What if the strongest case against God came from someone who desperately wanted it to be true? That is not a hypothetical for me. For twelve years I was that person. I set out to prove that God did not exist, and I went about it with everything I had.
Attacking Faith Like a Code
I was trained in cryptography and mathematics, and I have been a lifelong skeptic of conclusions that cannot support their own weight. So I did not approach faith gently. I approached it the way I would approach a cipher I intended to break: attack it from every direction, test every assumption, and trust only what survives serious examination. I expected it to crack. I wanted it to crack.
The evidence refused to cooperate.
That sentence is the hinge of my life, and it is the hinge of the book I eventually wrote about those years, Why I Decided to Believe in God.
What Is in the Book
The book follows one man’s journey from determined unbelief to Christian conviction. It draws on cosmology and physics, on biology and mathematics, on philosophy, on biblical scholarship, and on the historical case for the resurrection. Those were not academic subjects to me. They were the fronts on which I fought, and the fronts on which I lost, one after another, to a conclusion I had not wanted to reach.
If you are a skeptic, I think you will find that I remember exactly how the arguments sound from where you sit. If you are a believer who has never quite been able to say why you believe, I hope the book gives you reasons you can hold in your hand.
Three Graves
But I need to tell you what this book is not. It is not simply a work of apologetics, a tidy stack of arguments with a bow on top. It is also the story of three graves.
I will not say more about them here, except this: any faith worth having has to be able to stand at a graveside. Mine was tested there. Grief has a way of stripping an argument down to what it can actually bear, and the answers I found had to be strong enough to stand in that place, or they were not worth having.
So that is the book. The case against God, made by a man who wanted it to win, and the record of what happened when the evidence would not let it. If you have ever wondered whether faith can survive a hostile cross-examination, this is my answer.
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