What If God Doesn't Exist

WHAT IF GOD DOESN'T EXIST?

A Personal Journey

I didn't sit down to write a sermon, and I didn't sit down to write an argument for the other side either. I sat down because I was tired of carrying a question I'd never actually earned an answer to, and I decided the only honest way to put it down was to go looking myself — at the evidence, not at what I already wanted to be true.

This book is that investigation, told in the order I actually lived it. It starts where any honest inquiry has to start: with physics, with a universe that increasingly looks like it had a beginning, and constants tuned with a precision that resists easy dismissal. It moves through the first cell, the code written into every strand of DNA, an old philosopher who spent fifty years arguing one side and quietly changed his mind at the end of his life. It sits with two ancient warnings about knowledge that arrives faster than the wisdom to carry it. It doesn't look away from consciousness, from the accounts of people who died on operating tables and came back with something to say, or from a man in first-century Judea whose existence barely any historian disputes and whose followers left behind a set of facts no explanation I could find accounted for cleanly.

I promised myself one rule above all others going in: follow the evidence, not the conclusion I wanted. This book shows you everything I found, in the order I found it, including every counterargument that gave me real trouble along the way. Where I ended up may not be where you expect. I'd rather you find out by walking the same road than by asking me to simply tell you.