inspired to write
Inspired to Write
June 01, 2008 08:43
Inspired to
Write
by Mark Fowler
If you could prove God exists, should you? I don’t know who struggles most with that question, my fictional protagonist, Lowell Whaley, or me. If you can prove God, doesn’t that take the whole faith thing out of the equation?
My strongest emotional response is to stories with heroes that are essentially good. I’ve heard a mantra that the only interesting stories and characters are ones that have a dark, complex side to them. I like those stories and those characters too, but I remember back at the turn of the Millennium when the American Film Institute released a list of greatest screen heroes. I completely agreed with the top three choices: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, Indiana Jones, and Rick Blaine from Casablanca.
Atticus Finch was not dark or conflicted. He was noble and honorable, and he made his children and neighbors more noble and honorable by example. The world has enough bad examples, I say. As a writer, I felt challenged to create characters that follow the example of Harper Lee’s protagonist. Maybe you’ve seen Christians with bumper stickers or t-shirts that ask “What Would Jesus Do?” For me, the literary gold standard is Atticus.
I’m not trying to be sacrilegious. I’m a man of faith, and my greater challenge was to create characters who have faith and aren’t afraid to use it. The pertinent characters and plot of The Called Ones rolled around in my head for decades, ever since meeting a pastor and his wife in 1987, recently banished from Indonesia by the Muslim government. At the time I was teaching at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando and taking pre-med courses at night. In my first biology class I had a professor who was a disciple of Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Both offered a light-hearted but meaningful ridicule for people of faith. Both thought modern science has disproved God.
I looked at medicine as a calling, a way to help my fellow man. If I was doing it because I thought it would please God, what good was it if He didn’t exist? I was a little shook up.
So, I read the publications about the experiments that disproved Creation. Stanley Miller conducted an experiment where he introduced a spark into a glass system containing water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen. Eureka! A small number of amino acids were made! “See!” said the kind of people who want to dismiss God. “The building blocks of life could have been made from the primordial ooze with lightning.”
I thought about that and something I had learned about years earlier as a student at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School. I had my own eureka moment. Entropy had to do with the randomness of molecules in any system, and one of the things I remembered was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which said that the randomness of a system increases over time. I mentally applied the immutable law to Miller’s experiment. For the “No God” people to be right, the Second Law would have to be completely ignored to arrange primitive biochemical molecules into the most rudimentary life forms. By their thinking, you could leave an acorn and expect to return in a few million years and find a dining room set. By my thinking, this could be true, but only if furniture builders came along after the acorn grew into an oak.
But I was only a puny nobody. I knew God existed. I could prove it. What if I wrote a book about it? I had medical school to get through first. The book sat in the back of my mind for years.
You never know where inspiration might hit. Five years ago I read Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Chocolat”. He wrote “’Chocolat’ is about a war between the forces of paganism and Christianity, and because the pagan heroine has chocolate on her side, she wins.” Religion takes a beating in today’s popular culture, and if religious folks are honest, the actions of the religious have contributed to this general distrust. A few paragraphs later Ebert wrote “It goes without saying in such stories that organized religion is the province of prudes and hypocrites.” Good grief, isn’t it the truth, I thought. He concluded the review:
“I enjoyed the movie
on its own sweet level, while musing idly on the
box-office
prospects of a film in which the glowing, life-affirming local Christians prevailed
over glowering, prejudiced, puritan and bitter Druid worshippers. That'll be—as
John Wayne once said--the day.”
He didn’t know it, but he was throwing down the gauntlet, right at me. It was time to haul the missionary story from the back room of my mind, dust it off and start writing. What are the prospects for a story about Christians who aren’t prudes and hypocrites? I don’t know, but I decided to let my character speak his mind, then sit back and see what happens.
Mark Fowler is an OB/GYN in the U.S. Navy and has served since the first Reagan administration. His novel The Called Ones was a semifinalist in the ABNA contest.
by Mark Fowler
If you could prove God exists, should you? I don’t know who struggles most with that question, my fictional protagonist, Lowell Whaley, or me. If you can prove God, doesn’t that take the whole faith thing out of the equation?
My strongest emotional response is to stories with heroes that are essentially good. I’ve heard a mantra that the only interesting stories and characters are ones that have a dark, complex side to them. I like those stories and those characters too, but I remember back at the turn of the Millennium when the American Film Institute released a list of greatest screen heroes. I completely agreed with the top three choices: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, Indiana Jones, and Rick Blaine from Casablanca.
Atticus Finch was not dark or conflicted. He was noble and honorable, and he made his children and neighbors more noble and honorable by example. The world has enough bad examples, I say. As a writer, I felt challenged to create characters that follow the example of Harper Lee’s protagonist. Maybe you’ve seen Christians with bumper stickers or t-shirts that ask “What Would Jesus Do?” For me, the literary gold standard is Atticus.
I’m not trying to be sacrilegious. I’m a man of faith, and my greater challenge was to create characters who have faith and aren’t afraid to use it. The pertinent characters and plot of The Called Ones rolled around in my head for decades, ever since meeting a pastor and his wife in 1987, recently banished from Indonesia by the Muslim government. At the time I was teaching at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando and taking pre-med courses at night. In my first biology class I had a professor who was a disciple of Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Both offered a light-hearted but meaningful ridicule for people of faith. Both thought modern science has disproved God.
I looked at medicine as a calling, a way to help my fellow man. If I was doing it because I thought it would please God, what good was it if He didn’t exist? I was a little shook up.
So, I read the publications about the experiments that disproved Creation. Stanley Miller conducted an experiment where he introduced a spark into a glass system containing water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen. Eureka! A small number of amino acids were made! “See!” said the kind of people who want to dismiss God. “The building blocks of life could have been made from the primordial ooze with lightning.”
I thought about that and something I had learned about years earlier as a student at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School. I had my own eureka moment. Entropy had to do with the randomness of molecules in any system, and one of the things I remembered was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which said that the randomness of a system increases over time. I mentally applied the immutable law to Miller’s experiment. For the “No God” people to be right, the Second Law would have to be completely ignored to arrange primitive biochemical molecules into the most rudimentary life forms. By their thinking, you could leave an acorn and expect to return in a few million years and find a dining room set. By my thinking, this could be true, but only if furniture builders came along after the acorn grew into an oak.
But I was only a puny nobody. I knew God existed. I could prove it. What if I wrote a book about it? I had medical school to get through first. The book sat in the back of my mind for years.
You never know where inspiration might hit. Five years ago I read Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Chocolat”. He wrote “’Chocolat’ is about a war between the forces of paganism and Christianity, and because the pagan heroine has chocolate on her side, she wins.” Religion takes a beating in today’s popular culture, and if religious folks are honest, the actions of the religious have contributed to this general distrust. A few paragraphs later Ebert wrote “It goes without saying in such stories that organized religion is the province of prudes and hypocrites.” Good grief, isn’t it the truth, I thought. He concluded the review:
prospects of a film in which the glowing, life-affirming local Christians prevailed
over glowering, prejudiced, puritan and bitter Druid worshippers. That'll be—as
John Wayne once said--the day.”
He didn’t know it, but he was throwing down the gauntlet, right at me. It was time to haul the missionary story from the back room of my mind, dust it off and start writing. What are the prospects for a story about Christians who aren’t prudes and hypocrites? I don’t know, but I decided to let my character speak his mind, then sit back and see what happens.
Mark Fowler is an OB/GYN in the U.S. Navy and has served since the first Reagan administration. His novel The Called Ones was a semifinalist in the ABNA contest.
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