Is Abortion Murder? Not a Question to Be Taken Lightly

Despite having taught a bioethics course and debated abortion at length in the college classroom over ten years ago, I have come to my mature views on this question only recently. For what it is worth I'd like to weigh in. Emily and I have had many conversations on this and we have both reached an equally strong conviction. Too many lives are at stake to remain silent.

Since abortion was legalized in the U.S. there have been an average of 1.4 million abortions every year. So whether abortion is murder is a crucial question. I recently heard this analogy: say you wanted to demolish a building. Some people are telling you it's okay to blow it up because no one lives there. Other people are telling you that there are definitely people living in that building so it would be murder to blow it up. Who should you listen to? What is the safest course of action?

Given that people disagree over whether abortion is right or wrong, how is our situation different from the above? Might it not be better to play it safe?

Some will say: but shouldn't we allow each mother to decide based on their own moral convictions?

This leads to another analogy that I keep hearing, and it's a good one. In Nazi Germany some people thought it was okay to kill Jews and some thought it was wrong. Who was playing it safe, ethically speaking? Who was vindicated in the end? Who most needed to speak up? Does freedom of choice even come into play here? Do we want to say that those Germans who killed Jews were simply exercising their right to choose?

There was a time when I believed that abortion was permissible because the unborn child is not conscious yet. According to this view early-term abortions are especially unproblematic. According to this view, the idea that the unborn child has a soul seems like superstition. Without consciousness, it would seem that there isn't really a soul to be concerned about. And even if there is a soul preexisting the body, as some believe, then why couldn't that soul simply be born somewhere else?

This entire line of thinking is completely alienated, more and more people are coming to realize, from the sanctity of human life. The value of a life is not somehow proportional with how conscious it is. To believe this leads to the eugenic view that more intelligent people are more valuable. Unless we admit that all human life is equally sacred, then we detract from the value of every life, because all of us are very far from perfect intelligence. As to the view that unborn lives are interchangeable, so can be "born somewhere else", this is demonstrably false. At conception that child already has a unique sequence of DNA, never to be seen again in the history of the universe. Even twins, due to slightly different events as they grow and develop, will begin to diverge as soon as they start growing in the womb, and are never exactly the same, even just after they are conceived. So each unborn life is unique, and this uniqueness is inherently valuable, inherently real, and inherently sacred.

By the same token, the value of a life is not proportional to how well that baby will be taken care of after it is born. This again is basically eugenics, the argument that people whose quality of life is low should not be allowed to live, that it is better if they were never even born. But God loves all of us equally, and there can be no question of the sanctity of all life, whether living in poverty or not. You cannot justify killing an unborn child because it will have a "low quality of life" any more than the Nazis were justified in slaughtering the handicapped.

For these reasons, as I believe with many others, Roe v. Wade was a mistake. In fact, Jane Roe (whose real name is Norma McCorvey) who originally sued for the right to have an abortion in 1970, later in life became friends with the leader of an anti-abortion group, converted to Catholicism, and became an anti-abortion activist herself. The story of Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood director, was very similar, and if you haven’t heard about her yet, you might want to look her up.

The pro-life movement is growing. The number of abortions performed in 2019 was almost half of the number performed in 1990. Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to the rational, moral, and spiritual arguments against it. Since the beginning, abortion doctors and workers themselves have been turning against the practice. 

This article has more about the connections between eugenics and abortion, and offers some ways to get involved.

The Reason Why Reason Exists

I would like to finally give an update on what I’ve been thinking about and working on. I’d also like to raise a few questions that I think are worth pondering—especially concerning the whole modern religion vs. science debate—and to introduce some arguments that I’ve found compelling.

It’s been over nine months since my last post, which I’ve deleted. It’s been over a year since I’ve substantially posted. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking and writing as much as before, but rather, that every time I have sat down to write a post I’ve found myself unable to do justice to what I’m thinking about.

I know from several conversations that my last few posts have tended to raise more questions about what my views are than they have answered. This reflects, in a way, my own state of mind. Never have I had so many doubts as I’ve had over the past year or two— but at the same time I venture to say that my faith has never been stronger. (Because how is it possible to doubt anything without being that much more certain of your grounds for doubt? What is doubt of one thing caused by but certainty of another?)

~~~

What if it turned out that we lived in a world where the Theory of Everything was not only easy to understand, but also easy to explain to anyone with an open mind? What if the Meaning of Life isn’t something discovered through obscure physics equations or complex philosophical ruminations, but rather a fairly obvious truth about why we’re here and where this world came from?

Many today would laugh at this notion, and they might say, “Please, take me to such a world; it sounds much better than our confusing situation here!”

But others would argue that we actually are in such a world. In fact, the majority of the world’s population believes we are. If you asked them why we’re here in this reality they would tell you. If you asked them what will happen after you die, they would have ready answers. And this has been true since the dawn of human thinking.

You’ve caught on by now that I’m talking about religion. If you tend toward skepticism maybe you’re annoyed. Maybe you would argue that even though most people think they know the truth, they are very far indeed from the truth, having based their beliefs on ancient superstitions without any scientific support, superstitions, you would argue, that have led mankind massively astray, again and again.

Let’s assume for a moment that the idea that God created the universe is a valid hypothesis. And for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that the purely scientific view and the religious one are equally likely. It would follow that the best explanation for why most people believe that our reality is created by God is that God created our reality. Because God being infinitely wise, would know how to create a world where most people know how and why they exist. So you would expect a world created by God to be a lot like ours, at least in the respect of producing so much consensus that God exists. On the other hand, if there were no God, then how would the forces of natural selection countenance the vast majority of humankind being so massively deluded?

All things considered, I find this to be a very powerful argument for the substantial truth of most religious ideas. If religion is just an assortment of random superstitious beliefs, why are beliefs in a Higher Power, a higher reality (heaven), in an afterlife, and in anti-Darwinian self-sacrifice, all so ubiquitous? Why are people willing to give their lives for the sake of such beliefs?

Oh, I know the counterarguments. (I was raised on some of them.) Religion is a tool to control the masses. It binds tribes together so they can fight other tribes. Belief in an afterlife lets people sacrifice their lives for the tribe, so that Darwinian selection works on tribes and not individuals. Belief in the “ultimate truth” makes people loyal. Belief in unique supernatural notions gives a tribe common ground and makes it feel like something special and worth defending.

Incidentally, these arguments are most common in Darwinian books about human evolution, for example Sapiens and The Social Conquest of Earth, which have entire chapters on them. But what is interesting about such chapters written by such Darwinian atheists (like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson) is that they almost never offer any scientific evidence for their assertions that all religion is false. What they tend to do is throw these statements in there, mixed up with a bunch of unrelated studies. Why do these scientists make assertions without proof? Because, in the end, they don’t take the religious hypothesis seriously. What possible study could disprove God, they ask? The hypothesis of God is untestable and absurd, they believe. So they don’t even try. This is considered (by them) common sense. And the vast majority of people, who consider God’s existence common sense, are dismissed as non-intellectuals—as part of the deluded herd.

This is a real problem. It means that the science-religion debate is dead. It’s been killed by closed-mindedness.

Let’s look at a couple of examples that I’ve run into over the past year.

Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God attempts to explain the rise of Christianity as a form of myth-making. On the debate over whether Jesus’s empty tomb (attested in several eyewitness accounts) proves his resurrection, he offers several alternative explanations (for example that his followers simply moved the body), admitting that none of them are very satisfactory:

“I don’t subscribe to any of these alternative views because I don’t think we know what happened to the body of Jesus. But simply looking at the matter from a historical point of view, any of these views is more plausible than the claim that God raised Jesus physically from the dead. A resurrection would be a miracle and as such would defy all ‘probability.’ Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a miracle. To say that an event that defies probability is more probable than something that is simply improbable is to fly in the face of anything that involves probability. Of course, it’s not likely that someone innocently moved the body, but there’s nothing inherently improbable about it.” (p. 165)

This is a flagrant example of begging the question, grotesquely anti-logical, if you think about it. He does not question for a moment the atheistic dogma that miracles are astronomically unlikely. But from a religious point of view, even though miracles are rare, they still have a significant chance to occur. And when you’re talking about arguably the greatest moral teacher ever to grace mankind, namely Jesus, miracles are no longer improbable but become highly probable, since you would expect an all-powerful God to make his presence known as appropriate.

Most anti-theistic “arguments” in modern literature devolve into such question-begging. They assume they are right without even considering the counterarguments.

E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, is full of examples of this. On page 259:

“The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their essential strength. Acceptance of the bizarre creation myths binds the members together.”

That religious beliefs about creation are “bizarre myths” is assumed without argument. The “illogic” of religion is never shown. E.O. Wilson himself offers a non sequitur here. Exactly what about a “bizarre lie” is necessary to bind a tribe together? This is assumed, also, in the book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, but I’ve never seen a good argument for why it should be true. Schools of fish and flocks of birds do not need “bizarre” beliefs to hang together. Chimpanzees do not need “lies” to go to war against other chimpanzees. And atheists, if they are telling the truth, are dooming themselves to be forever sundered from society— that is if social bonds require lies.

Nor are bizarre myths sufficient for binding people together, assuming that the major religions are bizarre myths. Wars between Christians and Christians, Muslims and Muslims, and Buddhists and Buddhists have occurred throughout history. Even in tribal societies, tribes with substantially the same beliefs go to war all the time. The whole argument evaporates the more closely you look at it.

But how would you get people to work together and not be selfish without the prospect of heaven or the threat of hell? This is another of those notions that’s been repeated so many times it’s started to sound plausible. But it also fails to account for nice atheists or cruel believers. And the whole mechanism it proposes for making people cooperate is superfluous.

Let me try to explain this by way of an example. Say you were developing robot able to ride a bike. You would need to give it circuits for keeping its balance, right? You would probably program them something like this:

-IF you start leaning left, THEN turn the handlebars right.

-IF you start leaning right, THEN turn the handlebars left.

You would NOT program it like this:

-IF you start leaning left, THEN gnomes live in the clouds.

-IF gnomes live in the clouds, THEN turn the handlebars right.

-IF you start leaning right, THEN unicorns live underground.

-IF unicorns live underground, THEN turn the handlebars left.

That would be pointless. If you programmed like this all the time it would make your code slower, harder to debug, and more prone to error. You would never teach your child to ride this way. Why then, if evolution wanted to make us nicer to each other, did it not just work on our pre-existing instincts for being nice, rather than this whole elaborate cultural belief system that (supposedly) causes war and ignorance and confusion? After all, chimpanzees are able to cooperate and show compassion to each other, and they have no notion of an afterlife at all. So the instinct already exists as part of our heritage as primates. Therefore it is ridiculous to argue that religion only exists to promote kindness, which even contradicts the usual atheistic mantra that belief in God is not necessary for morality.

I do have faith that God can help you to become a more moral person. But I don’t think this makes any sense of how the belief in God “evolved,” if God is a lie. Because there are much easier ways to become a better person than to pray to a god that doesn’t exist and can’t answer prayers. The only way to explain—on the survival-of-the-fittest view—why so many people have prayed so fervently throughout history, is that prayers are answered.

~~~

“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.’”

-Matthew 11:25

Proving the existence of God in a simple and valid way is is not difficult. What makes it seem difficult is arguing with a well-trained atheist, anyone well-versed in high-brow atheism, who has many convincing fallacies ready at hand to confuse the issue. Atheists are uncommon in America today, but at the most elite universities, they predominate among professors.

I’ve been reading their books now for twenty years, but I’ve never yet encountered a sound argument that God doesn’t exist. At best, I’ve run into only very convoluted ones.

The easiest way to see God is to look at nature. The forests of our planet are beautiful and vibrant, full of life, meaning, and purpose. The stars in the sky are glorious in their simple, shining beauty. The human form, and the human intellect, formed by nature for nobility and reason, are beyond compare in their balanced and harmonious intricacy; as are all the ecosystems of our planet, even taken together as a whole living system, spinning endlessly in the generous glow of our star for its billions upon billions of quiet years orbiting the Milky Way’s dangerous and fertile galactic center.

Very far indeed is this world from that proposed by the materialist. Ours is no conglomerate formed of atoms randomly colliding in a chaotic void. All the life on earth is no chance effusion of replicating, arbitrary forms, searching blindly in the space of all possible monstrosities. Each human brain is no arbitrary combination of influences, without soul or purpose or desire for truth, without life, robotic, nor some mixture of computational program and buggy noise. No, our world does have meaning and beauty, even if there is ugliness too.

Such realizations suffice for most people, as they should. Though I’ve tried to express them poetically, they are simple and direct. When we look at the static on a old-fashioned TV screen, that is chaos. When we look at the world around us, we do not see chaos. Our world is obviously designed.

It takes all kinds of convoluted contortions of reason and evidence to force our world to appear moldless, some godless, Darwinian chaos. Yet this is what modern intellectuals have largely succeeded at.

I do not mean to impugn science, not in its purity as a search for the truth. Nor do I mean to deny that our world is billions of years old, nor that many or most organisms share common descent from a few primeval organisms. There is good evidence for some of these claims, and not much evidence against others. But we should not confuse disputes about how a watch operates from disputes over why the watch exists.

Why, when Newton discovered the Law of Gravity, did everyone admit its beauty as God’s handiwork? And why, when Darwin discovered the Law of Natural Selection, did everyone not admit its beauty as God’s handiwork?

This is a very long discussion, actually, and I’ll leave most of it for my book I’m working on. But let me just say this: I’ve programmed evolutionary algorithms, computer programs that improve themselves by natural selection. And it’s not easy. If it were, all of our programs would be evolutionary. Heck, if computer programs could just evolve on their own, without guidance, I would be out of a job.

And you’re telling me that our world, which evolved us, the most wondrously intricate beings in existence, evolved without guidance?

Every theist, college-educated or not, knows how to refute Darwinism. “Look, it’s designed!” Everything else is just endless hairsplitting.

~~~

I myself was an atheist for seven years, starting in high school and up until I graduated with my physics degree. I was not an atheist out of defiance or rebellion, not entirely. It just seemed to me, based on how the world works, how everything turns out to work according to the laws of physics, that anything supernatural was unnecessary and unlikely.

When I look back on the atheistic revolution in my thinking, it was not caused by any one argument, but by my gradual absorption of the atheistic worldview of the science books I read and television shows I watched. It wasn’t like I went and read a manifesto on atheism one day and became a convert. It was a lot of things: science fiction and futurism on TV, popular books about string theory and black holes, articles and books about dinosaurs and evolution, and skeptical arguments concerning UFOs and ghosts. There was an underlying assumption, it seemed, a part of being adult and evidence-minded, that rejected theories that didn’t put matter or atoms at the bottom of all explanations, or that believed life on earth to be anything but insignificant and unremarkable.

In calling myself an atheist I was trying to be honest. But there was another component too, which I’ve mentioned earlier. While I was growing up my parents left the religion they were part of, and they had many criticisms to make of organized religion. Blind belief makes you follow your leaders without questioning. It leads to gullibility and oppression.

On the assumption that the vast majority of people in world are delusional, people tend to think that the world is a result of chance, and that when we can understand it, it’s by luck and not design. By choosing the purely scientific worldview, I saw myself as defying this chaos. The world was a pool of random opinions based on feeling and chance (“religion”) and I was going to find what order there was in the world and hang on to it (“science”).

It didn’t occur to me (though this is easy to see) that belief in God is not a form of oppression at all, and in fact helps one fight against oppression. Jewish and Christian martyrs in every age have demonstrated this, not only under oppression by Rome, but under medieval rulers, under absolute monarchs, and under the intense oppression of Nazism and Communism. (Defending Identity by Natan Sharansky gives one personal account of this in modern times.) It is absurd to equate religion with oppression when it is obvious that the tyrants doing the oppressing have always been extraordinarily greedy, cruel, atheistic, and un-Christlike, even when they have called themselves followers of Christ.

But I had absorbed all these notions that God was unprovable. I had convinced myself that all the apparent design in the world—living things, the motions of the sun and moon and stars, mountains and rivers and oceans—are all just the result of chance combinations of atoms obeying the laws of physics.

I had convinced myself that everything that seemed designed in the world wasn’t designed. Even everything that humans had made, from computers to rockets, were products of the human mind, which was itself a product of blind evolution.

As I was pondering all this as a teenager, a Christian on an online forum about science and religion suggested I read a book by an intelligent design theorist, Michael Behe: Darwin’s Black Box. I read this alongside Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker. I was determined to have an open mind and come to the most reasoned conclusion. And back then it seemed to me that it was the arguments that Behe the ID theorist made that were the most convoluted.

Michael Behe is a biochemist, and over the course of his studies he has come across a number of molecules in bacteria and in cells that are just too complex to have arisen by small, incremental steps as required in Darwinian evolution by natural selection. For him, this proves that God must have somehow either preprogrammed DNA to be able to produce these molecules, perhaps at the origin of life, or perhaps over the course of evolution.

Darwin’s theory relies crucially on the gradual accumulation of changes for one species to evolve into another. If it turned out that the human eye was too complex to evolve, step by step, from no eye at all, then even Darwin would have admitted that his theory couldn’t work. Since then, attempt after attempt has been made to show that some feature we have couldn’t arise step-by-step. Behe’s it seemed, was the latest and most cutting-edge.

Dawkins argument, it seemed to me, was simply better. It was more open-minded; it was broader and more comprehensive. He pointed out that just because we couldn’t imagine how a given structure could arise step-by-step, didn’t mean that there wasn’t some way it could happen. For a long time people had claimed that eyes couldn’t evolve, but many finely-graded forms of eyes, from the simplest—a collection of light sensitive cells—to the most complex could be seen in nature. (At the same time, he was uncharitable toward his theistic opponents at almost every opportunity. For example in the Introduction: “In most cases, they know deep down what to believe because their parents recommended an ancient book that tells them what to believe.")

So I rejected Intelligent Design theory. It all seemed to rely on the existence of certain obscure molecules that very few people understood to begin with. (And implicitly on an ancient book full of myths.)

The apparent dominance of atheism in the debate over evolution is based on nothing more than a brilliantly subtle narrowing of admissible evidence down to a tiny speck of possible cases, all too complex and ill-understood to really debate—most importantly, the origin of life, and the origin of certain complex molecules. Everything else in evolution, it has apparently been conceded, could be the result of the chance operation of natural selection.

Why creationists have conceded so much without protest baffles me more, the more I think about it. The point of theism isn’t to believe that there is a convenient supernatural being who just happens to come down in rare cases when evolution gets stuck trying to create the next most complex molecule. If God wanted to make his existence known to us, it shouldn’t take a PhD in biochemistry to get the message.

God’s handiwork should be visible in every realm of nature. Surely it is apparent both in the very simple (the laws of physics for example) and in the very complex (such as the human mind). My point is that the only reason that ID theorists are forced to address such convoluted cases is that they face a very convoluted opponent.

It’s not that Behe makes a wrong argument for the existence of God. It’s not even that his argument is too complex. It’s that he doesn’t also mention innumerable simple arguments. This is actually the biggest problem with ID theory, though most people don’t realize it because too few people read it. (I do highly recommend Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, an extremely erudite and philosophical work, and fun too read. And if you’re interested in evolutionary algorithms and like difficult mathematical equations, Dembski’s co-authored Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics is full of entertainingly brilliant, if unnecessarily obscure, theistic arguments.)

All this technical debate can be fun (for some of us) but let’s get back to the basics. Richard Dawkins’s title The Blind Watchmaker is, quite simply, self-refuting. It’s a simple oxymoron. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, too, is about anything but the origin of species. If you think I’m being facetious or overly hairsplitting, take a minute to think these titles over with me. Because the entire Darwinian argument is simply a brilliant piece of Orwellian doublethink, and I want people to start seeing this.

On page 5 Dawkins writes:

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Okay, so natural selection is undirected he’s saying, right? It leads organisms here and there in the space of all possible organisms, with no goal in mind. Drunkenly, blindly, it simply wanders. Got it. But how then could it follow that natural selection would lead to something even apparently purposeful? Of course, it is the purpose of books like Dawkins’s to help us to “see” how such blindness could act as if it could see.

Consciously or unconsciously, such obfuscation is achieved by atheists confusing the role of chance in evolution. Theists like to ask, “But how could chance lead to something so well-designed?” Atheists respond, “It’s not chance, it’s natural selection.”

But if natural selection is blind, how is it not chance?

There are two kinds of chance being confused here.

The first kind of chance is chance mutations. This is when the DNA of an organism changes as the result of being damaged. Darwinists and creationists alike agree that mutations, if they make a difference, are usually harmful, possibly fatal. It is very rare that DNA will change in such as way as to make an organism more fit than before.

This is where Darwinists jump in to make their argument. Thanks to natural selection, they say, organisms that get beneficial mutations have more children, and thus beneficial mutations can build up over time, leading to complex things like eyes.

The second kind of chance is what this argument sweeps under the rug. It’s the fact that natural selection is the result of the environment you happen to live in. Natural selection is blind because your environment has no idea—on the atheistic view—what kind of structure it should favor next.

An example might help here. Say you’ve got some worms living in the ocean with eye spots. Their environment hasn’t changed for a million years, so they are optimally adapted. Any mutant offspring die out because they are less fit. This includes offspring with deeper eye wells, which could give them better visual perception but which do no good because they block out a little too much light.

Let’s say their environment changes. Now there is more light, allowing for deeper eye wells and more precision, another step to complex eyes! And the mutation happens again, and this time it spreads through the population. Evolution, it seems, has taken another step forward.

According to Darwin’s theory, this step was taken blindly. It other words, it could just as easily have gone the other way. We know of cave organisms, in fact, that have lost their eyes by natural selection. Every step forward, if we’re talking about a blind walk through possibility space, is more easily a step backward.

The question that Darwinists consistently dodge answering is how chance — in the second sense of the “blindness” of the watchmaker — could have progressively taken all the steps to the human eye in all its complexity without taking still more backward steps.

Any step toward greater complexity is always much more unlikely than a step away from it. For example, to make use of eyes you also need nerves to a brain wired to interpret their signals. It’s all in the coordination of parts. It’s much more likely that a random force of selection will eliminate something complex and costly to maintain, than favor it. So each step forward in the evolution of eyes, because there a more things that can go wrong — bad lenses, bad receptors, bad transmission, bad processing in the brain — is much less likely than than the corresponding step backward.

Dawkins on this point (p. 41):

“[T]here is the familar, and I have to say rather irritating, confusion of natural selection with ‘randomness’. Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”

Opposite of random? But it’s blind! It’s like telling someone to drop you in the desert at random, blindfolded, without a map. You’re going to walk toward the nearest sound of water. You claim, furthermore, that by this method you will tend to find gradually bigger and better sources of fresh water. Someone argues that without a map, wandering a random, you’re not guaranteed to find any water, let alone the best sources of water. Your response? Well I’m not wandering at random, I’m following the sound of water!

There’s absolutely no reason to think that blind natural selection, without a map, even working over billions of years, would produce anything complex at all. All it would tend to produce, assuming it could even get started, is organisms better at replicating faster. And bacteria can replicate a thousand times faster than humans. That’s a huge fitness disadvantage to overcome. It means that most evolutionary steps from bacterium to human decreased the fitness of the species. It’s like saying it’s easy to get to a mountaintop—all you have to do is roll downhill!

Dawkins’s doublethink goes all the way to the end of his book. I’m sorry this passage is so obscure, but if you think carefully about it I think you’ll see the contradiction in the heart of his thinking:

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival, properly understood. Nonrandom survival, improperly understood, is not the antithesis of chance, it is chance itself. There is a continuum connecting these two extremes, and it is the continuum from single-step evolution to cumulative selection. Single-step evolution is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation, that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design.”

Dawkins thus hides the crux of the matter in a convoluted philosophical analysis of chance that is superfluous and that presents itself as more logical than it is.

Dawkins reasoning doesn’t work at all here, even on the face of it. If single-step evolution is pure chance, then so is cumulative evolution. You don’t get nonrandomness by stringing together a bunch of random processes. It doesn’t matter how long a blindfolded person wanders, he’s still just as likely to go one direction as another.

To be fair to Dawkins, it should be noted that by “single-step evolution” he means not micro-evolution but the idea that the whole complex human eye evolved by one mutation. But this is a “straw man", an argument set up just so he can easily knock it down. No one believes this. Cumulative (blind) selection only looks like a good alternative next to such ridiculousness.

The whole march from germ to fish, from fish to man, from algae to tree, from shrew to whale, from primordial soup to rainforest — this whole march was no random collection of random marches. I don’t care whether each step in the march was necessary for survival or not. I suppose each step was necessary for survival, was survival of the fittest. Of course it was, tautologically so. But the harmony and complexity and directedness of the march must indicate that the selection ultimately was selection, in the original meaning of term “selection", that is, “to choose", “to decide consciously". “Natural selection", natural meaning unconscious, is the original oxymoron behind the entire intellectual movement of modern nihilism.

~~~

A lot more can be said. But it need not be. The arguments and counterarguments are endless, but the upshot is always the same.

“But we only think humans are the pinnacle of existence because we happen to be humans.”

Exactly. Chimpanzees don’t think they are the pinnacle of existence because they don’t have the ability to think about existence.

“Our world only appears friendly to life because we are well-adapted to it.”

Adaptation itself is impossible on most worlds, let alone most universes.

Yes, from one point of view, natural selection is never random. It’s not the survival of whatever but the survival of the fittest. But from a broader perspective, from the perspective of threading the evolutionary maze from bacterium to human, natural selection by itself would be extremely unlikely to lead to anything like us. If every trait that humans have is a trait implanted by natural selection, then the forces of natural selection that shaped these traits must have been at least as complex as the human mind. And since we don’t understand the human mind, not even close, we are not even close to understanding the forces that created us. So how could we not call the forces that created us intelligent?

To be more precise, forces are not individually intelligent, but they can be used together in an intelligent way. A computer programmer, even if he’s writing evolutionary algorithms, has got to put the right basic rules and parameters in place so his program performs the task desired. Without the right rules, without the right evolutionary environment, anything goes—the most likely outcome being a boring crash. There were countless ways the evolutionary history of earth could have “crashed.” Some tiny species of bacteria could have replicated wildly out of control, killing everything else. A comet could have struck, or a super-volcano. Sure, there were extinctions, but nothing that forced things to start all over. When diversity and complexity came back, it was always deeper than before. There is no law of nature saying this must be so. Life could easily have started on Mars, for example, and died out or simplified back to triviality. By all the laws of probability, this should have happened on Earth too, if there was no design involved.

The literature on this whole debate is vast. Was the Earth fine-tuned for life? Were even the laws of our universe fine-tuned? Did evolution proceed by random walk or designed progression? I challenge anyone to dip into this literature in a fair-minded spirit and not come back with a stronger faith—or at least a stronger suspicion—that a Creator is behind it all. A few recommendations, from both sides of the debate:

The Creator and the Cosmos, by Hugh Ross (theist)

The Accidental Species, by Henry Gee (anti-theist)

Signature in the Cell, by Stephen Meyer (theist)

How Jesus Became God, by Bart Ehrman (anti-theist)

The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel (theist)

Natural Theology, by William Paley (1809) (theist)

The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins (anti-theist)

Navigating Genesis, by Hugh Ross (theist)

The Social Conquest of Earth, by E.O. Wilson (anti-theist)

Privileged Planet (book and documentary) by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards (theist)

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, by Victor Stenger (anti-theist)

This is just a selection of the books I’ve read (or re-read from a new perspective) over the past year, what I consider probably the most accessible and surprising. The anti-theist literature I list, in most cases, does not present itself as such. Generally it claims to be objective and scientific, and not to take any particular stance toward religious ideas, assumed to be beyond proof. But now, I guess because I suddenly find them so full of contradictions, I find them shrill and petty in their anti-religion. I can still appreciate their honesty in trying to find the truth, if not their utter disdain for actually engaging with religion.

As a professor at a modern university, it is easy to write books and articles criticizing religious ideas. Several of the quotes I’ve offered here show that in the name of objectivity they explicitly criticize faith. They don’t worry about losing their job for it.

But the debate, as I said, is officially dead. Theists are not allowed to publish counterarguments except in special circumstances. In Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer tells part of his own story as a scientist and philosopher attempting to put forward pro-theist ideas. One peer-reviewed article that he published, a very technical article, all but destroyed the career of the editor who published it, causing him to be “transferred to a hostile supervisor” and demoted.

Since the Scopes “Monkey” trial, there has never been a case, to my knowledge, where a school was challenged for teaching students the anti-theistic ideas of scientists such as E.O. Wilson or Dawkins. But now any book billed as “intelligent design” has been legally classified as religious and therefore inadmissible in public school curricula, as decided in the famous Dover Trial back in 2005.

I recall hearing news reports about it, and getting the impression that Intelligent Design was a movement promoted by religious leaders without any actual scientific background. But this was all misinformation it turns out. I challenge anyone to read Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (or any of William Dembski’s more technical works) and not come away with a deep respect for the ID movement and its scientific methods.

~~~

“But all those ID theorists are Christians,” you say, “and even if their arguments for a Designer make sense, they seem to assume that we’ll automatically accept the God of the Christian Bible as our ‘intelligent designer.’”

If wanting people to know the truth about why we’re here is an ulterior motive, then yes, Intelligent Design theory is guilty as charged. But if objectivity is anything, then it is a desire to find and share the truth. How then, is one to present all the objective facts in favor of the existence of a Creator? Are we to present them as subjective feelings? That would be a lie. A fact is a fact, even if it favors Christian beliefs in particular.

Stephen Meyer claims that these are facts: (1) The universe could not have made more than 10¹³⁹ trails to create human DNA, given the number of particles and possible interactions of the universe. (2) The essential, necessary molecular machinery needed for DNA replication has a much less than a 1 in 10¹³⁹ probability to arise by chance. Together, (1) and (2) imply that life did not arise by chance, and hence was designed.

Maybe you can deny that (1) is a fact, or deny that (2) is a fact. But what if they are facts? What if they are among countless facts which point to the presence of a divine will in nature?

The modern intellectual climate demands that we pay no attention to such facts. It demands that we cease calling them facts, or even potential facts. It denies that they even can be facts. But that is to presuppose, from the outset, that there can be no universe outside our own, or that if it does exist, it may not have intelligent beings. That is an awfully big assumption.

They want to argue that anything beyond our universe cannot be proven. But then the only way for them to get around the undeniable fine-tuning of our laws of physics is to do exactly that, and postulate a “multiverse” outside our own, one consisting of perhaps countless varying universes that are all lifeless, with ours as the lucky stroke that gave rise to intelligence.

Occam’s razor, which states that “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity,” has often been used in attempts to eliminate the hypothesis of God, though of course, William of Occam was a theist. In our case it can easily be used to argue for the existence of a God, given that there is something beyond our universe.

The degree of fine-tuning of our laws of nature are something like one in a googol (10¹⁰⁰, one with a hundred zeros). That means that you’d need about a googol universes to, by chance, hit upon one like ours that supports life.

Even then, what fine-tuned the multiverse? Any multiverse you can imagine is just one out of an infinity of possible multiverses. How can this way of thinking avoid postulating an infinity of entities, most of them chaotic and lifeless?

Here’s another hypothesis. Instead of a googol other universes, assume you’ve got one other universe 10⁵⁰ times bigger than ours, with a creator 10⁴⁹ times smarter and more powerful than we are. Such a creator could easily create 10⁴⁹ universes as friendly to life as our own.

Which is more likely? For every 1 life-friendly universe created in the first scenario, 10⁴⁹ are created in the second. While the first scenario postulates a chaotic multiverse 10¹⁰⁰ times bigger than ours, the second postulates a much simpler and more lawful multiverse, 10⁵⁰ times smaller than the first, yet 10⁴⁹ times more productive. That means that in terms of efficiency, in terms of satisfying Occam’s demand for simplicity, the hypothesis of a designed universe is far, far more optimal (10⁹⁹ more optimal to be precise) than the hypothesis of a merely lucky universe.

It appears astronomically more likely to me that our universe, with its well-designed, fine-tuned laws, is part of the repertoire of a powerful Creator, than some freak in a vast array of monstrosities. Which is more likely to produce a working vehicle: storms and earthquakes tearing through junkyards, or engineers and factories?

But then who created our creator? To not multiply entities unnecessarily, we could postulate an infinite Creator, uncreated because eternal, responsible for creating every world under heaven. The infinity of an intelligent Creator is a much more parsimonious assumption that an infinity of chaotic universes.

I’m talking about facts and possible facts here, not emotions. Yes, there’s an emotional upshot, but even the purest scientific theories have one. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” says Darwin. “He who finds a thought that lets us even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great peace,” says Einstein.

I’m reminded of a peculiar philosophy of physics seminar session in grad school. The professor, an non-theist and hard-line empirical materialist, wrote a question up on the whiteboard along with a graph. The question was, “Why is mathematics so successful in describing nature?” The graph had two axes. One ranged from “simple” to “complex” and the other went from “solvable” to “unsolvable.” He wanted to know how complex we though the answer to this question was, and how hard we thought it would be to finally answer.

Each student and professor went up to mark the board. Most of the “x’s” clustered around the “solvable, complex” corner. In a spirit of contradiction, and in view of the fact that the problem had frustrated modern philosophers for over a hundred years, I went up and marked a region was that completely blank so far, “nearly unsolvable, simple.”

Even then, when my opinions on design were mixed, I knew that modern secular philosophers have a unproductive way of taking a straightforward question with a straightforward answer and making it more complex than it needed to be, all the while pretending that they were solving it once and for all with all their technical ramblings. But the history of philosophy, every philosopher knows well, had not shown much progress. Something new, I realized, was needed.

I believe, after all these years, to finally have hit upon the simple answer that most people already know yet is so nearly unsolvable on materialistic assumptions: Mathematics is successful in describing nature because nature was designed to be comprehensible. You’d think that any old collection of laws, and any old species evolved merely to survive, would have so little in common, logically, as to be mutually alien. As it is, children can start learning mathematics the minute they start learning to speak, starting with counting, moving to arithmetic, and then advancing as far as anyone could wish, into complex yet comprehensible mathematical theories that can keep any math-lover occupied for a lifetime. There is no reason any of this had to be true, nor that the laws of physics would be so readily comprehensible by the mathematics humans tend to excel at. Our mathematical abilities from the least to the greatest, it is held by Darwinists, all evolved on the savanna. Interesting coincidence. Must have been one well-designed savanna.

~~~

This has been a taste of where my thoughts have taken me over the last year. I’m currently writing down my arguments in a book, whose topics will range from the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, to evolutionary theory, to Biblical scholarship. Interspersed will also be an autobiographical narrative, telling the story of how my own beliefs evolved, starting with my Christian upbringing, my parents break with Christianity, their New Age explorations, my years as an atheist and physicist, then philosopher, and finally my recent journey back to faith. I groped for a title for weeks, until a friend of mine suggested “Surprised by Reason,” which I’ve kept as my working title for a couple of months now. The first draft is over half-way done, and I hope to have it ready to pass around to interested readers in a few months.

Where is "Contemplations on Nature and God"?

I've just deleted my most recent post "Contemplations on Nature and God." Here's a brief explanation of why.

In essence, it was reverential, but not reverent. What do I mean by this? Imagine walking through a very modern public building, filled with murals painted in a very contemporary style. As you go down a certain spacious passage, abstract shapes in the mural give way to a portrait given a central and honored place, a portrait of Jesus, largely realistic, with abstract flourishes. But as you continue down the passage, everything is abstract art again.

Such a portrait would be placed in reverential way, but not in a reverent way.

Originally, I wrote that post thinking I could help someone on a similar spiritual journey to mine. But by the end of it I concluded that nothing I ever wrote could defend the Bible any better than reading it or praying about it could. Even secular classics have this quality, that they are superior to almost any commentary you try to make on them.

In any case, don't worry, more blog posts are coming. I was preoccupied with very personal things for a couple of months there, but now ideas are flooding in faster than I can make use of them, bringing together my thoughts on fantasy, mythology, story-telling, literature, role-playing games, evolutionary algorithms, computer games, and interactive fiction. Most recently I've started writing a new scripting language, and continued deepening my epic fantasy setting for games and stories. Stay tuned.

Miracles and the Great Programmer in the Sky

I stopped believing in magic sometime around the age of 16. During a conversation with my mom about spirituality, I remember simply telling her this flat out. It was difficult for her to respond. But I was being honest. I believed I had grown out of that sort of thing.

Six years after this I had the most intense mystical experience of my life, and to use a clichéd expression that does it no justice: I was shaken to the core. After that, though I wore the trappings and attitude of an atheist, if you asked me whether I believed in God I would tell you that I did. It made me feel like a fool to admit it, but I’ve always valued hard-nosed honesty.

A fundamental tension had appeared in my beliefs. As a scientist I was fairly certain (1) that reality operated according to blind, mechanical laws, (2) that it was devoid of magic and miracles, and (3) that it was free from meddling from higher beings or spiritual forces. At the same time, I could no longer deny (A) that there was a Higher Power of a personal sort, (B) that we all have a divine Destiny, or (C) that our destiny lies in Eternity.

Until recently, A, B, and C were secret convictions. The bizarre thing about them is that they originated long before my first mystical experience. They even lasted through my “atheist” phase. But I had to keep them secret even from myself. I had to bury them in layers of wishful thinking and rationalization.

Who doesn’t dream about things like fame or fortune, despite their being so extremely unlikely for most of us? And who stops there? Who doesn’t dream about immortality, or learning what our reality is really about, or finally confronting the designer of our world and getting a few answers about what is going on? I’m sure some of us (myself especially) spend more time on these daydreams than others. But pretty much all of us have them at some point. (In fact, it seems to be good for us to think about the meaning of life. It seems that those cultures and individuals who have thought about these things—the Greeks, the Jews, the philosophers and prophets—have had a disproportionally large and positive impact on human culture and social evolution. But I’m getting ahead of myself.) In any case, I liked thinking about these things, though I found few fellow scientists who were not unspeakably embarrassed to discuss them.

So these thoughts got buried. I did what I could to stifle them, until after years of denial they finally burst out. And I spent three days in a mental hospital.

My spirituality easily could have died. In fact I would say that while I was at Caltech working towards my physics degree, my spiritual beliefs very nearly starved to death. They scraped by on a meager diet. Reading Plato, and (surprisingly) Nietzsche did something to feed them. But there were also the books of the physicist David Deutsch, which discussed what is called the “Omega Point Theory.”

In his book The Fabric of Reality Deutsch worries about the fate of the universe, in a way that only a physicist can. According to several theories of cosmology, the expansion of the universe is being slowed by gravity, and might eventually reverse. If this occurs, there will be a “Big Crunch”—everything in the universe will collapse back to a single point. And all life in the universe will go extinct. On the other hand, if the universe kept expanding forever, stars would burn out and it would eventually become too cold for life to survive.

But Deutsch believes that there may be a way for life to survive a Big Crunch, and even encourage a Crunch rather than an endless expansion. Calculations first done by another physicist, Frank Tipler, show that, theoretically, it would be possible for a universe-spanning civilization to use chaotic fluctuations in space-time to cause the universe to collapse rather than expand, and then shape the collapse to happen in a lop-sided way. They could cause oscillations in the collapsing universe that could themselves store and process information. And these oscillations would happen faster and faster, and ultimately infinitely fast as you approach the final crunch, meaning that life could survive eternally.

Frank Tipler’s book on the subject is The Physics of Immortality, and it’s an interesting read. At the time I read Deutsch, who takes it all with a grain of salt, and for a while I avoided reading Tipler because he had a reputation for practicing that flavor of witchcraft known as “pseudo-science.” But his book is actually pretty reasonable.

The idea stuck with me, and along with it, a little of Deutsch’s Platonism. By Platonism I mean the idea that forms and essences may exist more completely in higher levels of reality. It’s an idea that modern scientists like to scoff at as “unfalsifiable.” In other words, how could you falsify (disprove by experiment) any notion of a higher reality?

It’s hard to. But David Deutsch, in his seductive way, tries to demonstrate the notion logically. Take any ideal concept you like, say a “perfect circle.” According to Plato, a perfect circle really does exist—in the realm of Ideas. According to Deutsch, Plato is pretty much right, and you can prove it by running an advanced-enough virtual reality simulation. When virtual reality technology has finally become so good it becomes indistinguishable from real reality, then perfect circles, perfect squares, the perfect chocolate cake, and any other perfect concept you can think of will become so real you will be forced to say that they do exist.

This is actually another notion that you find in Frank Tipler’s writings. According to Tipler, as our world approaches the Omega Point, our civilization will approach infinite complexity and power. That means it will become so powerful and godlike it can resurrect the dead and put them in a perfect virtual reality heaven if it wants. And, according to Tipler, it will do this, because if we assume that civilization continues to progress, it will be too humane and merciful not to resurrect the dead. In essence, Tipler believes that you can prove the existence of a God and an afterlife using physics.

When I found this out I did what any good scientist or atheist was supposed to do—I scoffed. I moved on. Obviously, there were a lot of assumptions put into Tipler’s model. Most importantly, just because civilization could survive and advance forever, didn’t mean that it would. In fact, to this day I still disagree with Tipler’s (and Deutsch’s) progressive assumptions. So I’ve always had a convenient excuse to discount their ideas.

But a seed was planted in my mind. I knew the progressive assumption wasn’t really necessary to the argument. Life has evolved toward more and more complexity since it began. It still seemed likely, or at least possible, that this trend would continue. And if so, you might have virtual worlds created in the future that could be as convincing and elaborate as you want. I even started conceiving a number of science fiction stories based on the idea of virtual worlds, and some of the earliest sci-fi I wrote (back in college) was in this vein. And of course I’m not the only writer who’s been intrigued by these sorts of possibilities—virtual reality has been a staple of sci-fi novels and movies for decades.

As you fantasize about what a virtual universe would be like, you start to see some interesting parallels with religion. What if you could upload yourself into a virtual world and live out entire lives in it, maybe so quickly that it would seem that no time had passed in the real world. Maybe you even forget your original life while you’re in the simulated one, and then eventually you wake up and the knowledge from all your lives, real and simulated, comes rushing back to you. It would seem that more real realities, as you wake up, will be more and more complex. The reason for this is that a virtual world has to be much simpler than the reality it was made in. Just compare any of our computer games with our actual universe. Waking up from a universe in this way would be like going from 2-D world to a 3-D world, being transformed suddenly from animal to human, growing up instantly from child to adult, or better yet being born from the womb. From whatever point of view you think about it, if there is a reality outside ours it must be complex in ways we can’t begin to imagine. Waking up would be a lot like dying, at least as dying is understood by all major religions and most ancient philosophies.

All of these thoughts crossed my mind. But as they could not be confirmed by experiment, I suppressed them.

***

As a matter of fact, I continued to suppress these thoughts even after my 2004 mystical experience that convinced me of the existence of God. It isn’t that they weren’t part of that mystical experience. I felt that I had seen the Omega Point. But I was not in a stable place, mentally, until years afterward, and as part of my effort to maintain sanity, I avoided almost all speculations on higher realities.

I even avoided these speculations after my conversion to Christianity in 2009, which involved several additional revelatory experiences. If you’re a Christian yourself, I don’t expect you to be surprised that the possibility that we’re in a virtual reality simulation didn’t enter into it. However, if you’re a believer in science I do expect you to be surprised. Because you’re probably wondering how someone could swallow an old superstition like the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead to ascend into heaven, and discount off-hand Tipler’s scientifically plausible if somewhat outlandish theory that we’ll live on in virtual reality after we die.

The answer to the question of how I believed in one and not the other is Darwin’s theory of evolution. Part of what I had realized by 2009 was the utter universality of natural selection. Natural selection isn’t something that sometimes works on you if you happen to have DNA. It’s actually more like gravity—it is constantly working on everything, culling and reshaping all variable populations of persistent traits of any kind. Including culture. Including even religion. From this point of view it was a no-brainer to accept Christianity and reject Omega Point theory. True, Tipler was a Christian, but of a very heterodox kind. His theory was not that God had created reality, but rather that humans would create God. In all important essentials Tipler’s theory, I knew, was Gnostic. And as I had been studying late antiquity for years trying to understand the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, I knew enough by then to say for certain that Gnosticism was an evolutionary dead end.

But that realization didn’t make it any easier to swallow the miracles in the Bible. Nor the realization that in antiquity, those who admitted that Jesus was a great teacher but refused to call him divine, very quickly lost out to those who believed in all the miracles of the New Testament. I knew from history that to reap the benefits of Christianity you had to believe in all of it.

I knew that I had to believe, but I couldn’t. Not completely. I still found it hard to swallow that Jesus had walked on water and raised Lazarus from the dead. I still found it hard to believe that he came back to life and floated into heaven. But I did the best I could to have faith. I told myself that the teachings of Jesus were the closest thing you could get to pure Goodness. And I reasoned this out as the natural result of evolution, that the New Testament had evolved toward perfection and that the result was a story about God being incarnated that was so close to what it actually would have been like as to be 100% true—at least spiritually, if not literally.

If you’re Christian you’re probably saying, “But that’s not Christianity.” Maybe it isn’t. But it was the best I could do. I went over and over what was miraculous in the Bible. I even prayed about it. But I didn’t get any definitive answers.

That isn’t to say I received no answers at all. I had a series of intense dreams that hammered into my mind that God was infinite and ungraspable, and that no single religion could contain Him. I had powerful feelings of identification with Christianity. I was told that faithful members of other religions were “saved.” But I got nothing on the miracle question. And I didn’t even ask about any afterlife, or what it really meant to be saved. At the time I was more interested in evolutionary fitness, which was a very Old Testament concern, I well knew, but I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t believe in anything more.

I’m too honest with myself. I’m too skeptical. It’s what led me out of secular humanism in the first place. For 2500 years secular humanist philosophy, going back to the Greeks, had lost the evolutionary race again and again to theism. What had dawned on me was how gullible all those atheists are who think that this time it will be okay, that this time they will magically convince everyone that they are right, and we can live our scientific-logical-socialist utopia without religion or war. Maybe realizing the futility of all this sounds more like the logic of a deserter than of a true convert. In fact that’s exactly what it would have been if I had not had those dreams and revelations.

Ah, but hold on, you say, if you didn’t believe in miracles how could you believe that God was talking to you? Well I don’t know exactly. I sort of guessed it was my subconscious combining symbols and finding new local optima for my neural patterns, and that powerful tingling, those irresistible waves of goosebumps that made my hair stand on end, I guessed those were natural physiological responses to the enormous amount of correlation going on in my neural pathways. Right? And these patterns, since they reflected higher patterns of (very evolutionary fit) virtue, which were pieces of the theoretically highest-possible-virtue, or Good, also known as God, why shouldn’t I have said that they came from the Most High?

Anyway, at some point, I knew, I just had to go with it. I had read books by plenty of mystics and I knew they weren’t crazy. In fact they were the opposite of crazy.

Which reminds me. I almost forgot: in 2009 I stopped taking my anti-psychotic medications (which I had been on for years), I stopped seeing counselors, and I stopped having attacks both of mania and depression. This was after five years of being told by doctors that I had an incurable psychosis known as manic-depression or bipolar disorder and a 30% chance of committing suicide at some point. But after I started praying and earnestly reading scriptures: gone. For almost ten years now. If you’re religious you might call that a miracle. If you’re not religious you might call that very interesting indeed.

For most of the last nine years I’ve been the sort of Christian I just described. What you might call a “philosophical” Christian. I believed that Jesus’ teachings were as close to perfection as you could get. Whether he actually performed miracles or not I dismissed as immaterial, though I knew better. I knew it was important, but the fact was, I just couldn’t believe.

***

You’re probably thinking I’m going to start talking about some miracle that I experienced that I couldn’t explain scientifically, thus finally breaking the spell of materialism and ushering me into the gullible fold of True Believers.

I am in the fold of True Believers now, but not because I have directly witnessed or experienced any big miracles. Sure, I’ve had plenty of small miracles since my conversion—being cured of bipolar disorder, having powerful revelatory dreams and feelings, meeting my amazing wife, having several amazing children, finally finding a voice to express myself as a writer—but nothing earth-shattering. No angels coming down from heaven, no voices speaking out of a cloud, no walking on water. Nothing that defied the laws of physics or might convince a true skeptic.

What finally convinced me that miracles are real, is ... logic.

Let’s go back for a moment to this notion that we are in a simulated reality. Just for the sake of argument. Say you had one or more very powerful beings in a reality more complex than ours, and they decided to make a universe. And they made ours. But why did they make it? I mean, most of it is empty space and hydrogen atoms, right? You think they like watching hydrogen atoms collide in empty space like a bunch of mindless billiard balls? Of course not. What’s the most interesting thing in the universe? Well as far as we know, us.

Assuming our universe was created by someone, then whoever created it probably did it because they wanted to create something like humans. (Unless there’s a more intelligent and interesting organism somewhere out there, but let’s set this possibility aside for now.) And in fact, they did a great job creating humans because as it turns out, our universe is incredibly fine-tuned for life. The forces are balanced just right to create stars and planets and useful organic molecules that can join in so many interesting ways. By contrast, the vast majority of possible physical constants give you universes filled with just gas or just black holes or stars with no planets or planets with no organisms. Ours was perfectly done. It was a good bake.

So whoever is sitting outside our simulation watching it grow is surely very pleased with themselves. Or are they? What about all the suffering, evil, and injustice against innocents? In short, what about all the starving children? It would seem that our creator, as the old Epicurean argument goes, is either not all powerful or not all good.

I discuss this in more depth in my post on Boethius. And actually Boethius himself discusses it still more thoroughly. The answer to the question of why our world was created with evil in it boils down to this: if there is anything good at all, there must be something less good, which is to say, evil. And if things can be more or less evil, then you will certainly have things that are the most evil. And if there are sapient beings in your world, they will be bothered by this.

So evil must exist. But must innocents suffer? Well, again, if there is justice there must be injustice. And if there are things that happen by intention, there must be things that happen unintentionally. Bad fortune must be part of the world, or else we’d live in a place without good or evil, without chance or intention, and without justice or injustice. In short, you’d have a place not much different from a bunch of hydrogen billiard balls bouncing around in space.

If there were nothing challenging about reality, or if we could just mechanically do the right thing always and always get our just reward, how could there be any superbly good specimens of humanity? On the contrary you’d have a drab monotony of mechanically good people. (It’s ironic that the same people who complain that our reality is too harsh also like to say that heaven sounds boring and pointless.) In any case, it stands to reason that whoever made our world let bad things arise in it on purpose so that humanity could exist.

And here’s another thought. Why let all those good, innocent, heroic humans go to waste? So many good people die, but why let them die forever? Why not do what computer programmers do and write a “save game” function? Or rather maybe, a “save soul” function? Why not take whoever does especially well and, as a reward, promote them to a more pleasant reality and maybe even give them more responsibilities? Maybe even let them be agents in your own reality for a while, build them “heavenly” bodies so they can experience life outside their narrow simulation? Or even give them the ability to intervene in the world below as you yourself do?

So maybe, in a higher sense, justice could exist for innocents who suffer and die. They could have their reward in a life after death, or what some might call “an afterlife.”

Sounds nice doesn’t it? Maybe a little too good to be true? That’s what I thought myself until very recently. In fact, I had a friend come to me a couple years ago and cite this viral argument going around that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It goes like this: assuming that civilization continues to advance, we will continue to build more and more virtual reality worlds of higher and higher sophistication, until they are as convincing as actual reality. Over the life of the universe you’d expect at least billions of such simulations to be created. But from this it follows that the probability that we are in the base reality is one in billions. (Elon Musk is a famous proponent of this argument. Headlines were soon announcing that he had hired a team of scientists to break us all out of the Matrix.)

After my friend sat me down and told me this over a beer, I just sort of chuckled at him and gave him a dose of his own medicine. For years he had been giving me this skeptical spiel about how people (especially theists) don’t think critically about anything and need to be more scientific. So I told him straight off that there was absolutely nothing scientific about this theory, because if you can’t tell the difference between your reality and a simulation, then we’re talking about something you can’t measure. You can never gather any scientific evidence for it. I said even if it was true, it didn’t matter, because obviously whoever wrote our simulation made it basically identical to base reality, so we might as well act as if it was reality.

Of course, maybe they wrote the program with some bugs in it. If we could find these bugs, we might be able to unravel what is going on and “break” out, as Musk would have us do. But I went on to say that this was probably foolish, as whoever designed our reality was so powerful we’d have no chance in a war anyway.

Despite my skeptical take, he was insistent that the logic was bullet-proof, and didn’t back down. I also tried the anti-progress rebuttal, pointing out that it was a huge assumption that civilization would continue getting more complex and never suffer a collapse, as most civilizations had in the past. But he was already so in love with the religion of progress that he wouldn’t budge on even this.

Nevertheless, since that conversation I’ve given this line of reasoning more and more thought. And suddenly a couple of weeks back it clicked with my historical and metaphysical researches in a way that has left me reeling, distracted, and elated. And with a steadier faith than before.

I started by asking myself this: how can I simultaneously be so in doubt about miracles and yet so certain that Christianity is true? I went over and over my thoughts from 2009 and realized that my rational certainty was based mostly on historical evidence, coupled with the theory of natural selection. The teachings of Jesus won out in a brutal competition with Paganism, Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and a thousand polytheistic cults. It stood its ground against Manicheaism, Gnosticism, a thousand heretical splinter groups, and is now held by 33% of the world’s population, and growing. This was the evidence that finally convinced me, at least rationally.

I asked myself: how can I quantify this certainty scientifically? So a couple weeks back I did a calculation. Christianity rose to predominate in the Roman Empire between 0 and 400 AD, that is, in about 16 generations. About 4.5 million people, give or take a million, lived in the Empire in those centuries. Assuming that each person chooses a belief system at random (that is, based on preferences unrelated to natural selection), the chances against Christianity rising this fast are less than 1 in a googol to the googol. (That’s a 1 with ten thousand zeroes behind it.) That’s our confirmation that Christianity was evolutionarily more fit.

Some may object that Christianity came to dominate through force. This may have happened after about 400 AD, but it couldn’t have happened before because the early Christians were mostly pacifists, even when they were being persecuted and killed for their beliefs.

Others may object that Christianity came to dominate through unusually persuasive rhetoric. This may be true but it can’t be the whole story because we know that Christians had more children than Pagans too. So all this means is that Christians were both biologically and culturally more fit than the competition. But that’s everything.

Or almost everything. You might say that their cultural fitness was superficial, that it is a lot of great sounding ideas but that in reality they don’t give you any real philosophical truth. But that can’t be right either, because it was primarily Christians that engendered the Scientific Revolution. It was primarily Christians (and some Muslims) that kept Greek philosophy alive through the Dark Ages. Isaac Newton was a Christian, and Charles Darwin was too (at least as he was raised). I’ve met physics professors at Caltech who are Christian, and there are many books out there (including Tipler’s) by scientists who are of the faith. Because if you think about it logically (as we’re doing right now) all those metaphysical claims that Christianity makes that supposedly can’t be confirmed by scientific experiment wouldn’t be able to be disproven either. So even though they are not confirmed by science, they are at least consistent with science.

But actually Christianity’s metaphysics are confirmed, because history demonstrates that they help people lead more productive lives.

You can’t claim on the one hand that Christianity can’t be proven wrong but at the same time that it creates gullible minds. If it really did create gullible minds it would have died out a long time ago. The fact of the matter is that Christian culture (the West) has produced some of the most fruitfully skeptical minds the world has ever seen.

Christianity must be incredibly fit in a very universal way; it has grown steadily now for 2000 years through booms and busts of civilizations, through ages both golden and dark, through persecution, war, peace, prosperity, and on every continent among extremely diverse peoples. This is not bad for a religion whose core teaching is merely that you must love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

It should also be kept in mind that most of the stories in the Bible have undergone very powerful selective forces. The Old Testament books have been around longer than the New, and are thus still better tested (at least by natural selection). But the books of the New Testament were also chosen by very powerful selective forces. Early on there was no clear rule about which books were part of the Holy Word and which not. But over time this rule, or canon, was selected and refined, and now there is virtually a universal agreement on the New Testament canon, despite there still being a few Old Testament books different among Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and various Protestant branches. My point is that the stories of miracles in the New Testament have been tested again and again, and have been confirmed. The last 2000 years have seen Christian culture and philosophy flourish. And as the belief that Christ performed miracles is essential to Christianity, it is essential to Western Philosophy too.

The Epicurean and Stoic philosophies of ancient Rome were both skeptical and materialist. They existed in direct competition with Christianity. And they lost. But most of the everyday virtues they taught were the same. A Christian, Stoic, and Epicurean would agree on most questions of morality. What they differed on was metaphysics, spirituality, magic, and miracles. Where an Epicurean would counter demonic possession with at best a long explanation of how it wasn’t possible, a Christian would simply go ahead and exorcise it in the name of Christ.

Who had the correct theory? There’s a central principle in modern scientific philosophy called pragmatism. It states that the theory that is most useful is true. It is obvious that the success of Christianity was far better than chance. It amounted to a 3% advantage per generation even while it was being opposed by the Emperor of Rome, most respected philosophers in Greece, and the high priests of Judaism. That’s a huge advantage. And the greater portion of the advantage was due not to the ethical theory of Christianity, which was largely the same as that of ancient philosophy, but due to its metaphysical theory. If the two had been equivalent, it would have been one in a googol to the googol chance of early Christianity being so successful against the odds it faced.

Hold on! say my skeptical readers. Not so fast! Am I saying that just because it gives you an evolutionary advantage to believe that Jesus walked on water, that Jesus did walk on water? Isn’t that still a bit of a leap?

Maybe. So let’s back up a little bit. The fact of the matter is that Christianity is not alone. It’s one of several very ancient, very complex religions that are passed down from one generation to the next by very well-educated priests. In the entire world only 16% of people are non-religious, and of these non-religious only half are non-theists. That means 84% of the rest of the world hold to a religion, and 92% believe in a higher power and things like the afterlife and other supposedly unprovable metaphysics. Most believe in demons or angels, a God or gods, and some form of magic or miracles.

But, you ask, even if the vast majority of people believe in things like angels and miracles, aren’t most of these people uneducated? Maybe only a small proportion of the world’s population is atheist, but among the educated isn’t the percentage much higher, and for good reason?

It’s higher because people who read a lot tend to doubt tradition more. But theists are not non-existent, even at the highest levels of intellectual culture. Let’s mention a small portion of the most famous of these. Theistic physicists have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, and James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell was probably the greatest physicist of the 19th century and a devout Christian. Mathematicians have included Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel (called the greatest logician of all time), Nicholas of Cusa, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz (who invented calculus along with Newton), Leonard Euler (a name I became very familiar with as a physicist, and who wrote apologetic essays), Maria Agnesi (who became a nun), Bernhard Riemann (also still very famous), Charles Babbage (who invented the first progammable computer and published arguments defending the possibility of miracles), Lewis Carroll, and Alonzo Church (a pivotal 20^th-century computer scientist). Christian philosophers have included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Desiderius Erasmus, Edmund Burke, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Simone Weil, and Roger Scruton, to name just a handful. Among Christian writers we’ve had Leo Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rainer Maria Rilke, Annie Dillard, Robert Jordan, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, W.H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, Wendell Berry, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I haven’t even listed all the thinkers and writers I consider most brilliant, as I’m going more for name recognition in this list.

For 8% of the world to completely disbelieve in God is actually very unusual, historically speaking. Through most of human history this number has been more like 1%. Modern materialistic philosophies are mostly to blame for the rise of atheism, and they maintain their hold primarily through mass-media, government-mandated public education, and a university system dominated by the anti-religious. Even then, the percentage of nonreligious is actually shrinking, especially since the secular dogma of zero population growth is sold more easily to nonbelievers.

My point is, why would evolution have favored minds that tend to believe in miracles? It’s very puzzling on the face of it. People are taken in all the time by conmen and charlatans. That means there has to be some advantage so powerful that it outweighs the disadvantage of gullibility. But what on earth could it be?

Let’s come back to the Great Programmer than coded our world. What the heck was he thinking?

To begin with, it’s certainly very hard to be a Great Programmer. I know this because I have participated in artificial life research, which means I’ve tried to create rules that lead to interesting forms of evolution. What I found was that it’s actually really, really hard to do. Most of the time your computer programs will tend to evolve to triviality, getting shorter and shorter, for example, so they can copy themselves faster. If they can they’ll usually go viral and mooch off other programs, refusing to evolve any interesting solutions themselves. Natural selection—and this is a point I’ve made elsewhere—does not guarantee interesting evolution. By itself it does not guarantee that you will get the kinds of organisms you are trying to get.

You have to put in the right forces of natural selection from the get-go. Not just any world with life will evolve sapient life. But ours did. Our world is extremely well-constructed for it.

But how does the Programmer go about putting selective forces into his program? For example, say he wants to evolve kind creatures. How does he do this?

It’s actually a myth that evolution can only lead to selfishness. Scientists have discovered a variety of simulations where altruistic programs—programs that actually sacrifice themselves to help other programs—can evolve. I’ve written programs like this myself. It usually involves tweaking the parameters so that self-sacrifice still pays off in the long run, by helping other altruists do better. This is sort of like in reality when Christian martyrs gave their lives to help the Church as a whole. It was a strategy that worked, at least in our world.

How would you tweak the parameters of our world? Well, you could mess with the laws of physics. Or you could play around with how things were at the time of the Big Bang. But neither of these are very efficient ways to do this. You would end up changing everything, the whole history of the world.

Imagine that your Programmer somehow bungled things up. (This is what the Gnostics believe by the way, and it’s wrong, but humor me for a second.) Half-way through the simulation he realizes that everything has gone wrong, and he forgot to put in certain conditions that let his creatures evolve kindness. So maybe he decides to enter the simulation for a second, so he can teach his creatures how to be kind, and then send them on their happy ways, to forge a new evolutionary path producing more of the kinds of souls he was going for in the first place. This would be way better, because now he doesn’t have to restart everything, and he can sort of fine tune it as it goes along, maybe performing miracles now and then to guide history to where it should be.

When you’ve got a created world, in other words, there are going to be cases where you need to go in and fix things by hand. And it should be clear that this is basically what we mean by miracles.

Assuming this is correct, why then would Jesus have to be sent at all, unless God messed up? Why didn’t he just put in the right conditions for humans to evolve kindness in the first place? Why didn’t he make it so that philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism work best, so everybody can just be atheist and happy?

Ah. Whoops. There’s the reason. Because God is good and would never deceive us this way. Why would he want us to be atheists? On the contrary, being perfectly honest, he wants us to know we’re in a simulation.

Okay, so here’s another question for you. Why then doesn’t he use miracles to give starving children something to eat? Why should anything bad ever happen, where everything’s perfectly fine and there are no challenges?

Ah. Whoops. We talked about this. Because He was creating an interesting reality with good and evil to challenge humans and evolve heroism. The vast majority of the time he’ll leave in place the normal rules of the game, physical cause and effect, so we can learn what we are here to learn.

All right, but what about demons? Why did He allow any lesser programmers in on the party? Why let them deceive humans and lead them astray?

This is actually an interesting question. But if you think about it, once again God is being perfectly consistent. If there must be evil in our world for it to be interesting, there must also be evil in any higher worlds for them to be interesting. Of course, not all worlds need to be “interesting” in the sense I’m putting it, but you get what I’m saying. You could easily have heavens where nothing bad happens, but that’s obviously not what our world is, because eternal reward is not what our world is for. You could also easily have higher worlds with evil, because maybe God is evolving beings on those higher levels. In fact the story of the fall of Lucifer makes sense in this light. So you really could have demons outside our reality, at least conceivably.

Here’s another question. If demons exist, how do we know that a particular religion was founded by the true God, and not a deceiver? Well, the short answer to this is that we don’t. If St. Augustine was right that the Roman Pantheon was actually a league of demons (see City of God), then in fact people have been led astray by rogue cosmic programmers before. But this, too, seems to be the sort of challenge that God wishes to face us with. There will always be the possibility that we will fail in it. In any case, as He can see our hearts, we must have faith that we will get what we truly deserve in the afterlife, even if we are led astray now and then while we are here.

How do we know which religion is true? Up until a couple of weeks ago the best answer I could give is that I have been brought up in a Christian society, so I need to be faithful to my society and join its religion. Perhaps other religions are different because they are adapted to their particular society. And mixing, religions, I realized, was almost certainly foolish, because you would ruin the exquisite adaptiveness of each to its own society.

But now this whole line of reasoning, however valid, is preempted by a more basic question. If it is generally true that there is an external reality, outside our “simulation,” and that humans can contact higher beings, and that these higher beings can meddle in our affairs, and that our religions are successful precisely because they acknowledge this fact, then the question becomes—among Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, Socrates (yes even Socrates claimed to be in touch with a “daemon”), Moses, Zoroaster, Mani, and other religious and philosophical leaders—who was contacting a demon, who an angel, who the Almighty God?

Now the first and most obvious test is whether the religion founded by a given prophet thrived or not. Because if it didn’t thrive, it is likely that it was inconsistent with the evolutionary goals set down by the Programmer of our universe.

Hold on a second though. Here’s an even more fundamental question. How do we know the Programmer of our universe was God and not some demon? The answer to this is fairly simple, actually: because if our reality is too fine-tuned for life to be the result of chance, then any reality fine-tuned enough to evolve angels and demons capable of creating our reality will be in need of a still higher programmer to be explained. And that reality will need a still higher creator, and so on to infinity. And that is what we mean by God, the one truly infinite being, the First Mover at the top powerful enough to create realities of any complexity.

How do we know that God is good? Because God is all-knowing, and evil is simply a lack of understanding. Since God lacks no understanding, he lacks no good qualities.

So even if our reality was, in an immediate sense, created by a demon, this demon would be finite, and would thus be just as weak before God as we are, and subject to his laws. Imagine if you and I gained powerful enough technology to go create our own world. And we decided to make it a world that evolves purely evil beings. Or perhaps a world of slaves that would do our bidding and who would be merely our playthings, suffering endlessly for our pleasure. Surely this would displease our Maker. Surely he would have the ability and desire to interfere. Perhaps he would simply go down and save the poor souls we had created from slavery and then make us slaves in some kind of hell as punishment.

As an arena for the evolution of good by the struggle against evil, our reality seems to be well-designed. Many good and heroic people have arisen in our reality, and surely these souls have been greatly exalted in the realms above. True, evil has arisen as well, but it has been necessary to make our world a challenge, and villains will surely get what they deserve in the life to come.

So it appears that the Programmer of our world was, on the whole, good. Either an angel or the Almighty himself.

By angel, of course, we mean a higher being who answers to God’s will. By demon, we mean a higher being that defies it. You would expect the line between good and evil to be sharper the higher you go, because knowledge about the layered structure of reality would become more sophisticated, and the conclusion that there must be a God at the highest layer would be more clear. So to do evil would be a more blatant defiance of His will in higher realities.

Let’s get back to the question of how to tell which religious founders were inspired by angels and which by demons. Mani, the great Gnostic prophet of antiquity, whose religion Manicheaism flourished for only a couple of centuries, and whose philosophical ideas die out again and again, was almost certainly possessed by a demon. The 10,000 religions that have died out over the course of human history were likely mostly the work of demons, or at least unenlightened humans. Ancient Paganism is now regarded as the work of demons by most, and this would make sense, as they demanded human sacrifice in gladiatorial games, and lewd, pornographic displays at the theaters. (See Augustine’s City of God for more discussion of these.) Whatever gods demanded human sacrifice of the Aztec and Mayan empires were likewise certainly demons.

The question becomes more tricky when talking about the major world religions of today: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. As these are all long-lived, they must each contain mostly true doctrines. This stands to reason, as all these religions teach kindness, charity, honesty, humility, and good works. If you read for example the Koran, which states in the first chapters that you must give to the poor and bow to Jews and Christians because they worship the same God and are saved, you will see that much of the conflict between religions is due to their politicization and the manipulation of the devout by malign leaders.

But even if they are each mostly true, there is still the question of why they conflict. There are several plausible sources of interference: (1) perhaps as the founder of the religion was listening to God or His angel, a demon sneaked in a word here or there that appealed to the prophet’s vanity; (2) perhaps the founder (or his demon god) used an existing true religion as a model, knowing the power that true religion had to gain converts, but added certain flourishes out of pride or greed; (3) perhaps the original founding of the religion consisted of pure doctrine, but this was subsequently warped by corrupt leaders over time. Any or all of these could have played a role. And here again we see how this reality tests our virtue, how perfect honesty and humility will benefit us, and how selfishness and pride can lead to corruption and eventual downfall.

The centuries to come will tell us which religion is the most true. But I think still more can be said, especially about Christianity.

Christianity is unique because its founder, Jesus Christ, showed perfect humility during his time on earth. He obviously did not start the religion to become a great conqueror or a wealthy man. He remained humble throughout his life and died before becoming famous. It is clear that Jesus was not possessed by a demon.

But didn’t he claim to be God? Isn’t that somewhat insane? How could it be true?

If Jesus was not possessed by a demon, then he was on the side of the Almighty. And if so, he could not have been insane or a liar. If the words of the New Testament are true, then he was telling the truth when he said he was God.

And we know that the New Testament is true, because it has been selected to come down to us out of all the many thousands of beliefs there have been. And as the Almighty designed our reality, he would not design it to naturally select scriptures that were false.

In fact, during one period in the history of the Church there were two factions, the Trinitarians and the Arians. The Arians did not believe that Jesus was God, but that he was created by God. For a time the Arians rose to predominate, but eventually the Trinitarians (who held to the original view taught by the Apostles) came back to dominance. There was some violence between members of each camp, especially among barbarians, but if you study the history of this conflict in detail you will learn that the Trinity won its most decisive victories through rational debate, philosophical contemplation, and democratic voting. It was a selected doctrine, not imposed from above by corrupt leaders. So it is astronomically unlikely that Arianism is more true, especially as it has risen again and again during the course of history (there are Arians even today), but has in most centuries comprised a very small portion of the faithful.

So what we have is a certain religion, Christianity, which appears to be the work of the Highest Creator. He incarnated Himself to share with us what the whole point of this “simulation” is. And this is exactly what you would expect of a benevolent Programmer who does not wish to deceive his creations, but to help them.

As I realized this, everything started to fit together.

The doctrine of the Trinity states that you have one God who is three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father is the Most High Creator, of course. We use the term Father for tradition’s sake, though being infinite He is obviously beyond gender. The Son is Jesus, the incarnation of God for the purpose of sharing with us the meaning of life and suffering Himself to save our souls. How fair would it be for God to create this hard reality for us and not come face the worst of it Himself, and tell us that it will all be okay? Finally, the Holy Ghost is what allows us to feel the will of God when we pray. It is ever present so that we never have to be alone in this difficult reality.

And seeing this, I came to realize that all along it had been the Holy Ghost that had gently been guiding me toward the truth. Just as humanity was not ready for Jesus until the Jewish and Greek cultures had been led gradually closer to the light, I was not ready for the Truth until I had been led gradually closer to the light.

The fact of the matter is, my mystical experience in 2004 that shattered everything and landed me in therapy was the result of seeing the truth before I was ready. I recall surfing the web for statistics on world hunger and child mortality in the third world and on realizing the truth breaking down into a fit of weeping, unable to sleep for days. I recall scouring the library for books on mysticism trying to understand the visions that I had begged for but couldn’t comprehend. I remember one night sitting up in bed to have a waking vision of a light from God that penetrated me to my inmost desires, even the most secret and despicable ones, and being utterly humiliated. I remember seeing with full vividness the Eternity I would lose if I couldn’t piece things together. But things kept falling apart. I felt pretty sure that madness would result.

There is a good reason that God, who is incomprehensibly higher than we are, never showed his face to Moses. Nor did He even come close to showing His face to me. But as a well-trained, dogmatic atheist, even the slightest peak at the Truth nearly destroyed me.

I was not destroyed, however. And the thing that got me through was the realization that there was a Higher Power, because I had seen Him and had realized that this Power wanted what was best for me. And that was all I was ready to accept at that point, after my first experience. I clung to this bit of truth like a drowning man to a bit of wood.

I’ve come to see that God has a purpose for all of us, if we would only heed His guidance. But before all else, He wants us all to have our freedom, because we are, being created in His image, ourselves creative beings. He would never force us to do anything. Hellfire is reserved not for those who go their own path, but for those who interfere negatively in the paths of others. For my whole life I’ve seen myself as a seeker after truth. So after 2004, recovering my wits and a form of sanity, I left physics for graduate school in philosophy, to continue my search for truth on my own terms. Not only was I following my dreams, but I was following a path God knew would prove fruitful for me. Sure, he had given me a mystical vision, but his purpose was not to send me off to become a priest, a prophet, or a religious leader. That wasn’t where I was needed. I was needed in philosophy – the heart of modern atheism.

I actually made fast friends with several fellow students who were Catholic. But these friendships didn’t last long. In one conversation someone brought up angels. I said, “You believe in angels?” He said, “Yes.” I replied: “That’s stupid.” End of conversation.

I hung out more with the sort that I was meant to hang out with. The brilliant skeptics who, like me, believed in almost nothing but physics. And I came face to face with real stupidity. A fixation on the material world so laser-like that they couldn’t even admit that biology was a real science. (Why? Not enough math in it.) And though I was a jerk, at least I was an honest jerk, and when I saw the holes in their logic I was as merciless with them as I’d been with believers. When I decided that the truest position was emergentism—the doctrine that physicists hate because it states that not all sciences are reducible to physics—I chuckled to myself because it sounded so dumb and mystical. With glee I imagined the looks on everyone’s faces as logic showed that physics was not the highest form of knowledge. And this selfish arrogance led me to develop my first important theory, a mathematical proof of the limits of physics based on Gödel’s theorem.

Of course, it had been done before. Papers along the exact same lines had been published quietly in academic journals for decades. But this was going to be different. I was going to wave it in people’s faces until their world fell apart.

But that never happened. And the way it never happened was the most disappointing outcome you could have expected. Nobody proved me wrong. Nobody even tried (very hard). They would discuss it for a bit, but before anything was decided someone would change the topic and we’d all go home. I would argue with half-hearted professors in their office until they told me to maybe “choose a different topic.” Email chains would fizzle out before they even got good. And that was when I realized that reason and logic meant nothing in modern academic philosophy. In the end, it was politics. It was all about sounding more scientific than the next guy. And Emergentism, that laws of nature can emerge that physics can’t predict, is the least scientific-sounding theory you could have.

It didn’t dawn on me at the time, but I was getting a dose of my own medicine. Just as I had, for years, dismissed spiritual ideas outright as unworthy of my thought, my own philosophical ideas, despite being logically provable, were being dismissed offhand.

Jaded and dispirited, I again faced extinction. This time it wasn’t as a mental hospital patient, but as a mindless cog in the academic machine, churning out paper after paper on uninteresting, interminable arguments. They told me to choose a narrow topic so I could “just get my Ph.D.” making it clear that getting what might be considered the highest academic credential on the planet, a doctorate from the best philosophy school in the U.S., was just a matter of sitting quietly and doing busywork for a couple of years. It actually didn’t sound that bad. Why throw away such a certificate, a guarantee that I’d get whatever book deals in the years to come that I wanted? And so I buckled down and started becoming that cog.

But then, in 2008, the Holy Spirit returned and did me another favor. One night, in a waking nightmare I saw the utterly empty abyss that lay before me, the total extinction of my soul that awaited in the inanity of hypocrisy. It was so terrifying that I nearly overdosed on my anti-psychotic meds to get it to go away. But the nightmare still didn’t go away until, sluggish and numb through all my limbs and thoughts, numb even to the tip of my tongue with the synthetic chemicals coursing through my veins, urinating every seven minutes, I called my Dad and told him I needed a break from school and was flying home—and my two-year sabbatical began.

I read more books during those two years than probably in the entire rest of my life. But when it was all over I readily admitted that the best one of all, the one that had changed my life in the biggest and most positive way, was the Bible. At the end of it, after a series of significant dreams, was when I started calling myself a Christian.

Still I didn’t believe. Still I doubted that anything in the Bible had really happened. I had read it like fiction. Even as fiction it was more valuable to me than any other book.

But why? Why didn’t God just send an angel down on a cloud to explain: “Hey there buddy, you’re awfully close to the truth so here it is. You’re in a simulation and the Great Programmer wants you to know it. He’s sent prophet after prophet and miracle after miracle, and he even came in person to chat with you all and heal the sick to show how powerful and nice he is, but you guys still don’t seem to get it, so let me just tell you straight up. Consider yourself in the know.” Heck, that’s what He did with Paul and half the other saints.

Why have I been forced to work this all out logically? Because that’s what I wanted all along. That was my path. To develop my cosmology philosophically, logically, and in-depth. To find out analytically that, yes, we live in a rational universe where miracles are exceptions that (quite literally) prove the rule. And now I can share it with you all without having to tell some far-fetched story about an angel on a cloud.

As for all these snarky Frequently Asked Questions when it comes to Christian beliefs:

Q: Why send Jesus to one place and time and neglect earlier times and other civilizations? Why should God have only appeared in Isreal 2000 years ago?

A: I can’t think of a better place and time to appear than when He did. He had centuries of vetted scriptures of Judaism to work with, and this gave people a background for understanding why He came. Greek Platonic philosophy had matured, and played a huge role in understanding and explaining the gospel. (In fact the New Testament was written in Greek.) Jesus came soon enough to spread his word to the Roman Empire, and from there to all of Europe, and from Europe, as is happening today, it is spreading to the rest of the world. The Bible even says He will come again. And I don’t think He did neglect earlier times and other civilizations. They have received portions of the truth, enough to produce many good souls in every era of history.

Q: Why did Jesus have to come at all? Why not have designed good-enough laws of natural selection to make people naturally kind?

A: For two reasons. (1) To not pre-program us, but rather to let us have free will. (2) To show us with certainty that there is a Higher Power who cares. As a perfectly good being, He would clearly want us to be both free and undeceived.

Q: What about inconsistencies in the New Testament?

A: As the New Testament was written and passed down by finite humans, it is likely that some errors have crept in. But we can be sure that the best version has in most cases been selected, the version that best preserves His original message.

(POSTSCRIPT: During the week after writing this essay, I happened to pick up Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. I’ve found that much more can be said about the validity of the New Testament. Where most myths, legends, and religious biographies develop over the course of centuries, it took mere decades for the New Testament to be written down. Contrary to popular opinion, Jesus’s biography is one of the best corroborated—internally, externally, and archaeologically—in history. Scholarship has also shown that most of the so-called gospels that didn’t make it into the New Testament canon were first written down centuries later. So unlike most other holy biographies, the New Testament sprang into existence fully-formed. Within decades a significant fraction of Jews had converted, most of the rest had radicalized, and an angry Roman emperor came and demolished Jerusalem and dismantled its temple, just as Jesus, and Daniel before him, had prophesied.)

Q: How is it possible that Jesus did things like walk on water and cure the blind?

A: He coded our reality and He can change it at will.

Q: What about the Old Testament? Why is it so different from the New Testament? Why did God suddenly change His mind?

A: He didn’t change his mind at all. Humans had to evolve until they were ready. Prior to Jesus’s time the Jews were even less ready for what he had to say than they were when He came. He had to prepare the way with miracles, the Ten Commandments, and prophecies or else the arrival of the Christ would have been too confusing for everyone. As it was, enough Jews were just barely ready enough to get what was happening, learn the gospel, and go evangelize.

Q: Why did God play favorites with the Jews?

A: He had to set them aside as a chosen and holy people so he could teach them and prepare them to receive the messiah. When he saw them dying out in Egypt he went and saved them. When he saw them go astray he sent prophets to admonish them. He certainly didn’t make them into some world-dominating Empire, as He could have. They hadn’t shown themselves ready for the responsibility. He kept them just alive enough and wise enough to prepare the way to come down and explain everything to us.

Q: What about the creation story in Genesis? Why didn’t he just tell Moses that we all evolved over billions of years?

A: Even if He had told him this the ancient Hebrews wouldn’t have had the slightest clue what He was talking about. They got the basic outlines well enough: first there was a void and then an empty world with land and oceans, and then the sky cleared to give it light from the sun, then living things appeared (it even states that ocean life appeared first), then land animals, and finally humans. Pretty close to the real story, right? He even told Adam he was made from dust, and any modern astronomer will tell you yes, indeed, we are made from stardust. You can’t expect natural selection to keep alive an orally-passed, technically-correct story of evolution through all the centuries in a way that a modern biologist or cosmologist would find at all interesting. As it was He did pretty well in explaining. Most polytheistic creation stories are much more nonsensical.

Q: What about the Fall of Adam and Eve? Did that really happen or what? And if it did, isn’t it ridiculous to punish them and all their descendants for a little curiosity?

A: Even St. Augustine admitted that this story was almost certainly an allegory. Many Jews will tell you the same thing. It actually makes a lot of sense if you meditate on it. He tells them not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why? Because if they do they’re going to know enough to corrupt them. They’re going to know enough to give God the responsibility of teaching them what true Goodness really is. They’re going to make a choice to inhabit a reality of both joy and suffering, knowledge and deception. It seems much more fair to give them this choice and warn them they might regret it than to just plunge them into this reality without any choice or warning whatsoever. I believe that all of us made this choice at some level in the very act of attaining consciousness. Genesis is more a story of the genesis of human moral consciousness than anything else, and I think those of us wise enough to contemplate this fable have already eaten of the Tree ourselves.

Q: What about when God destroyed most of the world with a flood? Was that fair? Is that even supported by archeology?

A: Archaeological and genetic evidence shows that the last common ancestor of all humans lived about 50,000 years ago. Even if the flood happened that long ago, the distribution of land species on our planet is inconsistent with the idea that they all disembarked from an ark at any one time after the appearance of humans.

Some have said that the Biblical flood might have been the flooding of the Black Sea, which does appear to have destroyed some early civilizations. Or perhaps, as most religions and mythologies contain some mention of a flood, maybe the story has some deep allegorical meaning. My opinion is that the story of Noah, and along with it the story of the Tower of Babel (which is told right after it in the Old Testament) are dim records of the destruction of earlier civilizations that, due to human waywardness, were too violent, arrogant, or fickle for receiving God’s teachings of kindness. But I don’t know for sure. We’re still talking about only the first 10 pages of the Bible, and this is probably an example of oral traditions that are so old they could not help but be compressed into allegory. For an Old Testament about 700 pages long, the story of Noah comprises only 2 pages, so it’s less than 0.3% of the entire narrative.

Q: If our universe was created for life, why is there so much empty space?

A: We actually have no idea whether there is other life out there. For all we know the rest of our universe is teeming with life. SETI researchers have only been able to reliably search out to about 200 light years away from Earth, and our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years in diameter. And even then they’ve only scanned a relatively narrow range of frequencies for brief moments of time. Even if the universe is empty, there is no saying what God intended for it. Maybe it’s meant as a virtually unlimited field for space colonization by humans. Or maybe He wanted to allow life to arise spontaneously, and that much space was needed so that there would be a high enough number of earth-like planets for this kind of creativity to happen.

I’m not saying I have all the answers. I’m just saying that a lot of things start making a lot more sense if you take the idea seriously that our reality was designed. And I’m saying that a cosmology including miracles and angels and demons and a Highest God is a lot more coherent than modern intellectuals might have you believe. In fact, given the evidence, it’s the best metaphysical theory we have.

We live in a special time. Human knowledge has never stretched out deeper, wider, or higher. There has never been such a wide field of ideas for a philosopher to consider. And—as our reality is a fabric woven from both positive and negative aspects—this incredible breadth of education has led many of our most brilliant thinkers astray from the truth. Our power has given us arrogance, and I have suffered myself from this arrogance for much of my life. But somehow my honesty got me through. It is honesty that is needed most today, perhaps even more than faith, as it is the only way to true faith. God teaches us in many ways. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

He works on us through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going—provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other.