Chapter 1
I grew up and have lived my entire life in the southeastern
United States, a region American journalist H. L. Mencken
referred to as the Bible Belt in the 1920s. The states that make
up the region have less religious diversity than the rest of the
nation, with Protestant Christianity being the majority faith by
far. Only about half as many people in these states identify as
nonreligious compared to the national average. And people in
these states attend church more often than those who live in
most other states.
My own family were Southern Baptists, although I occasion‑
ally attended Methodist churches with friends. My grandmother,
who lived in the house next door, attended the First Baptist
Church, which you could see one block from our home. She
also taught Sunday school, played piano, and sang in church.
My mother’s oldest sister was just as devout as my grandmother
was. I remember my aunt singing the hymn, “I’ve got the joy, joy,
joy, joy” to me when I was a child. My father’s parents traveled
to churches as part of a gospel singing group, which is how my
mother and father first met. Growing up, I wasn’t aware of any‑
one not believing in God.
At some point in junior high school, when I was between the
ages of eleven and thirteen, I began to worry about the fate of
the souls who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and
Savior. I was a boy scout, and my scout master was also a Christian
minister. I trusted him enough to share my doubts and concerns.
I remember asking him what he believed happened to the souls
of the Native Americans who had died before Christians colo‑
nized the country.
My trust in him was not misplaced. He agreed with me that
it did not seem right for their souls to be damned and burn in
hell for all eternity simply because they were not aware of Jesus
Christ. He also agreed, though, that scripture implied that any‑
one who did not accept Jesus would suffer this horrible fate. He
also acknowledged that I’d probably heard something during
church service that implied this as well. But then he said it was
his personal belief that even though that was what the Bible said,
and what some preachers said as well, he did not believe God
would do that. He believed instead that many Native Americans
were as good as any Christian and had their own beliefs in their
own way. He said he felt God would know and understand this
and not punish them unjustly.
At the time I can remember feeling relieved. It made sense
to me that God would know this. Also, it seemed possible to me
that some people, like the Baptist preacher I had heard preach‑
ing hellfire and damnation for any nonbelievers, just simply had
that wrong about God. But it wasn’t long before new doubts
and concerns arose in my mind. I remember sitting alone in
the woods while deer hunting as a young teenager wondering
about God knowing all my thoughts. This was a strange feeling.
Did I truly believe in God? Had I accepted Jesus Christ as my
Lord and Savior? I felt like an imposter. I felt there was a God,
and I felt he knew I was a fake Christian because I was having
doubts. I felt God knew that I was saying I believed, while not
truly allowing Jesus into my heart properly and walking the path
of the righteous as I should.
I made up my mind to turn to the source of truth itself: I
would read the Bible. I remember this felt like an incredibly
important task. I told a religious friend I was going to read both
the Old and New Testaments, cover to cover. I was surprised
when she got angry and said that it could not be done. This
seemed absurd to me. Of course it could be done. My aunt had
read both several times. All one had to do was to start and read
a little each night, not give up, and eventually the task would be
complete. She then countered that even were I to do this, I would
not understand what it said. Having not read both books before,
I found the idea of understanding the scripture completely a task
that I was less certain I could do, but I still believed in myself. In
hindsight, I am amazed now by how many people who profess
to be believers of any given religion have not actually ever read
their religion’s doctrine.
But I believe that I know why, because I did not have to read
far before I thought to myself, most of this is completely ridiculous!
I can remember telling another friend, “It all just seems like
the stories of the people at that time in those places.” He was
confused by this, and he asked me, “Do you mean like stories
that someone just made up?” At the time, I could not quite artic‑
ulate what I meant, so I told him, “They seem like the stories
people around here tell others about events. The people who
are telling the stories seem to believe them, and they say that
the stories are true, but you know that when you hear some of
these stories that they are far‑fetched.” He couldn’t accept this.
Later when the topic of God came up in our friend group, he
announced that I’d said that I believed the stories in the Bible
were just that, only stories told by people long ago and not the
word of God. Suddenly I felt as if it had been announced that
I did not believe that Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was a good
football coach. Everyone laughed and turned to me smiling as
if I were the most foolish person on earth. One exclaimed while
laughing, “What?!”
I tried to explain myself. I asked the group, “What if, for
instance, when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, they came to a
part of the Red Sea that usually had water, but for some reason
like drought or something, it did not. They crossed that area,
but later the Egyptians came along after them and they were
not able to cross because there was water there now. And then
the people who told the story believed that God protecting
them was the reason this had happened?” They all just stared
at me smiling, some shaking their heads. One person felt sorry
for me I think, or perhaps wanted the awkwardness to end, so
they tried to change the topic. Then one of them asked me,
“So you don’t believe in God?” I answered, “That is not what I
am saying. There is a God. But what if the Bible is just stories
written a long time ago by people? I’m saying I don’t think all
the stories happened exactly the way they are written, such as
people living for hundreds of years, and Jonah being swallowed
by a fish and surviving in its belly.”
Afterwards, I was offended that my belief in God had been
questioned simply because I raised concerns about the outland‑
ish stories I had read in the Bible. I searched within myself, and
I did believe that there had to be a reason and a purpose for
everything. I believed that the world and the people in it had
to have been caused by something. Surely this was God, but
it seemed more likely to me that people had just told all their
own stories about this one God, which was how all the various
religions and different beliefs had started.
In my early twenties, I joined the military as an enlisted mem‑
ber and left home for the first time. I don’t remember how, when,
or even why I decided that I no longer believed in God, but at
some point in my mid‑twenties, I decided that the cause of the
universe was the big bang, and the idea of a supernatural deity
was an absurdity. Over the next decade I would oscillate between
considering myself an atheist and considering myself agnostic.
Science was always my favorite subject in school. Perhaps
that’s why I was always questioning everything. I was far from the
best student in terms of attendance, doing homework, or getting
good grades. If school had consisted just of science, history, and
literature and I had been allowed to just read what I was curious
about or conduct my own experiments all day, I believe I would
have excelled. Instead, I was bored. Usually, I could be found in
class staring out the window daydreaming. I always scored high
on achievement tests and science tests in general, but I was an
underachiever academically before I joined the military.
Once in the military I was trained in computer science. It was
the mid‑1990s just as personal computers and public access to
the internet were taking off. I soaked up my training, finishing
in the top of my class. I embraced every new technology, and I
would spend countless hours reading, and testing and building
networks and systems. After my active‑duty tour ended, I made
a career in Information Technology (IT). I quickly became a
certified software engineer and a certified network and IT secu‑
rity specialist. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was on the
internet night and day reading about new scientific discoveries
and new technology.
Sometime during the fall of 2010, I read an article with a
sensational headline. The article’s title proclaimed that famed
English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had said that no
God was necessary for the creation of the universe. Hawking
claimed that the big bang was the result of natural laws of
physics. The article included excerpts from a new book, The
Grand Design, which Hawking had coauthored with US physicist
Leonard Mlodinow. In the excerpt, Hawking wrote, “Because
there is a law such as Gravity, the universe can and will create
itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there
is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why
we exist.” Hawking went on to say, “It is not necessary to invoke
God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
At the time, that seemed intuitive to me. I thought, of course
the beginning of the universe was caused by some natural law
like Gravity and not some conscious deity as we humans had
believed before we created the scientific method and began to
discover the laws of physics. I joked with my immediate family
members about what Hawking had said. I would say, “I believe
in an invisible force responsible for creating the whole universe,
and it is everywhere all the time, all around us, and it starts with
the letter G … ha! ha! It’s not God! It’s Gravity!” For almost a
decade, I gave little more thought to creation. In my mind, I was
now an atheist; there was no God. Gravity was the reason for the
big bang and that was the beginning of all existence. For me,
the matter was settled.
That all changed in 2019. A couple of years before, perhaps
in the late spring of 2017, or maybe 2018, I left home to go pick
up a family meal of boiled crawfish, potatoes, and corn from a
local restaurant. On the drive there I brought up Spotify and
saw there was a category for podcasts. I had never listened to a
podcast before, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I browsed
for something educational and happened upon one called
Philosophize This! by Stephen West. I started with the first episode,
something about what West called pre‑Socratic philosophy. I had
never studied philosophy, but I had a general feeling for what it
was—and I’d heard of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
I was immediately hooked. Once I had listened to all the
episodes of Philosophize This! out at that time, I moved on to The
Partially Examined Life podcast created by a group of people who
had all studied philosophy together at the University of Texas.
I then listened to History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Peter
Adamson, a professor of philosophy at the LMU in Munich and
at King’s College London, and In Our Time: Philosophy, hosted
by Melvyn Bragg.
I don’t remember which podcast I was listening to when I
had my epiphany in 2019. I remember it was a warm, sunny day
a few months prior to the COVID‑19 outbreak, so it must have
been the summer of 2019. I had gone to Wendy’s to pick up a
salad to take back to work for lunch. The podcast I was listening
to was describing the concept of God’s transcendence, a phil‑
osophical concept I was very familiar with by this time. As the
podcast described that the critical feature of transcendence was
the existence outside of creation as well as immanence inside
of creation, I nonchalantly said out loud to myself as I drove,
“Gravity is transcendent…”
In the next moment, I knew immediately what the cliché “it
hit me like a ton of bricks” meant. My brain suddenly seemed
to freeze. I felt a kind of panic, like I was not able to operate my
vehicle. It felt like I had stopped breathing. Should I pull off onto
the side of the road? I wondered. As all of this raced through my
mind, a single thought so big it seemed my head would burst,
tore through my brain. All I can describe it as would be a men‑
tal scream, “Gravity is transcendent!” I couldn’t comprehend
why I felt this way. I was still driving, but I wasn’t even aware of
where I was. I don’t think I was even sure what it meant or why
thinking it made me feel the way I did, but I couldn’t seem to
think of anything else.
***
For the past four years since that moment, I have been digging
into what philosophers call metaphysics, which deals with the
first principles of being and existence. This journey has taken
me through the ages of written human history. I have explored
the origins of religion and I have studied many different con‑
ceptions of God. I have dug deeper into philosophical thought.
Along the way I uncovered the beginnings of science and math‑
ematics. I studied the teachings of the greatest minds in human
history from Aristotle to Einstein. This book is a record of that
journey and the impersonal and universal truth about God that
I believe I have uncovered. It’s been hiding in plain sight for
hundreds of years.
Chapter 2
CURIOSITY, or love of the knowledge of causes, draws
a man from the consideration of the effect to seek the
cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity
he must come to this thought at last, that there is some
cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternal;
which is it men call God. So that it is impossible to make
any profound inquiry into natural causes, without being
inclined thereby to believe there is one God eternal;
though they cannot have any idea of Him in their mind,
answerable to His nature.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
Thomas Hobbes believed the seed of religion was in each of
us as we observed the cause and effect of the natural world
around us. He believed we each intuitively feel there must be
some first cause, and from that intuition springs all the various
religions as we try to dispel doubt and find an answer to satisfy
our curiosity. The beginning of religious belief likely predates
what we today consider written human history. However, according
to a 2023 Cambridge study, cave paintings may have been more
language than we initially thought and not solely artistic expres‑
sion.
Regardless, the seed of religion predates modern written
language, and we can only speculate at its origins.
The belief that supernatural forces govern our world likely
dates to tens of thousands of years ago. While the time period
that humans became self‑aware creatures able to consider their
own demise is a topic of great debate, I believe most scholars
would not put that date any earlier than 30,000 years ago, and
there are some who say 100,000 years ago or more. At some dis‑
tant point in our history, our ancestors began to ask the greatest
question man has ever asked, “How did I come to exist and why?”
The answer to that question has eluded humankind, until now.
One can imagine how terrifying the world must have seemed
to primitive man: volcanoes, earthquakes, lightening, thunder,
wind, rain, snow, and hail. At the same time, those early humans
probably experienced the sublime just as we do today, the maj‑
esty of mountains and the power of the seas, the beauty of the
sunrise and sunset. And as humans, just like us today, they likely
suffered from apophenia, the propensity to perceive connections
and meaning in unrelated events where no connection lies.
Mere probability meant that occasionally a human would
survive an unlikely encounter with a predator when their guard
was down. This must have felt like a blessing, a gift from fate.
At other times, loved ones would have met a mysterious demise
which surely seemed a curse. Anthropology shows us countless
examples of this kind of thinking throughout human history,
even to modern times. No doubt there are things we all generally
accept today as fact, which science will disprove in the future.
Not long after the ventrolateral frontal cortex of our ancestors
grew beyond that of our primate cousins, our ancestors obtained
the ability to imagine their own future and plan accordingly.
