About the author

Christopher J. McElwain is a software developer and a former United States Army Airborne soldier. He is a husband and a father. He spent most of his adult life as an atheist, and whatever he believes now he came to through living rather than through an upbringing. That is the whole reason this book is an investigation instead of a set of conclusions handed down from a lectern.

He is an autodidact rather than an academic. He is not a theologian, not a professional historian and not a physicist, and he says so in the opening pages rather than leaving a reader to work it out. What he has instead is an analytical habit of mind, years of reading and questioning, and a stubborn unwillingness to accept an answer just because it is the one everybody around him had already agreed on.

How the book came about

It began with a question he could not shake. If science and faith are supposed to be enemies, why did they keep pointing at the same thing? He kept finding the same shapes in places that were not supposed to share anything: the precision of the physical constants, the way information behaves inside a living cell, the recurring patterns in traditions that had never had contact with one another.

He had years of personal writing and accumulated research and a web of ideas he had been trying to articulate for most of his adult life. Turning that into something a stranger could follow took a structure. The structure he landed on was a suspension bridge. One tower anchored in the hard bedrock of science and logic. One anchored in the high mountains of theology and psychology. Cables of personal experience holding the walkway steady between them, because without the logic the path is a fantasy, and without the experience the logic is a cold, dead machine.

What the book is

A hybrid, and it announces itself as one. Part memoir, part intellectual field guide. Three parts and twelve chapters, moving from cosmology and information theory, through comparative religion and the historical evidence, and out into ethics and purpose. Around them sit a prologue, an introduction, a conclusion, two appendices, a glossary and a full bibliography.

The first appendix sets the ethics of eleven major world religions beside each other so a reader can compare them directly instead of taking anyone’s summary on trust. The second is original poetry and personal writing, which is where the cables of the bridge are most visible.

What the book is not

It is not a sermon, and it is not a collection of easy comforts. Christopher’s own way of putting it is that he was not writing rainbows and sunshine. It does not mock anyone for being where they are, and it makes no attack on atheism or on any other tradition. The objections it takes seriously are the ones he used to hold himself.

It also does not ask for agreement up front. The invitation is to join him as a fellow investigator, look at the evidence together, and decide for yourself where the path leads.