Freed from the stifling shackles of dogmatic Protestantism, my love for science could finally blossom. I could read all the “science for kids” books that came my way without feeling that they were a threat or that I needed to perform any mental gymnastics to make them match my worldview. Suddenly, free thinking was guilt-free.

I could read and/or watch as much as I wanted to try to understand the theory of evolution, modern cosmogeny, or whatever other theory grabbed my imagination. And to the shame of my church, everything I read filled me with a sense of awe and wonder that I never got once from a sermon or a Sunday school class. From the ego-humbling time & distance scales of modern astronomy and biogenesis, via the mind-bending facts of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, to the infinitesimal evanescence of particle theory. The explanations and myths of my church had never offered me a similar sense of grandeur.

The smallness of religion

To push this point even further, the explanations offered to me via religion suddenly seemed very small and mundane. Compare a literalist interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis with the magnificent cosmic dance offered by modern Physics. Think of the interplay of the minute scales of particle interactions in the dense soup of the Big Bang with the galactic distances governing the macro-evolution of the Universe. For a moment, forget questions of evidence and proper scientific inquiry, and ask yourself which of these contains the most beauty and inspires the most awe.

In addition, there was also the brute fact that these awe-inspiring explanations were backed by thoroughly tested theories and mountains of evidence. In comparison the literalist interpretations of the Bible had, to be blunt, nothing.

The myths offered by my church were a failure.

I finally had a worldview whose public confessions did not clash with my personality. Nothing is arbitrary. Any observation can be understood. To say that something is not understood really means that it is not understood yet. Miracles are nonsense, magic is stagecraft and trickery, and everything — everything — is derivable from fundamental physics.

Becoming myself?

The basis for who I am was set by my early life, but I would guess that the most obvious parts of my personality — those parts that people who know me at least superficially would describe — were set during this part of my life. Everything can be explained, and everything deserves to be explained. Don’t present me with claims, especially big claims, without something to back them up. Arguments from “common sense” aren’t worth the paper they are written on.

A landmark book for me was Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the Rainbow“. I can’t quite remember how this book found its way into my life, but it explained my worldview perfectly. Not only did it capture the sense of awe and magnificence that modern science offers, but it also made me realise the anger I felt towards those who obstinately continued in their belief in magic, New-Age nonsense, and Young-Earth pseudoscience. Why didn’t these people want to understand? Why did they want to be tricked?

In hindsight I can see that I had moved from a scientific worldview into a belief in the very modern religion of scientism. I had figured out how to identify heretics and apostates and was alert to the warning signs that I might be slipping from the One True Religion. I knew the Einstein quote (that probably wasn’t from Einstein), “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” but I only believed it at a superficial level. At my core I believed that there is nothing not ultimately vulnerable to the scientific method.

Overloading the foundations

But there were the occasional cracks.

Once, as a PhD student, I walked my neighbourhood for a day or two looking for an open church. I had (albeit temporarily) realised that I needed something more, something numinous, but I was terrified that any such belief would require the intellectual anaesthetic needed at my childhood church. My plan was to find an open church and try to speak to the pastor/priest. The goal, as I phrased it, was to find a church I could respect intellectually. Yes, tremendously arrogant, but such was the 25 year old I had become.

In the end, my fear of meeting a church like that from my childhood stopped me from going in to any of the churches I found. The idea evaporated from my mind. But the implications of this episode — an unconscious desire for more briefly emerging consciously — are not lost on me today.

My interpretation is that I have been a seeker my whole life, but one who has a need for explanation and argument. Removal of the handcuffs given to me by my childhood church allowed me to dive into modern science; a seam so rich it took decades of investigation. This change of direction led (inevitably?) to the pendulum swinging too far, but the seeker never disappeared. Something else was needed to make me see that I had swapped my handcuffs for a much bigger cage.

Who would have thought that a very cliched New Year’s health-kick could lead top of the Tower.