Sometime during the fall of 2010, I read an article with a sensational headline. The article’s title proclaimed that famed English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had said that no God was necessary for the creation of the universe. Hawking claimed that the big bang was the result of natural laws of physics. The article included excerpts from a new book, The Grand Design, which Hawking had coauthored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow. In the excerpt, Hawking wrote, “Because there is a law such as Gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Hawking went on to say, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

At the time, that seemed intuitive to me. I thought, of course the beginning of the universe was caused by some natural law like Gravity and not some conscious deity as we humans had believed before we created the scientific method and began to discover the laws of physics. I joked with my immediate family members about what Hawking had said. I would say, “I believe in an invisible force responsible for creating the whole universe, and it is everywhere all the time, all around us, and it starts with the letter G … ha! ha! It’s not God! It’s Gravity!” For almost a decade, I gave little more thought to creation. In my mind, I was now an atheist; there was no God. Gravity was the reason for the big bang and that was the beginning of all existence. For me, the matter was settled.

That all changed in 2019. A couple of years before, perhaps in the late spring of 2017, or maybe 2018, I left home to go pick up a family meal of boiled crawfish, potatoes, and corn from a local restaurant. On the drive there I brought up Spotify and saw there was a category for podcasts. I had never listened to a podcast before, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I browsed for something educational and happened upon one called Philosophize This! by Stephen West. I started with the first episode, something about what West called pre‑Socratic philosophy. I had never studied philosophy, but I had a general feeling for what it was—and I’d heard of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

I was immediately hooked. Once I had listened to all the episodes of Philosophize This! out at that time, I moved on to The Partially Examined Life podcast created by a group of people who had all studied philosophy together at the University of Texas. I then listened to History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Peter Adamson, a professor of philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King’s College London, and In Our Time: Philosophy, hosted by Melvyn Bragg.

I don’t remember which podcast I was listening to when I had my epiphany in 2019. I remember it was a warm, sunny day a few months prior to the COVID‑19 outbreak, so it must have been the summer of 2019. I had gone to Wendy’s to pick up a salad to take back to work for lunch. The podcast I was listening to was describing the concept of God’s transcendence, a philosophical concept I was very familiar with by this time. As the podcast described that the critical feature of transcendence was the existence outside of creation as well as immanence inside of creation, I nonchalantly said out loud to myself as I drove, “Gravity is transcendent…”

In the next moment, I knew immediately what the cliché “it hit me like a ton of bricks” meant. My brain suddenly seemed to freeze. I felt a kind of panic, like I was not able to operate my vehicle. It felt like I had stopped breathing. Should I pull off onto the side of the road? I wondered. As all of this raced through my mind, a single thought so big it seemed my head would burst, tore through my brain. All I can describe it as would be a mental scream, “Gravity is transcendent!” I couldn’t comprehend why I felt this way. I was still driving, but I wasn’t even aware of where I was. I don’t think I was even sure what it meant or why thinking it made me feel the way I did, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything else.

***

For the past four years since that moment, I have been digging into what philosophers call metaphysics, which deals with the first principles of being and existence. This journey has taken me through the ages of written human history. I have explored the origins of religion and I have studied many different conceptions of God. I have dug deeper into philosophical thought. Along the way I uncovered the beginnings of science and mathematics. I studied the teachings of the greatest minds in human history from Aristotle to Einstein. This book is a record of that journey and the impersonal and universal truth about God that I believe I have uncovered. It’s been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years.

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