Jordan B. Peterson: Sinner?: Why Acting as If God Exists Isn’t Good Enough.

By A. Believer

Despite its title, this book isn't about Dr. Peterson. It's about something far greater. It's about the gaping chasm that currently exists separating the Biblical and scientific world views. More precisely it's an attempt to bridge that gap.

Written as a series of personal emails to a close friend, a former pastor, the author attempts to "interpret" the Biblical narrative in the light of modern science. Walking a tightrope that balances a solid understanding of the Bible with a basic understanding of the three fundamental pillars of modern science, namely general relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory, the author attempts show how science, rather than contradicting the Bible actually provides a corrective lens by which the Bible can be more clearly understood.

At the core of this book lies the issue of authority. Authority can be thought of as that to which a person willingly aligns their thinking and behavior. The average person who sees the law as authoritative will conform their behavior to the law. A scientist sees science as authoritative. So, if scientific inquiry reveals that there are innate differences between males and females, then the scientist, like Dr. Peterson, accepts this and adjusts his thinking to match. For the believer, the process is the same only the Authority that he aligns with is Scripture so that, over time, the Christian conforms to (aligns to) the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). The challenge is that the average pers, the scientist and the Christian do not agree on what constitutes final or ultimate Authority.

If the Bible is the Word of God, however, ultimately science and the Bible must converge. And, if they converge there must be but one ultimate Authority. If they do not converge then either science or the Bible must be revealed to be false. For anyone in possession of a smart device, it should be clear that science stands on pretty solid ground. The burden of proof, therefore, rests with the believer. The primary challenge being to show that is is possible to read the Bible in a cohesive and coherent way in the light of modern science while also not gutting it of meaning. Starting with an old theological understanding that God wrote not one but two books, the book of Devine Revelation (the Bible - the domain of Theology), and the Book of Nature (created reality - the domain of science) the author sets out on a journey to reveal what emerges when you interpret the Bible in the light of modern science.

Anyone familiar with Dr. Peterson will know just how fiercely he confronts wrong thinking. Not only that but he has often expressed the desire to be corrected if his thinking is off in some fundamental way. From a scientific perspective, all it takes is one exception to a hypothesis to disprove it. Dr. Peterson has thrown out the hypothesis, the belief really, that no-one is worthy to say he believes in God. In loudly proclaiming, "Who dares say he believes in God?", Dr. Peterson has issued a challenge to the world to prove him wrong. The author takes up Dr. Peterson's challenge, offering himself up as just one exception that disproves this hypothesis and challenges Dr. Peterson to read this book and judge the matter for himself.

Dr. Peterson has issued his challenge to the world. Let him now show the world whether or not he is being genuine when he says that he wants to know if his thinking is wrong in any fundamental way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543977271

Book preview

Day 1

Friday, February 8, 2019 - 5:10 AM

Dear Dave,

I don’t know if I ever told you about my friend Denis. When my brother Pierre [older by 2 years] started school, my mother would drive him. Immediately next to the school lived my aunt Rachel, a good friend of my mother’s. My mother would often stop and visit with her for a while before coming home. Aunt Rachel had three boys, the youngest, Denis was my age. 

In today’s world, my mother would be considered an abusive parent because she often left me at home, alone, when she went to drop off my brother. But the year before I started school, when I was four, I started tagging along so that I could spend time with Denis while our mothers chatted. 

Denis was born funny or it seemed like that to me anyway because he was already hilarious as a four-year-old and remained funny into adulthood. I loved spending time with him. Being in his presence brought a sort of joy into my life, and not just because he was funny but because I didn’t feel I had to be guarded with him. He had a fun-loving and gentle spirit and we got along great, so great in fact that, over the course of that year, I went from enjoying his company to falling in love him. 

You may question whether or not a four-year-old can fall in love but I have no doubt about the experience. You see, when our time came to start kindergarten, my mother, because she wanted to be able to sleep in, my brother now seven and old enough to walk to school on his own, she decided to enroll me in the afternoon session. Denis’ mom enrolled him in the morning session. As I remember, my mother gave me the option but sold me on the afternoon session and, not realizing that it would mean that Denis and I wouldn’t be attending school together, I went along. Had I known, had I understood that this decision would effectively cut us off from each other, I would never have gone along with this arrangement. But what does a four year old know of such things.

Being only four, I either didn’t think of asking or didn’t understand the implications, I don’t remember which it was. What I do remember is the heartache that came along with that first year of school. I’ve experienced heartache a few times since then and it always feels the same. So I’m convinced that I had fallen in love with Denis and the separation that came with the onset of school was excruciating. What’s worse, because Denis’ house was right there on the other side of the school fence, whenever I was at school I was reminded of him. 

Before school had started, he and I often played in the laneway that ran between his house and the school property. A chain link fence was all that stood between the schoolyard and that laneway and once we started school, that fence went from separating the two of us from the older kids to separating us from each other. I can’t remember if I cried at the time but writing about it, even fifty years after the fact, brings tears to my eyes. 

I went from having a best friend to being alone at a time when I really could have used a friend. Then, over the course of that year, each of us began to be shaped by the interactions with the other children. We learned to be guarded since, as I’m sure you are aware, kids pick on each other and if you leave any weak spot exposed, they’ll turn it against you. By the time the year was over, we had both lost the ability to be vulnerable in front of each other and from that point on, even when we spent time together, we never managed to reconnect. 

Our lives went in separate directions and we never talked about this until, some thirty or so years later, when Denis’ father passed away, we finally had an opportunity. It was after the funeral and a number of people had gathered at his mother’s house. At one point we got to talking and the conversation turned to that year when, as four-year-old boys, we had discovered the joy of connecting, really connecting with another human being. He shared how hard the experience had been for him and I told him about how difficult it had been for me. We talked a bit more, catching up just briefly before life sent us back to our own separate paths.

Anyway, last year Denis passed away, from a heart attack. I had held hopes that we would someday have the opportunity to get together and really reconnect. I always thought there’d be time, at some point, to make this come true. His death brought those hopes to a bitter end and I felt the loss as the loss of a dear friend despite the fact that, in reality, our friendship, the time in which we walked side by side in our journey in this world, had lasted only a year and I was only four at the time. 

As I think about his death now, I’m reminded of Bunyan’s Christian walking along, on his way to the celestial city, and how, along his journey, he spends time walking alone and time walking alongside others. My journey has been similar. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to share my path with Denis for a year. The connection we formed over that brief period was never really broken despite the fact that we never really walked together again after that. 

Besides Lily [my wife] I can count, on one hand, the people who I consider myself to have really walked alongside of on my journey. There was Denis when I was four. Then there was Pauli, a good friend starting around grade two and lasting till he left town in grade six. I’ll never get the chance to reconnect with him either since he died in a boating accident in his early twenties. Then there was you. 

1:05 PM

I was thinking more about this idea of walking alongside and asking myself who I’ve felt the freest to be myself around and your uncle Kit came to mind. In all, if you added up the hours that I got to enjoy his company I would say that we only really spent a few days, maybe a week, walking together and yet he would probably be in my top five list, along with Denis, Pauli, you and John - I think I’ve told you about John. 

I remember the heated debates that Kit and I would get into about evolution. We stood at polar-opposite extremes, he and I, but no matter how hot the discussion got, there was always an underlying, unspoken, respect that we shared for each other. Not once did anything ever become personal and not once did I ever get the impression that he somehow looked down on either me or you for being Christians and for not believing in evolution. To this day, I have nothing but very fond memories of Kit and I can say without reservation that I loved him despite the limited time we got to spend together. 

I don’t know that Kit ever fully grasped my main point, probably because I didn’t do the best job of articulating it, but I never really meant to argue that evolution was wrong but rather that believing in evolution is a leap of faith in the very same way that believing in God is a leap of faith. That’s how I would have worded it back then. I would word it slightly differently today, focussing more directly on genesis than evolution in general. Even today, with all the scientific advances that we’ve seen, there remains a giant chasm around the emergence of life or genesis, and believing that life emerged through natural selection is going beyond the limits of what we know. So I’m still of the opinion that you can only cross that chasm by faith. 

Day 2

Saturday, February 9, 2019 - 8:45 AM 

Dear David,

In my adult life, actually, in my entire life, I’ve had very few close friends. Sure, I’ve interacted and even gotten close to a number of people and some of these have even had a dramatic impact on me, but in those cases, I wouldn’t use the word close to describe the relationship. Time seems to be the test of a friendship’s quality. More precisely, for me, a close friend is one that I carry with me rather than just letting them fade into the past. Denis and Kit are great examples of what I mean and you are an even better example. 

Our lives were closely entangled for only a few short years, years that I still look back on as some of the best in my life. Then, as with all things, change entered the picture and our lives went in different directions. Despite the distance, we managed to continue to get together fairly regularly at first but life continued to change and we saw less and less of each other so that, over the past fifteen years, you and I have not really had the opportunity to have a serious conversation. 

I’ve missed our talks, how we’d flow back and forth, sharing our struggles and our faith together. We inhabited the same world, walking on common ground back then. The foundation that we shared was the deep love we both had for the Doctrines of Grace. Technically you were my pastor and the Masters in Divinity that you held, in this world, would have made you my superior but from the very start we only saw each other as equals, equals in Christ, brothers. 

I have never stopped thinking of you as a brother and I suspect it goes both ways. I wonder though, if you knew exactly how far I’ve traveled from what you consider the straight and narrow path, whether you would recognize, whether you would still acknowledge me as a brother. Before he passed, for a couple of years actually, I’d been forming an intention to reconnect with Denis but he lived in Vancouver which made it challenging in terms of time and money. With all the grandchildren [six of them under the age of six] competing for the top spot on our priority list, with them scattered in different parts of the country, and with me thinking that there would always be time later to reconnect, I never got around to it.

Denis’ death has stirred a similar desire to reconnect with you. 

You may be wondering why I would say reconnect when you most likely have never felt that we stopped being connected. In heart, I would have to agree with you but in mind, there is a gap, a very large and perhaps even an unbridgeable gap that has emerged because I’ve been led down a very different path than you. Now, with the political climate being what it is, I’ve become afraid to set foot in the US and so I feel the separation all the more acutely. I’m sure, as a Canadian, I would be safe visiting you. The problem is I no longer feel safe and that alone makes me question whether I will ever set foot in the States again. This may sound a little paranoid, and I won’t dispute that but there is more to this than what lies on the surface. I won’t get into that right now, perhaps later. The point that I’m making is that from my perspective there is much that separates us. I’ve learned a lot, especially over the past decade but I haven’t had the opportunity to share my thinking with you and, as a result, while I think I still know fundamentally where your thinking resides, you can’t begin to imagine where mine resides and this, it seems, is the root cause of the disconnect that I feel exists between us. 

Since I have a desire to reconnect it’s up to me to do something about it. Even more, since I’m the one who knows what separates us, I’m the only one who can really do anything about it. The first step is to bring you up to speed on where my thinking has led me, over the past fifteen years. That’s the simple part. It could take some time to articulate correctly but, as daunting as it seems, it remains pretty straight forward. The hard part is the risk. There is a good chance that my thinking will seem alien to you and serve only to increase rather than decrease the distance between us. My head knows it’s an easy enough decision to make. It tells me that if you reject me then our relationship is essentially dead anyways. But my body, my heart, warns me in a very serious tone that the loss of your friendship, regardless of what my head has to say about it, would strike a serious blow, one that would be very painful and probably leave a deep scar. I didn’t understand these things when I was younger but experience has taught me that such decisions have consequences, emotional and even physical consequences. 

I’ve shared this with you, not to scare you, but so that you know that I’ve given serious consideration to the possible consequences of sharing my thinking with you. I’ve thought about it and reached the conclusion that I want to reconnect. So, I’m going to take that risk, taking full responsibility no regardless of where it leads. 

After Lunch

So where do I begin? 

I’ve just gone to my office and pulled from its shelves a small hardback copy of Johnathan Edwards’ Basic Writings. I open it up and read the handwritten inscription. It’s addressed to me and reads:

May this great man of God lead you closer to the God of The Word.

In Godly Friendship

David 

Sept 2, ‘95

I’m sorry but I’ve never been good at keeping track of when things happened so I can’t remember exactly whether this corresponds with your leaving Hometown or not but regardless it’s a good enough approximation of the date for me. I’ve gotten rid of the majority of my books but I’ve held onto this book through the years as a reminder of the time we shared walking side by side and I continue to cherish it as a token of our friendship. More than that though, it’s a reminder of something deeper. I feel a deep connection to Edwards and a deep connection to you and that book never fails to remind me of those invisible connections. So it seems appropriate that I should start at the point where we parted company and stopped walking physically alongside each other. 

Once you announced that you were going to leave the ministry and go back to the States, Lily and I decided that it was time for us to leave Parkwood Baptist Church. We had known for a while that we were staying there to support you and Lisa [Dave’s wife]. I’d played such a critical role in pulling you up to Hometown, a city that is rather hard, cold and isolated and I felt a deep sense of obligation and loyalty because of that. In my position on the pulpit committee [a committee charged with interviewing candidates for the position of Senior Pastor], I had weighed in heavily in favor of selecting you. I had come to Parkwood because James was the pastor there and he had been responsible for pointing me towards the giants of the Protestant faith such as Johnathan Edwards, and I wanted the next pastor to be someone who would continue in that direction. Toronto Baptist Seminary had a reputation for producing such men and I had seen enough evidence to convince me that you were such a person to recommend you. Then, once you had come up I would probably have continued there as long as you remained the pastor but, once you declared your intention to leave, Lily and I knew it was time for us to go as well. 

So, soon after you left, we started attending the Reformed Baptist Church across the border. We attended that church faithfully till some time in 2002 or 2003 I don’t quite remember. I liked this small group. They were straight arrows and had a depth of knowledge that kept me humble and learning. Unfortunately, they were just a bit too straight for me. 

From the very beginning, as a Christian, there existed, for me, this tension when it came to church membership. On the one hand, I could see the importance of church membership. On the other hand, I found it impossible to become a member of a church if I disagreed with even one of their key beliefs, as expressed in their statement of faith. I’d left the Pentecostal church to join Parkwood partially because I couldn’t agree with their stand on speaking in tongues and at the Reformed Baptist church I was blocked by their stance on the Sabbath or Lord’s Day. In practice, I came extremely close to living in accordance with their belief but my thinking was opposed to this doctrine so I couldn’t become a member. This was an irritation to them because I wouldn’t submit my thinking to their truth and so remained sort of a free agent in their midst. For my part, John Bunyan had so captured both my mind and heart with his understanding of Grace and especially the contrast between Law and Grace that it formed an invisible line, a line I was unwilling or perhaps unable to cross, a line that separated me from them. Eventually, Pastor Stephan’s frustration grew to the point where, from the pulpit and speaking to a congregation where the remarks applied only to us [me and my family], he made a comment about church membership and how the time comes to either fish or cut bait. 

I was secure in where I stood and so I didn’t take his comments personally. Lily, on the other hand, sure did. I recognized that he was simply being consistent with his own beliefs. Because I was completely secure in my position, the attempt to push me over the line, a line I already knew I would not cross, seemed to me simply a foolish move on his part. But what I felt as a mild and ineffective nudge was to Lily a slap in the face. And so, we cut bait. 

Looking back it seems as though I was born into this world lacking the ability to compromise. By compromise, I am not talking about negotiating or even about being swayed by sound argument but rather when I talk of compromise I’m talking about being able to subject my thinking to someone else’s thinking. Unless I first understand and agree with their thinking I cannot be budged. It’s not a matter of right and wrong. I’ve often been wrong. I’ve discovered that it’s not even entirely a matter of conscience. It’s much more practical than that. Whenever I’ve blindly followed someone else’s thinking I’ve gotten burned. The pattern that I saw at work was something like, I blindly follow, I get burned, I blame the person I was following for misleading me. After seeing this pattern a few times it leads to the question, Why was I following them? Eventually I learned that I would rather make my own decisions and be wrong and take responsibility for it than follow someone else’s lead and be wrong that way.

There is a world of difference between following someone’s lead, where you take the person’s directions as hints about what might be the right direction and blindly following someone. The moment you stop taking responsibility for your own direction, you set yourself up for hardship and disappointment. I learned this lesson the hard way but once I’d learned it, it stuck. Then, once it had stuck, it made it nearly impossible for me to subordinate my thinking to someone else’s thinking even if they were the expert on the matter. Before stepping in a direction, I first had to see it, to understand it for myself. Only then could I get on board. This aspect of my personality is what made it impossible for me to become a member of the Reform Baptist church and it plays a huge role in how my life continued to unfold. So I think it’s worth taking a side trip to illustrate why I took this lesson so seriously.

Day 3

Sunday, February 10, 2019

I was probably aware, to some degree, of how big a decision it was but, with hindsight, I really had no clue about how significantly this single decision would impact the rest of my life. That decision was which high school to attend. 

Hometown had a fairly large French community, large enough to have its own schools. Because of where I lived, I started out at St. Agnes which went from kindergarten to grade three. From there I went to St. Joseph’s which covered grades four through eight. From there I had two options, St. Patrick’s which was an all boy Catholic academic school or Lakeview, the public high school in our district. 

The decision should have been an easy one. Unlike my brother who was well suited to an academic education, I avoided reading like the plague. Lakeview had various shop classes intended to prepare students who would be entering the workforce straight out of high school as well as a French stream making it the natural choice for most of the other kids in grade eight class. 

Given the fact that I already felt at home on a construction site, having started working for my father during the summers when I was eight, the natural choice would have been Lakeview. I mean, by the time I was twelve I was proficient at setting up scaffolding and could handle a Skill saw and hammer pretty well, definitely better than I could read and write. Physical and not intellectual work was what I understood and felt most comfortable with. So, the right decision for me should have been Lakeview. 

It should have been a no-brainer. Not only was I not academically inclined, I was academically slow. It wasn’t that I lacked intelligence as much as I had found it hard to learn to read and had avoided it as much as possible. That generated a sort of vicious circle where I was continually falling behind relative to everyone else. So, by the time I was in grade eight and ready to move on to high school, I was already struggling to take notes as quickly as everyone else and found myself having to pretend I was done so as to not draw any attention to the fact that I was the slowest or at least the second slowest kid in the class. 

What should have, in theory, been a simple, a natural and even correct choice of high schools turned out not to be so straight forward in reality. There were other factors involved that turned this seemingly simple decision into something close to a nightmare. First, there was the fact that my parents wanted me to attend St. Patrick’s. And when I say they wanted me to, I really mean that they told me that’s where I was going. They claimed that it was because they wanted me to have the best possible education but I’ve always suspected that they wanted to keep me away from girls. So, anyways, if I wanted to go to Lakeview I was going to have to fight them on the issue. I was capable of fighting them and I think I could have won had I given it my best but, in the end, I never put up that fight and simply did what they thought was best for me. 

You can probably guess that there was more to it than that and you’d be right. As they say, context matters, and for me, that context lay in what happened in grades seven and eight.

First off, in grade seven, I injured my back. I can’t remember if we ever visited my dad together. If we did, you’ll remember how he had a large round patio with a permanent canopy which was sort of like a large steel umbrella with a fiberglass top. As a kid, I used to jump up and swing from the 2-inch steel tube frame. I would guess that the frame was about eight feet up. On this particular day, I happened to grab a fairly dusty part of the frame to swing from. Then, when I was in full swing, I lost my grip and fell the six or so feet to the ground, landing flat on my back on the cement pad below. 

The impact knocked the wind out of me, which was scary enough on its own, but it did much more than just knock the wind out of me. That fall injured my back so that, over the next two years, I experienced periods where I was in constant pain and could barely walk up a flight of steps. These periods could last for a couple of months at a time. I was pretty tall at that time but was still very much a kid in my thinking and so I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. Instead, I hid it from everyone. So I lived with this injury without seeking medical attention and, more importantly, without pain killers. 

The constant pain that didn’t seem to care whether I was standing, sitting or lying down, would have been bad enough on its own but the situation at school made it a living nightmare. There was another French grade school in a different part of town, St. Jane Frances that went from kindergarten to grade six. But there was only one French school that offered grades seven and eight. So in grade seven, there was an influx of students from this other school and among them was a small handful of kids who were a couple of years older than the rest of us, having had been held back a couple of times along the way. These kids were of the rougher sort, bullies really, always going around looking for someone to provoke or intimidate. They behaved like a small pack of dogs, circling around their prey, putting on a display of strength. To me they acted like chimps in a zoo except their moves included various kicks and punches that the zoo animals would have been unfamiliar with. In short, they were older, bigger, stronger and came at you in a pack, looking for any sign of weakness and always looking to provoke a fight. 

I had been a real hothead when I was really young but by the time grade seven rolled around I had learned that fighting wasn’t really for me. Fighting wouldn’t have been a good choice anyways since they always operated as a pack virtually ensuring that they would win and, from the way they behaved, there was reason to believe you could get seriously injured in the process. Even if I’d wanted to fight, the reality was that I couldn’t. It took all I had to simply walk around and on those occasions when their provocations included pushing me around and even knocking me to the ground, the pain this caused was reminder enough that I didn’t stand a chance. 

So, in grades seven and eight, when I should have been giving serious thought to which high school I was going to attend, my mind was preoccupied with survival much more than career choices. Rather than contemplating my options for the future I was figuring out how to time things so that I arrived at school just as the bell was ringing. I’d walk home for lunch and, again, timing things so that I got back just on time. That left only the mid-morning and mid-afternoon recesses to contend with. Winter was both the easiest and the hardest. It was the easiest because none of the older kids spent time in the backfield because the snow was so deep and so I had a place of refuge to escape to. It was the hardest because trudging through the snow was excruciatingly painful. The only consolation was that, out in that field, I could let my face express what I was feeling, I could groan in pain as I slowly plodded along and I could focus all my energy on making it from one moment to the next. Out in that field, I was in pain but I was otherwise safe.

In the end, the bullies and the injury became the deciding factors on which school to go to. The bullies were all going to Lakeview and this ended up trumping everything else. Yes I wanted to go to a school that offered shop classes, yes I wanted to go to a school with girls and yes it would have been the best choice for preparing me to enter the workforce immediately after high school but I’d already been in pain, on and off, for a couple of years now and the experience had taken a toll on me so that my thinking had shifted from what I wanted and thought would be best to where I would be safest. 

There was also one other factor, more subtle than the rest, that contributed to my final decision. This had to do with the limits of how far I could see as a child. I understood manual labor. I’d been doing that for the past three or four summers. But I didn’t understand this other world, the academic world. It was like a big black hole to me. My father had a grade six education and my mother had finished high school. They both stressed the value of education and my father was always joking about us becoming a Doctor, a Priest or a Lying Lawyer (his exact words) which all required higher education. So, my older brother and I were under the impression that my parents wanted us to go to university. What we didn’t know and didn’t discover until my brother, who was valedictorian of his graduating class, started applying to university, was that by education, my parents meant high school and no further. Only then did it become clear that they had no clue about the purpose of an academic high school. They didn’t realize that it was meant to prepare you for university and not the workforce. But I didn’t know this when I made my choice. I, like my brother, had simply assumed that they wanted us to go to university. I didn’t know and couldn’t see that by following their directions into the academic world I had chosen a dead end. 

That’s how, in grade eight, I ended up choosing to go to an all-boy, academic only, Catholic high school, a choice that would have a far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the rest of my life.

Now we know that all things work together for good...

- Romans 8:28

You know how, in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s walking along the way and finds himself on a rough stretch that has a fence running along one side and on the other side of the fence the ground is smooth and the going is easier so Christian hops the fence figuring it was close enough to the true path. The next thing that happens is the path he is walking on diverges from the way and Christian ends up being imprisoned and tortured in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair. Well, in grade school I thought that the two options that were set in front of me ran pretty much parallel because they both led to a high school diploma. In my mind, one high school diploma had approximately the same value as another high school diploma. I was wrong. 

Really, when I’m being 100% honest with myself, I can see that I understood that each high school would take me down a very different path in life. You see, when I considered Lakeview, I could see myself taking shops classes and I could picture, roughly anyway, the sort of job it would lead to. But when I considered St. Patrick’s, I saw nothing. It was like looking down a tunnel with no light at the other end; I had no idea where it would lead. It’s impossible to know where the other path would have led but I know that it would never have taken me on the journey that included getting to know you. I honestly believe I wouldn’t have become a Christian in my early twenties if not for this decision. This decision, to turn from the tunnel where I could see the light on the other side and head into the tunnel that was pitch black would turn out to be a dead end of sorts. But I would only see that once it was too late and the train had already derailed. 

That decision, more than any other, ensured that I would never feel settled in this World. It sent me down a path I could never have anticipated, much less planned, a path that we shared in common for a while. I had no clue when I made that decision that I was following my parent’s leading down a blind alley that would make life harder and not easier for me. I followed their lead and paid the price. It was a hard lesson, a very hard lesson. 

Day 4

Monday, February 11, 2019 - 5:15 AM

Dear Dave

I’ve been talking about following someone’s lead down a dead end. I know you understand just how hard it can be to have traveled some distance just to discover that the road you were traveling was a dead end. I remember that dark period you went through after leaving the ministry and going back home to Florida. I know you understand how it feels to question why you ever went down that path to start off with and I know you understand the cost that comes with traveling down a seeming dead end.

I think, in your case, the decision was entirely yours and you made it as an adult. In my case, I was trusting that my parents were right about which path was best for me. That’s what parents are supposed to do right? Their supposed guide you towards the path that’s best for you, the child. They placed a premium on education making St. Patrick’s the better choice. It was as simple as that in their thinking. 

I don’t know that you can imagine the impact it had when Pierre and I discovered that my parents’ idea of education went no further than high school. My brother was in his final year and was positioned to graduate at the top of his class. He had started applying to universities having assumed, all the way along, that this was the natural next step. Then, when Pierre went to apply for financial aid, my parents’ did a complete U-turn or rather, that’s when they declared that he had reached the end of the road. From their perspective, he now possessed a good education and it made no sense going any further. 

Pierre was beside himself. He had, as I had, always assumed that my parents wanted us to go to university. Their emphasis on the value of education and the push to go to St. Patrick’s were all the proof we needed. Neither of us ever actually asked them what their idea of a good education actually was. Unlike me, he had gone all in, dedicating himself to doing the best he could to ensure his chances at getting into the best university. In his case, he had set his sights on the University of Toronto, specifically their aerospace engineering program. He was shooting for the stars and my parents’ announcement was, to him, like the mission was being aborted at the last moment. He was furious.

Pierre didn’t take this sitting down. He had never really fought them on much but now he put everything he had into changing their mind. It took a bit but they eventually conceded and we packed him up and drove him down.

Pierre had won the battle but while he was away at school, the war raged on at home. My parents had conceded but they were divided on the issue, very divided. They fought about this almost constantly over the next year. They continued fighting about it when he went back his second year. The fact that he just wasn’t around anymore made him completely blind and deaf to the effect all of this was having on my parents.

I, on the other hand, lived in the middle of the storm that he’d created at home. The more they fought, the more I realized that if I did the same thing, it would tear them apart. So when I got into my final year and my mother approached me and told me they would pay for my university as they were doing with Pierre, it wasn’t joy but dread that came over me. While I had assumed, like my brother, that I’d be going to university after high school, I hadn’t gone all in as he had, so I wasn’t as attached to the idea as he had been. Not going to university wouldn’t crush any of my dreams as I didn’t have any to start with. 

At some point in my last two years of high school, I lost all desire to continue my education beyond high school. I didn’t actually make up my mind that I wasn’t going so much as I slowly lost heart. I actually went as far as picking out a course of study at Nearby State University. I even enrolled. But as the time came around, the thought of spending another four years studying something that I didn’t really care about became overwhelming. Even with the much, much lower cost of attending a local university, I knew I would continue to be exposed to my parents’ fighting only, now I would be part of the cause. I couldn’t do that. 

It all came to a head at some point and I decided I’d had enough and it was time for me to go out on my own. I had my high school diploma and I was working full time as a gas station attendant at a truck stop at the North end of town. I figured I was as prepared as I would ever be to jump out into the real world. I was encouraged by the thought that I would no longer be a burden on my parents. I was doing the right thing, I told myself. 

I had no idea what I was getting myself into, only what I was getting myself out of. I had traveled to the very end of the dead end and gotten off the train. It was now up to me to see where the footpath led. 

12:30 PM

As I remember I brought up this issue of which high school to go to in order to make a point. The side trip was to get you to the point where you had a better picture of how unprepared I was to step out into the real world right after high school. In my mind, this parallels a little bit with the difficulty that you had in finding a way to make a decent living when you moved back to Florida. It literally took you years to get back on track as it were and you had two degrees under your belt. I make this comparison so that you can believe me when I say that I had a pretty good idea of just how hard it was on you and Lisa to start over. I’m sure, in some ways you have never fully recovered. And it’s this last point that I want to connect with. From a career path/financial stability point of view, I have never recovered from the choice I made to go to St. Patrick’s rather than Lakeview. 

I followed my parents’ guidance into a dead end, not knowing at first that it would turn out to be a dead end, only discovering this when it was already too late. Perhaps I could have averted the actual catastrophe had I gone to university after high school but when I left home, I consolidated my losses and all but guaranteed that I would never catch up to my cohorts. Instead, I fated myself to a life of struggle that continues to this day.

I wish I could say that these two decisions, the wrong high school and not going to university, were the only costly decisions that I made but that is far from the truth. As a twelve-year-old deciding what high school to go to, I had no idea just how big a decision it would turn out to be and that it would continue to impact me throughout my entire life. I also didn’t understand how decisions could have consequences that didn’t come knocking at the door for years but when they did come knocking they didn’t bother knocking, they simply flooded in life like a tsunami.

Day 5

Tuesday, Feb 12, 2019 - 5:10 AM

Dear Dave,

I’m tired today. I’ve started over four or five times already and it looks like I won’t get to say much this morning. 

Some days are like this, days where I feel that the cumulative weight of the consequences of all of the choices I’ve made in my life is pressing down on me, determined to crush the life right out of me. I stand at the brink of collapse, as I have just about every day for some seven or so years now. I’ve spent my life. I’ve used it up and now it feels like I’ve exhausted all of my resources and lost everything betting on the wrong horse. 

It’s as if I set out to experience struggle and hardship. They talk about the path less traveled, well I feel like I’ve been walking the path not traveled by anyone before. It’s as though this path that I’ve traveled was somehow chosen for me by constraint as it were. The options that I’ve had before me have rarely, if ever, been about choosing the right from the wrong path as it’s been a matter of having very few options, none of which were very appealing, none of which I would have consciously wanted. And now I find myself on the edge of collapse as a result. 

I’m struggling to find a way forward. I know approximately where I want to go with this but I don’t know how to get there. At the same time, my mind keeps going back to Kit and the debates we would get into. Kit is no longer with us but he remains close and dear to our hearts and, in spirit, I consider him a brother. I often think of Kit and wonder what one of those debates might sound like if he were around today. Back then, I still had a lot of learning to do but I think you’d agree that my arguments were sound both theologically and scientifically though I realize that you weren’t really in a position to objectively assess the latter point. 

My journey has taken me far from where I was back then. 

But I keep getting drawn back to Kit. 

At the end of 2017, I made that website that you had problems getting into. You emailed me sounding concerned about it. It seemed to unsettle you somewhat. I wrote you an email trying to explain the intention behind the site, but never sent it. I apologize for that. In truth, I really couldn’t have articulated what it was that I was doing. The site was actually an attempt at articulating my current understanding, like an artist doing a very rough sketch. I consider that site to have been a little experiment, practice if you want. It provided me with a first pass at consolidating my ideas into something coherent and cohesive. It came out stillborn. 

It’s hard to explain but it’s as though I’ve been rethinking those fundamental debates with Kit. In a sense, I’ve been rethinking everything for ten to fifteen years. I didn’t actually set out to rethink things. From my perspective, I simply went about exploring ideas that caught my interest. There was no direction in this, no purpose other than to increase my understanding of reality. Then, at some point, circumstances seemed to push me into rethinking my understanding of the Bible. The site was also an experiment, a step in the learning/artistic process. This experiment revealed that I still didn’t have a good way of articulating my ideas. Since then, I’ve been focused on sharpening, on bringing into clearer focus, what it is that I see. It’s all been and continues to be a work in progress as the image goes from broad strokes to increasingly finer detail. I’m hoping that, by writing to you now, I’ll finally be able to focus it enough to enable you to catch a glimpse of it. 

Day by day I wrestle with how to express what I see. The problem is that that it is one thing to understand a thing and a completely different thing to be able to talk or write about it. I’ve got ideas in my head, ideas that I’ve gathered from hundreds of different sources, ideas that all seem to converge and yet I have found it impossible so far to gain enough clarity around how exactly they converge. I think, I hope, I’ve finally found a way. More precisely, I think you’ve given me a way to do just that. You and Kit. 

I find myself standing on a strange sort of middle ground between you and Kit. On one side there is Kit, unreservedly atheistic in his worldview and arguing for evolution. Back then, you, as a Christian, couldn’t really answer him because you didn’t have the background needed to do so. I didn’t articulate it very well back then but I was basically focusing on the week links in the chain of logic and facts that he was stringing together. What I don’t think Kit understood was that I did, in fact, understand where he was coming from. I could see his point of view but he couldn’t see mine. On the other side is you, a Christian and not just a Christian but a Calvinist. Even back then, I stood in the middle, though at the time, my position was decidedly on your side. Today, my position is much closer to the exact center of these two extremes.

I’ll never get to have one last debate with him, but as a tribute to his memory, I can imagine what it might be like. 

I would start by pointing out that an atheist that claims that science is the reason that he is an atheist is a contradiction. I’d then point out that there is a gap so large at genesis that it can only be crossed by faith because science has no bridge to cross that gap. I’d then show him how it’s not God that he’s denying but the caricature of God that he is denying. Then I’d show him how science helps clarify not disprove the Biblical message. If he heard me out, I think he would join me in the middle. I’m concerned though, that you might not. 

Day 6

Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - 5:30 AM

Dear Dave,

There was a time not too long ago when Christians believed that God wrote not one, but two books, the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Johnathan Edwards, for example, held this view and he held this view, as I’m sure you’re aware, because the book of Scripture, the Bible, teaches this. 

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead

- Romans 1:20

In fact, Johnathan Edwards may have been the last great Christian Theologian to take this seriously enough to try to synthesize these two great Books. 

When I look back over my life, I can break it up into three different phases. The first phase, the first 21 years of my life, was dominated by ignorance and superstition, a phase in which I had no way of knowing up from down, right from wrong and reality from fiction. The second phase, starting when I was around 22 and lasting till I was 40, the one in which our lives became forever entangled together was basically a period of learning and integrating the Book of Scripture. Then, in 2004, I put down the first Book and stepped away from it. During the next few years, I deliberately stopped entertaining the Scripture verses that were continually popping in my thinking as a reflex of having spent so much time in the Word. Gradually, over a period of about five years, the verses came less and less frequently and, by the end of this intermission, they stopped showing up altogether. At some point during this intermission, I began a new study, a study of the Book of Nature. 

When adults used to ask me what I wanted to be/do when I grew up I had no clue. Gazing towards the future was like staring forward in the countryside on a moonless night, all I saw was black. All the way along I’ve been moving forward never knowing where forward led to, often not even knowing in which direction forward lay. So it comes as sort of a surprise to me that I can now look back and see that there has been an overall arch to my life. With hindsight, I see that, in order to understand both Books, you pretty much need to study one at a time, taking care to understand each separately and distinctly almost like they were different languages and cultures that you need to fully submerse yourself in, in order to absorb the nuances. Mixing and comparing the two before you’ve gained some degree of mastery of each separately is to live in a mindset of perpetual confusion because, on the surface at least, they appear mutually exclusive. I’ve been led to look deeply into both Books in just such a way though I didn’t know it at the time. To be completely honest, when I put the first Book down and walked away, I did so with the intention of never picking it up again. I had no clue that I