use Lewis's bitterness to stereotype Christians in general. Just so, believers would do well to abandon a stereotype commonly applied to atheists by believers, that of someone bitter and joyless who, like Jadis, the White Witch and villain in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—the first of the Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis—wanted it to always be winter and never Christmas. Admittedly, there are atheists whose atheism resulted from experiencing abuse of one form or another at the hands of religious authorities. The late Skeptic magazine co-founder and Art Director Pat Linse used to refer to them as experiencing what she called "Angry Atheist Syndrome".

In my case, the journey from belief to unbelief did not involve either abuse or bitterness. My religious experience during childhood can best be characterized as benign neglect. My parents had, for a time, before I was born, been active members of a local Methodist congregation, but had drifted away from it. From time to time, they would bestir themselves to return to active church attendance, in the process making me go to Sunday school. Their zeal, however, would soon flag. For a time after they had stopped attending church, they would send me to Sunday school. However, they would soon abandon even in this concession to religious propriety. This changed when I was in middle school. They made friends with new neighbors who were dedicated churchgoers and were led into active membership in the local Presbyterian congregation. My family became regular churchgoers, and I not only attended Sunday school regularly but became active in a Presbyterian youth group.

Thus, in high school, I was quite active in the Westminster Fellowship at the First Presbyterian Church in Garden Grove, California. This involvement ended abruptly when, after graduating from high school in 1961, I joined the United States Navy in response to the demands of the military draft. After boot camp, while I attended Sunday church services for a time, I soon fell away from any active participation in religion. Once I was out of the service, I made a few half-hearted attempts to rekindle religious observance while in college, but soon gave these up. Nevertheless, I still held on to a sort of deist belief in God until I realized I really didn't believe anymore. When I finally confronted the dreaded "A-word" I realized I already was an atheist.

Bon's journey from belief to unbelief was a bit rockier. As the daughter of a non-practicing Protestant father and a lapsed Catholic mother, who experienced guilt at having left the church, she was forced, as the only one in her family, to attend mass and to experience Catholic indoctrination. While she still bears some scars left by the imposition of Catholic guilt, she did develop a more wholesome religious belief in her first marriage to the founder of the Mythopoeic Society, a literary group dedicated to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Thus, her eventual journey from belief to unbelief was, like mine, a gradual and gentle drift.

While we know of some who find comfort from religious belief in a time of loss, there are also those who, like C. S Lewis, found the devastation of unexpected bereavement only deepened by their belief in God. In the end, the comforts of religion in a time of grief would seem rather dubious and dependent on variations in temperament and the specific details or their loss.