I spent decades believing that science had settled the question of God or was at least well on the way to settling it. I want to describe the moment I realised it had not, because it was not a moment of abandoning logic. It was a moment of extending it further than I had bothered to before.
Science answers how. It does this brilliantly. It traces mechanisms, maps processes, follows the chain of cause and effect as far back as the evidence allows, and I have nothing but respect for the rigour and patience of that work. But at the edge of what it can measure, at the boundary where the laws of physics themselves came into being, it falls silent. Not because scientists are failing at their jobs, but because the questions that sit underneath the other questions are not scientific questions at all. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe follow laws in the first place? Why does it produce, against all apparent probability, conscious beings capable of looking back at it and asking what it means?
For most of my life I assumed those questions either had scientific answers coming or were not real questions. I never examined that assumption. It was simply part of the furniture. When I finally did examine it, I found that faith was not attempting to answer the scientific questions badly, which is what I had always supposed. It was answering a different set of questions entirely, questions that science, by its own admission, cannot reach. The two were not enemies. They were not even in the same argument. I had simply never looked hard enough to notice.
Take the objection I would have led with as a sceptic: dead men do not rise, therefore the central claim of Christianity fails at the first hurdle. It is a fair objection, and I held it for years. But look at what it assumes. It assumes that God, if He exists, is constrained by the physics of the universe He is claimed to have made. To assume that, in the very question of whether He can raise the dead, is to have answered the question before you start. The objection is not evidence against the claim. It is a decision about what evidence you will allow. When I saw that, the objection did not survive contact with its own logic. Not because I stopped thinking. Because I thought it through further than I had before.
That pattern repeated everywhere I looked. Each of my strongest objections turned out to contain a hidden decision, made in advance, about where the evidence would be permitted to lead. And here is the uncomfortable thing I learned about scepticism, as someone who had worn the label with some pride. There are two kinds. One follows the argument wherever it goes, including to conclusions it would not have chosen. The other has decided its destination before setting out and calls the journey rigour. The second kind is far more common, and I practised it for most of my adult life without ever suspecting that I was.
I assess evidence for a living. Plans, risks, claims, the gap between what people say and what the data supports. When I finally applied that discipline to the question of God, without the pre-made decision about where I was willing to arrive, the conclusion was not the one I expected and not the one I would have chosen. It was simply the one that held when everything else fell over.
I am not asking anyone to take that on trust. The whole point is that I did not take it on trust either. If you are where I was, sceptical, evidence-minded, confident the matter is closed, I would only ask you the question I eventually had to ask myself. Have you followed the evidence, or have you decided in advance where you are willing to let it lead? One of those is scepticism. The other just borrows its name.