Autopsy

When I was in college I had an opportunity to observe an autopsy. I did not know the deceased. He lay nude, under a sheet, on a stainless steel table. His skin was a waxy yellow- sunken- almost plastic looking. His mouth was gaped. The man's death had been mysterious. The pathologist was charged with the responsibility of determining the cause of death. I saw the physician carefully open up the decease's body cavities- the lungs, the heart, the stomach, the intestines. As I watched it occurred to me that these body parts didn't explain the dead man's fears or lusts, ambitions or loves. There wasn't an organ we could probe to explore the man's kindness or lack of it, human power or lack of it. We saw inside the man's cranium. Somehow this gray nerve tissue failed to explain who this man had been- his needs, longings, hopes, and desires. He was more than mere chemical reactions and electric impulses. That was the day I started to second-guess my atheism.

That was the day belief in God started to be born in me.