How did I get here?

The title poses what is known as an existential question — questions that are much easier asked than answered.

Who am I? What happens when we die? Is there a purpose for my life?

Existential questions are the sort that you’re never completely sure that you’ve really solved them, until you die. The answers that you decide are most correct will often determine whether or not you believe in God, which may impact many of the life decisions you make.

So these are not trivial questions…in fact, they are the most important and difficult questions that we may ever contemplate.

How in the hell did I get started writing books that talk about things related to religion and science, when I only received a business degree in college?

That’s also an excellent question, and an easier riddle to solve because the question itself isn’t existential in nature. And this is my answer…

I’ve always loved writing, whether it was source code for computer programs, a short story, or an effort to communicate important thoughts and ideas in concise language through documents I’ve written. I’ve always enjoyed tackling difficult problems and then working diligently to solve them. One of my earliest dreams was to become a professional writer one day.

However, for the longest time, I was too busy working a full-time job and raising my family to write prose on the side, or to worry much about seeking answers to my existential questions. I had things to do, and people to see. I stayed busy.

Then a fateful television interview that was mostly background noise while I worked  completely changed my attitude and my priorities. When I heard Richard Dawkins claim that cars and computers were intelligently designed, but human beings were not, I had to understand the rationale he used to justify his assertion. To this day, I still marvel at that absurd claim, even more so now that I more fully understand his flawed thinking.

I’ve always loved to read detective novels. Now I also enjoy writing them, along with the occasional nonfiction book. Richard Dawkins served as my motivation to become a writer.

Recently I promised a new friend of mine that I’d write something to specifically explain how I came to hold the beliefs I currently hold about science, given my published criticisms of evolution theory.

My new friend wanted to know how I came to write my book Counterargument for God.  The best way to answer his question will be to go back to the very beginning.

Similar to the experience of many atheists, I was inculcated in the beliefs of Christianity by my mother, with strong assistance from the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Also, as many atheists have experienced, I went off to college and promptly lost my faith after being indoctrinated into mainstream secular beliefs. In college I was taught to believe that science and religion were incompatible. I was taught that science was right and religion was wrong, as if they were mutually exclusive.

I’ll never forget my professor who broke the news that God hadn’t created the universe, the Big Bang had. Immediately, a question popped into my mind. So I asked, “From where did the matter for the Big Bang come?”

Of course I realize now is a question a theist would naturally think to ask, which is probably why my professor seemed to get defensive. I could accept the idea that the Big Bang occurred, but not the professor’s flippant response, which was that the origin of matter didn’t matter.

Without matter coming from somewhere, there is no Big Bang. In my opinion, it’s everything that matters. Naturally, I interpreted his reply to actually mean that he didn’t know.

Without a Big Bang, there is no universe, no stars. No complex chemicals that can by some unknown process cause dead matter to become a living organism. I said as much, and our exchange ended. Apparently that professor, whose name escapes me, wasn’t even sharp enough to offer the multiverse as an answer.

So I graduated from college knowing about Darwin and evolution, and knowing about the Big Bang theory, but without understanding how those theories truly help answer our existential questions.

Nowadays when someone tries to tell me that I have to believe something, I like to quote the Buddha, who said: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Sage advice.

When our children still lived at home, my wife and I both worked at demanding full-time jobs in order to support the family in the lifestyle to which we had become accustomed.

Working full time as a software developer and my parental duties required most of my time.

Writing software in complex computer languages paid very well, and I was pretty good at my job. In the world of computers, I was the intelligent designer.

People actually paid me to go from the United States to Australia, a trip that would have cost thousands of dollars, had it been a vacation. I was Down Under for six months, but only worked eighty hour weeks for the middle four. In my free time, I visited zoos and Australian landmarks. I  saw kangaroos and petted a koala bear. I watched a professional tennis tournament with world class players competing on beautifully manicured grass courts. I went to see an America’s Cup boat race in Fremantle.

And I was getting paid to be there. Is this a great country, or what?

Without a doubt, I’ve been blessed — with intelligence, and then with opportunity. My dreams of writing a book one day and becoming a published author were put on indefinite hold, and practically forgotten as years and decades passed, with the continued success of my career.

Then one fateful day, Richard Dawkins woke up the writer sleeping inside me.

I’ll cut to the chase right here: when Dawkins said what he said, I knew he was wrong, but also knew that I couldn’t explain why. So I began to research.

I sincerely believed in a supernatural God because I believed in the existence of ghosts, due to many personal experiences. My ghost stories have been told before: in my first book Divine Evolution and online here at my website, so for the sake of brevity, I won’t repeat them.

And I understand that my own personal experiences won’t mean much, if anything, to my atheist friends. But I’d sincerely appreciate it if people would not insist my experiences should also mean nothing to me. A single incident can probably be explained away with somewhat plausible rational thought. But not hundreds of them.

Richard Dawkins proclaimed (rather emphatically) that there is no such thing as a supernatural God. He boldly asserted that supernatural entities do not exist: no God, angels, demons or ghosts or anything related to the supernatural are permitted in his worldview.

When I first heard Dawkins being interviewed on Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, I had forgotten most of what I’d known about the theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory just wasn’t very interesting to me.

I had no need to understand the origin of species in order to write computer software, so the theory was useless, as far as I was concerned.

About all I remembered about the theory of evolution was the famous progression chart showing an Old World monkey evolving into a human being. Good for a laugh, perhaps, but nothing that might help me write code in an object-oriented programming language, or coach my son’s baseball team.

Only years later, when my curiosity had finally been piqued by Dawkins, I began to buy books by him and other prominent atheist authors, devouring just about every book related to science I could find, and began to haunt our local library.

I took copious notes as I read that were eventually edited into my first book, Divine Evolution, released by a small independent “no-fee” publisher who paid royalties.

The focus of Dawkins’s “argument” against God positions the argument for the theory of evolution against the biblical description of creation. This is absurd, for one simple reason:

Life cannot evolve until it exists. The Big Bang, inflation, and abiogenesis are equally or more important as the theory of evolution, because they must occur first.

Before evolution ever becomes possible, this universe (capable of supporting life) must first exist, and lifeless matter must somehow become animated.

My critics will often scoff and suggest that if my science arguments really could effectively challenge Darwin’s theory of natural selection, I should gain fame, fortune, and a Nobel Prize.  However, Richard Dawkins doesn’t have one of those, either, and my initial goal was responding to him.

My science arguments are not even “my” arguments. I stand on the shoulders of giants, merely reinterpret work produced by the experts in their respective fields. I’m a writer, not a scientist, and never pretended otherwise. The question is not whether I offer new evidence that discredits Darwin, but does my philosophical analysis of the scientific evidence explain that evidence as well or better than the theory of evolution? The question boils down to design, or descent.

No one seems to believe me when I say that my goal has never been to “destroy” Darwin or his theory as much as it has been to understand how evolution might produce the incredible diversity of life that we see in our current world. If evolution really does cause the origin of new species, I’d like to fully understand the process by which it happens.

The atheist/naturalist explanation for existence claims that nothing created this universe from nothing, that life itself is nothing more than a few chemical reactions, and that all life itself descended from a common ancestor. Descent with modification not only causes astonishing variety within an existing species, it also creates new ones.

If the universe could come to exist without any help or divine intervention, then there is no reason that ghosts would exist as the displaced spirits of the dead.

The atheist will probably say, “That’s right!”

The problem is that I’m not willing to ignore or worse, insist that hundreds of my own personal experiences were untrustworthy hallucinations and abandon my beliefs because someone else refuses to believe in ghosts.

Invariably, God will be mocked as a somewhat vacuous and superfluous invisible man in the sky, a figment of the imagination for the weak-minded. Talking snakes and donkeys will probably get brought up as well, because there are no new arguments for atheism. It’s all been said before.

But I have to wonder — how much easier it is really to believe in a universe coming from nothing for no reason than it is to believe in ghosts, or a virgin giving birth?