People ask me, gently and sometimes not so gently, how I can still believe in God. I never resent it; if anyone has earned the right to ask, I have. But I want to answer carefully, because almost everyone who asks has the story backward.
They assume my faith is something I cling to in spite of the evidence, a comfort I refuse to give up. The truth is the reverse. My faith was built by the evidence, against my will, over twelve years of trying to tear it down. And it was tested by fire long before the fire I am standing in now.
The House That Remembers
I am writing this in the morning, in the kitchen of the house Nadine and I shared for twenty-seven years. The clock on the wall ticks like a metronome for a song that has lost its melody. Every room holds the imprint of her, and none of them knows she is not coming back. I still reach for my phone to tell her something, and the day is broken before it begins.
In May 2025, I buried my wife. Nadine was forty-nine. She fought brain cancer for more than a decade, through two surgeries, radiation, proton therapy, and chemotherapy, and she fought with a grace I still cannot describe. I sat in waiting rooms praying the raw prayers of a man who would trade everything he owns for the safety of one person. I counted her radiation sessions the way sailors count the miles to port. Then, on a Friday evening in May, my daughter called and said, “Papa, come immediately,” and I stood in the silence after the last breath of the woman who was my light, my map, and my meaning.
I have called myself a dead man walking and my heart an empty cathedral. Those are not literary flourishes. They are the most accurate descriptions of my days I have found.
And the loss did not come alone. Fifteen months earlier, in February 2024, I buried my mother. I have now buried my father, my mother, and my wife. I know the empty side of the bed at three in the morning. My children tell me the burdens I carry are more than any man can carry. They are right.
Twelve Years Trying to Prove the Room Was Empty
My father died in May 1994. He was a kind and gentle man, and his death broke something in me I could not name. I did not grieve the way people expect a son to grieve. I grieved the way a mathematician grieves. I decided that if God had allowed this, then perhaps there was no God, and I set out to prove it.
I was not casual about it. My training is in cryptography and mathematics, and I have spent three decades in computer science and cybersecurity. I know what a rigorous proof looks like, and what it feels like when one collapses. For twelve years I read the cosmology, the biology, and the skeptics’ best arguments, and I pressed on every seam.
I failed in every aspect.
- I failed at the beginning of the universe. Everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist. The equations run backward to a starting line, and nothing inside the universe can explain why the line is there.
- I failed at the constants of physics. They are set to a precision that makes every encryption key I have ever studied look like a toy. In my field, when you find a key of that length set to exactly the right value, you do not conclude that it rolled itself.
- I failed at the cell, because I found information there: coded, stored, error-corrected, translated information. I have never once seen a code without a mind behind it, and DNA is the densest code I have ever examined.
- I failed at mathematics itself. There is no reason a universe of blind matter should be legible to the human mind, yet the deepest structures of reality submit to equations we can write on a chalkboard. That is exactly what you would expect if “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
And I failed at my own grief. You cannot be angry at something that does not exist. My rage in 1994 was not how a man behaves when he has concluded the room is empty. It was a son pounding on his Father’s door.
So after twelve years I gave up the fight. I did not surrender to emotion. I surrendered to evidence. The scientist in me was cornered by the data, and the son in me was cornered by the love.
What the Testing Has Shown
That is the faith Nadine’s death has put on trial, and here is what I have found.
The evidence did not move when my heart broke. The universe still had a beginning on the day she died. The constants were still finely tuned. The code in the cell still demanded a Coder. Truth does not attend funerals.
There is more. Atheism could not have carried this grief. If there is no God, then Nadine was a temporary arrangement of atoms, my twenty-seven years of love for her were a chemical accident, and my sorrow is a malfunction to be medicated away. I lived inside that worldview for twelve years, and it offers nothing to a man at a graveside. It cannot even explain why the loss should matter.
Faith gives me a truer account. This grief is not a malfunction. It is the testimony of a real love, given by a God who is love.
“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15).
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
I am not healed. The grief is a permanent resident of this house and this heart. But I am learning that grief and hope are not opposites. They are companions, two plants in one garden, roots intertwined beneath the soil. I plant her memory where the light can reach it, and I let it root too deep for time to thin it. Even in the ruins, the sunrise still gleams.
Driven to the Door, and Through It
I spent twelve years trying to prove that God does not exist, and I could not. I have now walked through the valley of the shadow of death and found something greater: that He exists, and that He is good, even here. Science walked me to the door. Sorrow pushed me through it.
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life… nor things present, nor things to come… shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
I will see Nadine again. Heaven’s door will swing wide for two hands that fit like they were made for each other, with no more goodbyes and nothing left to fear.
That is not sentiment. It is the conclusion of a proof I have spent thirty years testing.
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