Facing Cancer Without God

This is a personal journal of an atheist, Matt Miller, facing death from cancer. It is not a "God-bashing" book. It is his philosophical musings about the sources of solace in atheism and discussion of the question, "If I exist in an uncaring universe, and have been raised from childhood to believe in the process of evidentiary reasoning, can I find the emotional support I need to carry on in the face of a devastating disease?" His answer, in his plain-spoken and often amusing voice, is a resounding Yes.

This is a personal journal of an atheist, Matt Miller, facing death from cancer. It is not a "God-bashing" book. It is his philosophical musings about the sources of solace in atheism. He wrote it in the almost three years between his diagnosis of stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer, and his death in 2010. He describes his familial roots in skepticism and pragmatism and his own development during his travels around the world. He discusses his philosophical scaffolding and how it provided the support he needed to deal with his imminent death. With examples from Walter Mitty and Rambo, football, neurology, Camus, and pure fantasy, his wide-ranging and original thinking comes through in clear, uncomplicated, and often surprisingly funny prose.

Matthew Lorimer Miller was a computer scientist, traveler, writer, and teacher, who never had time to get advanced degrees. Directly out of high school he went to work for Nobelist Robert Wilson at Bell Labs. Years later, upon getting a BS in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester, he turned down the chance to go back to Bell and chose instead to join a start-up in Silicon Valley. After that company folded he decided to work his way around the world: He taught color theory at Aarhus University, Denmark, computer graphics at Charles University, Prague, and computer science at Vilnius University in Lithuania. In Vilnius he met and married Giedre Andrasiunaite and returned to the US with her in 1997. They settled in Princeton, NJ. and he went to work for NEC Labs. There, he pioneered digital watermarking technology, co-founded a start-up company that commercialized watermarking for digital rights management, and co-authored the definitive textbook on the subject. He held over thirty patents, and at the time of his diagnosis with non-small cell lung cancer he was doing research into machine learning and pattern recognition applied to the detection of cancer cells. He died just shy of three years from his diagnosis, leaving his wife, Giedre, and two daughters, Fia and Ada. He read widely in philosophy, history, and science, and was a passionate historical board gamer. He managed to go around the world nine times.