“Was there one thing in particular that caused you to lose your faith in God?” I asked at the outset.I've always been interested in finding this photo.
He thought for a moment. “It was a photograph in Life magazine,” he said finally.
“Really?” I said. “A photograph? How so?”
He narrowed his eyes a bit and looked off to the side, as if he were viewing the photo afresh and reliving the moment. “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa,” he explained. “They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?’” As he emphasized the word rain, his bushy gray eyebrows shot up and his arms gestured toward heaven as if beckoning for a response.
“How could a loving God do this to that woman?” he implored as he got more animated, moving to the edge of his chair. “Who runs the rain? I don’t; you don’t. He does – or that’s what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony – when all that was needed was rain?”
He paused, letting the question hang heavily in the air. Then he settled back into his chair. “That was the climactic moment,” he said. “And then I began to think further about the world being the creation of God. I started considering the plagues that sweep across parts of the planet and indiscriminately kill – more often than not, painfully – all kinds of people, the ordinary, the decent, and the rotten. And it just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves.”
Templeton was tapping into an issue that had vexed me for years. In my career as a newspaper reporter, I hadn’t merely seen photos of intense suffering; I was a frequent first-hand observer of the underbelly of life where tragedy and suffering festered – the rotting inner cities of the United States, the filthy slums of India, Cook County Jail and the major penitentiaries, the hospice wards for the hopeless, disaster sites. More than once, my mind reeled at trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the depravity and heartache and anguish before my eyes.
But Templeton wasn’t done. “My mind then went to the whole concept of hell. My goodness,” he said, his voice rising in astonishment, “I couldn’t hold someone’s hand to a fire for a moment. Not an instant! How could a loving God, just because you don’t obey him and do what he wants, torture you forever – not allowing you to die, but to continue in that pain for eternity? There is no criminal who would do this!”
“So these were the first doubts you had?” I asked.
“Prior to that, I had been having more and more questions about things like, for instance, unanswered prayer. I had preached to hundreds of thousands of people the antithetical message, and then I found to my dismay that I could no longer believe it. To believe it would be to deny the brain I had been given. It became quite clear that I had been wrong. So I made up my mind that I would leave the ministry. That’s essentially how I came to be agnostic.”
I thought that perhaps the Biafra photos in LIFE were the ones referenced, but according to his Wikipedia page, he announced himself an agnostic in 1957. I have found some other really good pictures for inducing atheism: the World Press Photo of the Year collection. Or see the W. Willoughby Hooper photos of skeletal human beings from a famine in Madras.
