Not long ago, evangelical big name Tim Challies wrote about his lifelong problems with insomnia. After some exploration of this problem, he ended up punting to mystery: Since he has no idea what might have caused his insomnia, he assumes it must be supernatural in nature. Yes, everyone! An omnimax god has personally sent this one guy insomnia! Why? Oh, for some reason, he assumes. But he has no clue why.
That post of his got me thinking about the sheer danger of assuming everything we don’t understand must be supernatural in nature. When one is evangelical, supernatural boogeymen hide behind every single bush. But the actual answer rarely turns out to be what evangelicals dearly want.
(From introduction: Greta Christina’s 2007 post about the unexplained; Brazil’s leprosy stats.)
(This post first went live on Patreon on 8/20/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
The Goddidit Fallacy
In the Christ-o-sphere, the appeal to ignorance turns out to be an extremely popular apologetics argument. It often takes the form of “Goddidit,” which means “God did it.” Here’s how it goes:
- This one situation or event sure seems mysterious. We have no idea what’s going on there.
- Only a god could possibly have made this thing happen!
- Therefore, Jesus did it. (And everything in the Bible is true and if we don’t psychically apologize to him and obey his clergy then he’ll torture our ghosts forever after we die!)
This is a fallacy because it’s wrong right out of the gate. The argument’s second premise is never actually demonstrated, but the apologist leaps right past it to the only allowable conclusion in their end of Christianity.
Of course, lots of things in our world aren’t completely understood or explained. But every single time humanity’s decided that gods were behind something and we investigated it, it’s always turned out to be something perfectly natural. In short, gods never did it.
Evangelicals in particular don’t like knowing this truth because their entire worldview revolves around a real live god doing real live stuff in the real live world—often on their behalf.
Goddidit Insomnia
Tim Challies is a fairly big name in evangelicalism. Last month, he wrote a blog post called “When God Doesn’t Give His Beloved Sleep.” In that post, he tells readers about his lifelong insomnia:
Though I’m really good at falling asleep, I’m extremely poor at staying asleep. And, as I’m sure you’d agree, the staying is every bit as important as the falling! When night comes and bedtime draws near, I always face it with a mix of eagerness and dread—eagerness to get some rest but dread of waking up before I get enough rest. [. . . ] It’s a battle that has gone on for decades and one that is getting no better as I age. In fact, it could actually be getting worse.
To deal with this insomnia, Challies has done absolutely everything he can think of—except for one step that most non-evangelicals will likely notice right away (and which we’ll discuss in a minute):
Have you tried chamomile? Melatonin? Adjusting the temperature? Lowering the humidity? Cutting caffeine? White noise? The Calm app? Of course I have. [. . .] Sleeping pills may work their magic, but that’s no long-term solution since they inevitably lead to a cycle of increased dosages providing diminished effect. So what to do?
This insomnia is wrecking his life in more ways than the obvious. But because he thinks he’s tried absolutely everything to deal with it, that leaves the supernatural as his only explanation:
I have decided I ought to receive this as God’s will—as a reality to be accepted rather than resented. After all, who am I to resist what God seems to have decreed?
See? Jesus sent this poor man insomnia! He might as well just give up trying to fix it. As Challies himself writes, “as much as we always want God to strengthen us so we can do his will, he often chooses to weaken us so we can do his will.” So he needs to just accept it.
Sleep deprivation is, um, torture
In recent years, government watchdogs have become more aware of sleep deprivation’s nature as torture. Because it’s a form of emotional and mental harm, sleep deprivation doesn’t seem as obviously cruel as physically hurting people. Until around 2009, the United States military even allegedly practiced this form of torture on captured prisoners. We’re still hammering out the details of this new understanding, but at least we’re getting there.
So the idea of a loving god inflicting one of his most devoted followers with insomnia strikes me as absurd, if not horrific. The only way to love such an abusive god is that terrified-placating way we see in that one Twilight Zone episode about the godlike little boy.
Those who’ve done time around infants knows this form of deprivation all too well, but at least that phase ends at some point. Parents know exactly why it’s happening. Also, of course, their baby becomes a toddler once that first hopeless phase of exhaustion finishes.
By contrast, what Tim Challies is going through doesn’t have any hint of ending, nor of producing anything worthwhile at its end. It’s just suffering with no explanation. His job, as he sees it, is simply to endure—and repeatedly tell himself his god is totally doing the right thing: Jesus, after all, “knows best.”
(We’re getting to the one super-obvious thing he apparently hasn’t done, but we’re not there quite yet.)
Divine insomnia as a facet of the Problem of Suffering
Christianity suffers from several big-name problems that its adherents have never been able to square away. We call these capital-P Problems because they simply should not exist if Christian claims were true. As you’ll no doubt notice, they’re quite inter-related:
- The Problem of Hell. Hell is the ultimate perversion of goodness and love. It’s absolutely inconceivable that any good, loving god would ever allow such a place to exist, much less send his own children there.
- The Problem of Evil. An omnimax god of love doesn’t square with the presence of evil in our world. Either he’s unable to stop evil or doesn’t want to, and neither option speaks to him being a god worthy of anyone’s worship.
- The Problem of Suffering. Holy cow, there is a lot of suffering in our world. There always has been. How does a loving god allow so much bloodshed and pain to go on for all the endless eons of life’s presence on Earth?
In his insomnia post, Tim Challies is working through the Problem of Suffering. Alas, he tackles it in the usual inadequate way authoritarian evangelicals have: He brute-forces himself to submit to an entity that he thinks has more power than he does, since that entity can hurt him horrifically forever if he doesn’t.
It would be no struggle for him to grant me a solid seven or eight hours each night. But that does not seem to be his plan for me. And so in this, as in so much else, I bow the knee to him.
He does give himself a little room to feel upset about his insomnia—and to keep seeking solutions for it. He’ll always be open to trying “the next herbal concoction someone recommends” to him. But it doesn’t even occur to him to question why his divinely-planned life can’t include decent rest every night, or how his insomnia makes his god look better or better accomplish his god’s ineffable divine plan for the universe.
The capricious, insomnia-inflicting jokester god who’s better than no god at all
I suspect most ex-evangelicals can attest to this same struggle in their own pasts. It’s scary to imagine that one’s beliefs are simply flat wrong. No, evangelicals would rather contort themselves into knots to rationalize their misfortunes as somehow being the product of an omnimax god who loves them and works all sorts of miracles on their behalf all the time—except for now.
Many years ago, I read a story about tornados tearing up some small towns. Immediately afterward, evangelicals ran over their own feet offering up rationalizations for why their god had apparently wiped out dozens of homes and wrecked hundreds of lives.
After every disaster, evangelicals perform this same song and dance. It’s part of how they insulate themselves against wrongthink. So as you can imagine, I’d seen this performance many times in my life.
That tornado story sticks in my mind because it’s one of the first times I ever thought, How is this kind of god better than no god at all? Because I’d really rather there be no god than one who allows this devastation in the lives of his own followers.
But I dance barefoot at one end of that balancing equation. Evangelicals huddle at the other end, the one that tells them it’s far better to have a mysterious, harm-causing, harm-allowing strongman of a god than none at all.
The harm of assuming anything, especially insomnia, is supernatural in nature
Tim Challies does himself just as much of a disservice as he does his readers in assuming that his god has somehow caused or allowed this dreadful insomnia to disrupt his entire adult life. Yes, he’s trying to teach his readers to attribute everything they don’t understand to their god’s actions—the literal Goddidit of the fallacy—but he’s doing himself actual physical harm here. Here’s a short list of the long-term effects of insomnia:
- Increased risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and weight gain/obesity
- Depression
- Heart attacks/heart disease
- Strokes
- Memory and concentration problems
Exhaustion is also a problem if he’s driving or operating any kind of machinery like that. It slows the reflexes and makes decision-making much more difficult. If Challies is nodding off during the day when he’s doing stuff, he could even get into a bad accident.
By assuming that his god is involved somehow with his insomnia, Challies has punted to mystery. It’s just magic isn’t an explanation, and it definitely isn’t a solution. It’s just a demand to shut up and quit asking questions. And he’s making this demand of himself.
Meanwhile, he’s not figuring out why he can’t sleep.
Also, don’t ever expect him or any other evangelicals to apply that same logic to their political extremism or their culture wars.
Goddidit stops all investigation in its tracks
There’s a worse outcome of assuming that all suffering must be divinely-sent or -allowed, though.
When we punt to mystery, we stop asking questions. Why ask questions? It’s just magic! Magic has its own rules that nobody can understand!
That’s why I didn’t see a doctor about my skyrocketing anxiety levels as a young adult. Pentecostalism got me started on a scorching case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But I perceived its symptoms through the lens of religious indoctrination. My anxiety and dread felt like divine messages and portents.
The situation definitely didn’t improve when occasionally those feelings turned out to be very justified. An old elevator at work that I’d felt deep dread about for months conked out and fell one day. I’d been taking the stairs for a while by then, so I wasn’t on it when it fell. Nobody on it got hurt, either, thankfully. Naturally, I didn’t even wonder why my god would send me these feelings of dread but allow others to be in that elevator cab when it fell. At the time, I was just thankful Jesus had totally warned me about it!
Because of this and many other similar incidents, I got a minor reputation at church as a prophetess of sorts. I was nothing of the sort. I just had a raging case of anxiety that paid off just enough to make me look remarkable by fundagelical prophecy standards.
It wasn’t until well after my deconversion that I finally got a diagnosis and treatment for my PTSD. I still get sad remembering all the people at my first Pentecostal church who suffered from that and similar mental ailments like depression—but who tried to Jesus their way out of those problems, or at least Jesus themselves into accepting them as a divinely-sent burden.
Many people just want to feel their suffering has some broader meaning
Insomnia is definitely a form of suffering. And a lot of people want their suffering to mean something in the grander scheme of things. I get it. They want their loved ones’ deaths to be part of some divine plan for the universe, for their diseases to produce fruit in the form of teaching or emotional growth, for their sleepless nights to be the key to sparking some humongous leap forward for all of humankind.
They don’t want to imagine that, say, their baby can be born with dealbreaking birth defects that aren’t anyone’s fault and will cause that baby a very short, pain-filled life for no reason at all. Sometimes, shit just happens.
Pagans understand very well how to coexist with suffering. Their gods, after all, tend to be very limited in nature. Pagans can reason with their gods. Tussle with ’em. Yell at ’em. Argue with ’em. Love or hate ’em. Even bribe ’em. We see shades of that same pagan-style interaction in parts of the Old Testament in the Bible—before one ancient tribe of Israelites made that shattering shift to one single omnimax god who is somehow tender and loving and yet allows evil, Hell, and suffering to exist.
It’s a dealbreaker, one hopefully accidentally designed. It destroys the mind’s critical thinking skills in favor of indoctrinated obedience. As a secondary effect, it teaches adherents to see everything as part of that god’s actions.
So in a very real way, their god approves or directly causes every single thing that happens to them and their families. Everything he does sends some message to them, even if they can’t figure out what it might be.
I joke about Pentecostals praying about where to eat lunch, but it really happened. It happened all the time. People really did pray about every single decision they made. And they fully expected—and claimed to receive—a divine response to each and every one of those prayers.
The day my mother died of cancer, my then-boyfriend took me to a fast-casual restaurant to get me out of the house and make sure I ate something. Some evangelicals showed up a few minutes later and rejoiced that their god had provided them a nice window seat that day. They’d prayed to be seated quickly, and not only had their god provided that, but he’d also given them a great window view too! Wow! What an amazing miracle!
Meanwhile, no prayers in the world had saved my mother. As I listened to those evangelicals rejoice, I felt increasingly angry—and utterly disgusted at the notion of a god who gave some followers quick seating next to a pretty view at a fast-casual restaurant on a slow midmorning weekday, but who gave other followers only an early and painful death.
Even at the time, I was thankful to be pagan. I was free from needing to reconcile meaningless suffering with a god like Yahweh. But I remembered very well the days when I’d gone through life like that: Constantly second-guessing everything, constantly analyzing everything. Back then, my world was infested as much by angels as demons.
All that said, what I’m describing here is an incredibly arrogant and self-centered way to go through life. Oh, so tell me more about this omnimax god who simply must personally stop you from getting the rest you need, Tim Challies! Wow, it’s such a shame he doesn’t love all of us that much! I bet he barely even glances at OUR sleep schedules! You must be super special! No way could your god get his plan done right without your insomnia!
Insomnia is a natural thing humans experience, not part of a loving god’s divine plan
When I read Tim Challies’ post, I was immediately struck by two things:
- This guy has tried a lot of over-the-counter solutions for his insomnia.
- However, he doesn’t once mention any doctor visits or a sleep study.
My immediate suspicion would be really bad sleep hygiene. Especially in the modern age, it’s very easy to keep one’s brain hyped up 24/7 online. Media can be hyperpalatable just like fast food is, and it can keep someone up for hours and hours. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that all of those cat videos will be there tomorrow. We don’t need to watch them all tonight. In my direct experience, evangelicals aren’t really good at self-regulating, so sleep hygiene is probably a problem for many of them.
Another option I’d suggest he explore is sleep apnea, a chronic obstruction of one’s breathing tube while sleeping. Apnea can wake someone up hundreds of times a night, leaving them utterly wasted the next day. And it doesn’t only hit obese people. He doesn’t look too chunky in his author photo, but skinny folks can develop apnea too if their mouths and throats get shafted enough by genetic chance.
Given evangelicals’ general lack of good mental health treatment and hostility toward real therapy, I’d also suggest he look into anxiety or depression as a possible cause for his insomnia.
Dude doesn’t need sleeping pills, “The Calm app,” melatonin, or whatever else. He needs to see a physician and get a damn sleep study done.
That may be easier said than done if he’s a typical evangelical pastor with typically sparse-to-nonexistent health insurance. Maybe it’s easier for him to punt to mystery and quit asking questions.
But I can promise him this: Whatever’s going on here is natural in nature. No gods were involved in any of it. They had no input at all. So he can safely assume that his insomnia is physical in nature. He doesn’t need to wonder if his god wants him to suffer from it for some divinely ineffable—or ineffably divine—reason. A god that lets children and mothers die of cancer, pastors suffer decades of sleep deprivation, and disasters level towns isn’t a loving god. Luckily, he’s not real. His suffering is purely earthly in nature.
We can—and indeed must—deal with suffering ourselves. And that’s a good thing, because reality works. The supernatural, by contrast, never does.
NEXT UP: The twin specters of politics and scandals are making evangelicals fret about recruitment rates again. So we’ll check out the next stanza in “The Ballad of the Bad Christians.” See you soon!
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