The Limits of Knowing

“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”

— The Buddha

Evarist Caritas Twinomujuni, Monday, 6th April 2026

I. The Honest Posture of Not-Knowing

There is a peculiar courage in admitting the boundaries of human knowledge. In a world that demands certainty; that asks us to plant flags in ideological territory and defend them to the death; the agnostic mind occupies an uncomfortable middle ground. It refuses both the confident assertions of the believer and the dismissive certainty of the atheist. Instead, it sits with a profound question: What can we actually know about the divine, and how should this uncertainty shape how we live?

This is not a posture of cowardice or indifference. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of our cosmic situation. We are beings locked into three-dimensional perception, attempting to comprehend forces that may exist in dimensions we cann’t perceive, operating on timescales that dwarf our brief existence. As limited creatures, we must ask ourselves: is it not intellectual hubris to claim comprehensive knowledge of the infinite?

Consider the language of religion itself. Christianity speaks of “belief” and “faith”—not “knowledge” and “certainty.” There is wisdom embedded in this vocabulary, an implicit acknowledgment that what we are dealing with transcends the verifiable. The agnostic simply takes this admission seriously. If even the scriptures frame divine truth as something requiring faith rather than knowledge, perhaps this is because such knowledge lies genuinely beyond our cognitive reach.

II. The God of the Gaps: What Miracles Actually Demonstrate

What is a miracle? Consider 2 Kings 2. Elijah and Elisha are walking together, talking, when a chariot of fire and horses of fire appears, separates the two men, and Elijah ascends in a whirlwind. Elisha watches, crying out "Avi! Avi! The chariot of Israel and its horsemen!" and sees him no more.

Now read that passage as an engineer. A column of fire descends, a man steps into it, and he rises. Elisha has no word for propulsion. He has no concept of thrust, of combustion, of lift generated by controlled explosion. So he reaches for what he knows: chariots, horses, fire. Five days ago, NASA's Artemis II rose on 8.8 million pounds of thrust, shed its own rocket body mid-flight like a snake casting off skin, and sent four humans around the far side of the Moon on a trajectory so precisely calculated that the spacecraft will sling around the lunar far side and ride gravity home without a single additional burn . A chariot of fire that sheds its horses and keeps climbing. Nobody knelt. Today, SpaceX lands a rocket booster on a drone ship in the Atlantic, riding a pillar of flame so precisely controlled that it sets down on a platform the size of a tennis court, and nobody kneels. A Tesla responds to a voice command and drives itself to its owner across a parking lot. A surgeon puts a blade through a man's chest, stops his heart, repairs a valve, restarts it, and the patient wakes up remembering nothing because a chemical deleted his consciousness for six hours. We do not call these miracles. We call them Tuesday.

But transport any one of these acts back 3,000 years. Show a shepherd anaesthesia: his friend lies down, a stranger passes something beneath his nose, and the friend falls into a death so convincing that no slap or shout revives him. Then the stranger cuts him open, rearranges what is inside, sews him shut, and he wakes whole. The shepherd will fall on his face. He will call the stranger a god. Not because anything supernatural has occurred, but because the gap between what he can explain and what he has witnessed is so vast that divinity is the only category left. This is the god of the gaps. Not a god who inhabits the unknown because he is the unknown, but a god who inhabits the unknown because we do not yet have the language to close it. Every generation's miracles become the next generation's curriculum.

This observation does not diminish the significance of what scripture calls miraculous. It merely asks us to consider what miracles truly demonstrate. A smartphone would have been indistinguishable from divine magic to our ancestors: a glowing tablet containing the world's knowledge, enabling communication across continents, capturing frozen moments of time. The healing of diseases that once meant certain death, the ability to fly, the power to illuminate the night, all of these were once the exclusive province of gods. They are now the province of engineers who did not even finish their degrees.

Power demonstrates capability. It does not, by itself, demonstrate moral authority. A civilisation advanced enough to raise the dead is not automatically a civilisation whose politics you should adopt. Elisha saw the chariot and wept. He did not ask who built it, how it worked, or whether the being who rode it had earned the right to dictate how he should live. He assumed that power of that magnitude could only be divine. We have been making the same assumption ever since.

III. Love, Choice, and the Architecture of the Fall

And it is precisely this gap between power and truth that troubles me when I examine the architecture of salvation. Both the Quran and Genesis describe a God who places his children in paradise, then sets a single prohibition at the centre of it:

“And We said, "O Adam, dwell, you and your wife, in Paradise and eat therefrom in ease and abundance from wherever you will. But do not approach this tree, lest you run into harm and transgression."”

— Surah Al-Baqarah 2:35

“And to Adam He said: "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life."”

— Genesis 3:17

The punishment cascades outward. It is not only Adam who suffers. Paul tells us that the entire creation was "subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it" (Romans 8:20), that the whole of nature has been "groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time." The woman's pain in labour, the man's toil in the field, the very decay of the natural world, all of it, the text says, flows from a single act of disobedience in a garden. The punishment was pronounced not by the serpent, not by Satan, but by God himself.

This framing troubles me. A loving parent does not stock the pantry with poison and trust in warnings. When you shop for groceries and discover that the milk you picked is expired, you dispose of it. You do not place it in the refrigerator alongside fresh milk and caution the children not to touch it, unless, of course, you have no trashcan. If God is omnipotent, He has a trash can. The question then becomes: why was the expired milk placed within reach at all?

But set aside the pantry for a moment and follow the logic one step further. If God is omniscient, He saw the hand reaching for the fruit before the hand existed. He knew, before He shaped Eve from bone, that she would yield. He did not discover her disobedience the way a parent discovers a broken vase. He authored the scene knowing its ending. So was the Fall ordained from the beginning? Was the curse written into the blueprint before the first breath was drawn?

And I do not mean to be sarcastic here, but consider what actually happened in the garden. Eve did not commit an act of calculated rebellion. She committed an act of weakness. She was persuaded, subdued, outmanoeuvred by a being the text itself identifies as the most cunning creature God had made. This was not strength choosing evil. This was frailty folding under pressure. And that frailty was not acquired. It was not the product of a lifetime of poor decisions. It was factory-installed. Baked into the design by the Designer, present before Eve had made a single choice in her existence. God built the vulnerability, placed the threat within arm's reach, watched the predictable unfold, and then cursed the species for it. If a software engineer ships a product with a known vulnerability, then watches a hacker exploit it, we do not blame the user. We blame the engineer. We say: you knew. You shipped it anyway.

The standard defence is that without the tree, there was no choice, and without choice, love is not love. Obedience means nothing if disobedience is impossible. God needed the tree so that Adam could choose Him, and choice requires the possibility of refusal.

I find this unconvincing, and not as a matter of abstract theology. We assume that the presence of sin and obedience represents the full spectrum of meaningful choice. But have we never chosen between two creative pursuits? Between two forms of goodness? I find it unconvincing because I make meaningful choices every day that have nothing to do with evil.

Consider career choices. The adrenaline, it’s exciting. I studied statistics; yet, became a software engineer. That transition was not a choice between good and sin. It was a choice between two legitimate disciplines, two ways of reading the world, each with real trade-offs. Statistics offered me the language of uncertainty, the ability to extract signal from noise, a career path that was legible and respected. Engineering offered me the ability to build, to ship things into the world, to turn ideas into tools people could touch. I could not do both fully. Choosing one meant underusing the other. People questioned the switch. I questioned it myself. It was a meaningful, consequential, identity-shaping decision, and evil had nothing to do with it.

Or consider something as ordinary as buying a car. You stand on the lot and the choice is not between a good car and a wicked one. It is between fuel efficiency and performance. Between diesel and petrol. Between the one your family fits in comfortably and the one you actually want to drive. Between the colour that is practical and the colour that makes you feel something when you walk towards it in the morning. Every option forecloses another. Every yes is a no to something else that was also good, potentially. Or consider choosing a life partner. Two people, both kind, both capable of love, but one shares your ambition and the other shares your calm. One makes you sharper; the other makes you softer. You cannot marry both. The choice will shape your children, your home, your old age, and there is no serpent anywhere in the equation. Just two goods, and a life that is too short to hold them simultaneously.

The suggestion that a world without sin would be a world without meaningful options reveals more about our fallen imagination than about the necessity of evil for freedom. We have flattened the entire landscape of human decision-making into a binary, obey or rebel, and then claimed that without the rebel option, the whole terrain is featureless. But the terrain is not featureless. It is rich with trade-offs between competing goods, competing loves, competing visions of what a life well-lived looks like. A paradise that offered Adam a choice between cultivating the eastern garden or the western one, between naming the animals or studying the stars, between composing music or shaping wood, would have been a paradise full of agency, consequence, identity, and meaning. No serpent required.

If the “God of the Bible” is a loving parent, and if the purpose of the tree was to create the conditions for genuine love, then He chose the most dangerous possible mechanism for love when infinitely safer ones were available. That is not the behaviour of a loving parent. That is the behaviour of a parent who has confused love with loyalty tests.

IV. The Problem of the Vessel

I spent 7 years in Catholic seminaries, immersed in theological formation. During those years, I did not doubt a single teaching. The version of me that existed then would have regarded my present self as blind, perhaps even lost. But what I observed during those years planted seeds of questioning that would only germinate later. What troubled me most was the disconnect between the message we were being prepared to carry and the methods by which we were being formed. A child who made a mistake; who stumbled in the way that children do; faced heavy punishment, sometimes expulsion, before anyone thought to offer counsel or understanding. The institution’s first instinct was deterrence through fear, not restoration through compassion even when it came to spiritual matters.

I found myself asking: How will I carry God’s message of empathy and love to the people I am meant to serve, when empathy and love were not what I was shown? The scriptures themselves warn that we will be known by our fruits, not our words—“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). If the vessels carrying the message cannot embody it in their treatment of vulnerable young people, what does this say about the transmission of the message itself?

This is not unique to Catholic formation. Speak to those who passed through similar institutions of other denominations, and you will hear remarkably consistent stories. The pattern suggests something systemic—that religious institutions, whatever their stated aims, tend to operate as mechanisms of control rather than vehicles of the liberation they proclaim. Walking among non-religious people, I find moral seriousness, compassion, integrity, and wisdom that equals—and sometimes exceeds—what I found among the faithful. The empirical evidence suggests that the inner moral compass operates independently of religious affiliation. Which brings us to a deeper question about design.

V. God’s Morality Resumé vs. Satan’s: The Arithmetic of Scripture

Here we arrive at perhaps the most disorienting question: Which God are we even discussing? The deity of the Old Testament who demands blood sacrifice and destroys cities, who chooses favourites among peoples and commands genocide. Is this the same being as the Father of Jesus, who speaks of loving enemies and turning cheeks?

The question is not rhetorical. It is arithmetic. When you actually sit with the Bible—not the curated Sunday-school version, but the unabridged text—and tally up who kills whom, a picture emerges that most believers have never confronted. Steve Wells, in his meticulous accounting , identified over 150 separate killing events attributed to God across the Bible. Using only the numbers the text itself provides, the total reaches approximately 2,821,364 deaths. With estimates for the events where no body count is given—the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn of Egypt—the figure climbs to roughly 25 million. The methods include drowning, burning, plague, animal attacks, being swallowed alive by the earth, being eaten by worms, walls collapsing on soldiers, and commanding genocide down to the infants.

Now consider Satan’s record—the being presented as the ultimate evil in the narrative, the adversary, the accuser, the father of lies. His confirmed kills in the entire canonical Bible amount to 10 people. All ten occur in a single episode: the Book of Job (Job 1:18–19), where God gives Satan explicit permission to destroy Job’s family as part of what amounts to a wager (God’s henchman?). In the entire scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, Satan never once kills anyone independently. His entire actual resumé—as opposed to his projected future in Revelation—consists of killing ten people on contract from God and tempting people to make choices. God’s kill count exceeds Satan’s by a factor of over 2,000:1.

Walk through the books yourself. God drowns the entire world population except eight souls (Genesis 6–8), turns Lot’s wife to salt for looking backward, kills Er for unspecified wickedness and Onan for spilling his sperm (Genesis 38:10). The ten plagues culminate in every firstborn Egyptian child slaughtered, followed by the drowning of Pharaoh’s army. Nadab and Abihu are consumed by divine fire for a procedural error in their offering (Leviticus 10:1–2). In Numbers, people are burned alive for complaining, struck by plague for requesting food, swallowed by the earth for dissent. God orders Saul to annihilate every Amalekite—men, women, infants, and livestock—then punishes Saul for not killing enough (1 Samuel 15:3). He slowly kills David’s infant son over seven days as punishment for the father’s adultery (2 Samuel 12:15–18). Two bears maul 42 boys for mocking a prophet’s bald head (2 Kings 2:23–24). Even in the New Testament, Ananias and Sapphira drop dead for lying about a real estate transaction (Acts 5), and Herod Agrippa is eaten alive by worms for accepting the crowd’s praise (Acts 12:23).

Some of these killings, defenders will argue, were acts of justice—punishment for genuine wickedness. I will grant that in many cases, the biblical narrative offers a rationale. But not always. The case of Job is the most glaring. Here was a man the text itself describes as “perfect and upright,” and God permitted his children to be killed, his wealth destroyed, and his body ravaged—not as punishment, but as a demonstration, a bet with the adversary. The case of Uzzah, struck dead for reaching out to steady the Ark of the Covenant as it was about to fall (2 Samuel 6:6–7)—killed, it would seem, for an instinctive act of care. These are not the actions of a deity whose justice we can comfortably call proportionate.

And then there is the self-testimony. Deuteronomy is remarkable for its candour:

“See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no God besides Me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; nor is there any who can deliver from My hand… I will make My arrows drunk with blood, and My sword shall devour flesh, with the blood of the slain and the captives, from the heads of the leaders of the enemy.”

— Deuteronomy 32:39–42

This is not a critic's paraphrase. It is “God”'s own voice, as recorded by His own authors, declaring His sword drunk with blood; and specifying, with surgical precision, that it would drink "from the heads of the leaders of the enemy."

Read that line today, in April 2026, and the ancient language does not merely echo: it scripts. On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli warplanes struck Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in an airstrike on his compound along with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. Within hours, the defence minister was dead, the IRGC commander was dead, the Defence Council secretary who days earlier had been negotiating a nuclear agreement was dead. Seven senior leaders confirmed killed in the first wave. The sword devoured flesh from the heads of the leaders of the enemy. The verse was not quoted. It was performed.

I take no side in this operation. The Iranian regime has sponsored terror, crushed its own people, and threatened its neighbours. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that every leader targeted deserved what came. The question is not whether the wicked should face consequences. The question is what the method of consequence reveals about the character of the one dispensing it. Because the strikes did not stop at the heads of the leaders. Universities were hit. Medical research centres. The state broadcaster's headquarters. A school. Bridges, petrochemical zones, parliament. Over 2,000 civilians killed in five weeks; people whose only offence was geography, the accident of being born inside the borders of a regime they did not choose and had themselves risen up against only weeks earlier.

Now consider omnipotence. If God can part seas, halt the sun in its course, and strike a single man dead for touching the Ark — if His precision is, by definition, infinite — then every act of collateral destruction is not a limitation but a choice. An omnipotent being who wants the uranium removed can remove the uranium. He does not need to flatten the city around it. He does not need the daughter dead beside the father. He does not need the school. The fact that Deuteronomy does not describe a God who regretfully resorts to violence as a last measure but a God whose sword is drunk; gorged, exhilarated, satiated; tells us something the apologist must sit with. This is not the language of a surgeon who wishes the operation were unnecessary. It is the language of a conqueror who enjoys the blade. And the modern operation mirrors not just the strategy but the affect: the towers of smoke over Tehran broadcast on cable news, the press conferences announcing body counts with the cadence of scorecards. The righteous, it turns out, do not respond to wickedness with the patience and precision their omnipotent God could model. They respond with Deuteronomy 32. The sword gets drunk. The arrows drink blood. And the collateral is called necessity by those who have the power to avoid it entirely.

The rhetoric of divinely mandated annihilation has not aged out of the human repertoire. It has merely changed uniforms and upgraded from bronze-age swords to bunker-busting ordnance. The God of Deuteronomy would recognise the operation.

VI. The God Behind the God: Cosmic Equilibrium

What if the gods described in our scriptures are themselves creations of something far more ultimate—beings of immense power who interacted with our ancestors but are not themselves the final ground of being? We cannot conceive of infinity; we struggle to imagine what it means for something to have no beginning. If God is the beginning, how did He come to be? Was it just Him, or was it Them? We are part of a structure so complex that it becomes difficult to believe any of us possesses even one percent of cosmic knowledge.

This leads me to a hypothesis that may disturb traditional theology: what if sin predates the God we know? What if evil is not a creation that could simply be disposed of, but a primordial reality that even the divine must contend with?

Consider how humanity deals with radioactive waste. We cannot destroy it. Radioactivity comes from unstable atomic nuclei. The only way to truly eliminate it is to change those nuclei into stable ones; which means altering atoms at the subatomic level. We can't do that cheaply or at scale with current technology. You can't burn, dissolve, or chemically react radioactivity away because it's a nuclear property, not a chemical one. It’s a genuinely hard civilizational challenge. The best we can manage is geological disposal: burying it deep underground, covering it up, managing it as “long-lived waste” that will remain dangerous for millennia. We do not choose this approach because we lack the will to eliminate radiation; we choose it because elimination lies beyond our capabilities.

Perhaps the relationship between God and sin is analogous. Perhaps the duality we know—God and Satan, good and evil—represents not a moral battle with a predetermined victor, but a cosmic equilibrium. Forces in balance, neither capable of fully eliminating the other, perhaps because each is somehow necessary for the structure of reality itself. This would explain why Satan remains. Not because God permits evil for pedagogical purposes, but because evil cannot simply be wished away, even by the divine.

Consider the audacity of Satan’s temptation of Jesus. Here was a being who supposedly knew Jesus was the Son of God, yet dared to tempt him anyway. Was this mere foolishness? Or did Satan perceive a genuine window of opportunity—a vulnerability that even divine incarnation could not entirely eliminate? The serpent in Eden, the adversary in Job, the tempter in the wilderness—these do not read like the actions of a defeated enemy playing out a predetermined script. They read like genuine contests whose outcomes were not foreordained.

Greek mythology spoke of gods who died: powerful beings, but not ultimate. The Kardashev scale imagines civilizations so advanced they harness the energy of entire galaxies. If such beings exist, their capabilities would appear godlike to us. What if the biblical narrative describes encounters with such beings; worthy of respect and attention, but not necessarily the final word on cosmic reality?

VII. The Universality of Myth: Every Culture Has Its Gods

The question of multiple gods is not merely speculative. It is anthropological. Every civilisation on earth, without exception, independently developed narratives of divine beings interacting with humans—creating them, testing them, punishing them, and occasionally dying among them. The parallels are too consistent to be coincidental and too geographically dispersed to be borrowed.

In Buganda, Central Uganda, Kintu, the first man, marries Nambi, daughter of the sky god Ggulu. Their union bridges the divine and mortal realms. But when Nambi disobeys her father’s warning and returns to retrieve forgotten millet seeds, her brother Walumbe; whose name means “Death”; follows her to earth, introducing mortality to humanity. A single act of disobedience. A prohibition violated. Death as consequence. The structure is identical to Genesis 3, yet the Baganda had no contact with ancient Israelites.

In the Ankole mythology of my own East African heritage, the creator god Ruhanga sets a test for his three sons: each must guard a pot of milk overnight. Kairu sleeps and spills all his milk. Kakama dozes and loses half. Kahima stays vigilant and spills nothing; then generously shares with his brothers. Based on their actions, Ruhanga assigns them their stations: ruler, herder, cultivator. A divine test that determines social order, strikingly parallel to how biblical narratives use covenants and blessings to assign status among Abraham’s descendants.

The Yoruba of West Africa speak of Olodumare, the supreme god who delegates creation to the Orishas. The Zulu tell of Unkulunkulu emerging from a reed to bring forth humanity. The Hindu tradition describes Brahma creating through cycles of birth, preservation, and destruction. The Norse give us Odin, who sacrifices an eye for wisdom at the Well of Mimir. Prometheus steals fire for humanity and is punished for it: a Titan’s version of the forbidden fruit. Flood myths appear independently in Mesopotamia, India, China, the Americas, and the Bible. Every continent produced its own Genesis.

Here is my argument: the Bible dominates global consciousness not because its stories are uniquely true, but because the civilisation that produced it was uniquely powerful. It was documented in a literate culture, preserved through empire, and distributed through conquest and colonisation. Had the tables turned; had Africa written first, conquered first, institutionalised its oral traditions into canonical texts; the stories of Kintu and Nambi, of Ruhanga’s test, of the Orishas might today be read in cathedrals. The Yoruba pouring of libations to ancestors would be called sacrament. The Maasai drinking of blood and milk would be communion. The Dogon invocation of the Nommo would be liturgy. And the swinging of incense in a Catholic procession, the circling of a black stone in Mecca, the chanting of words no congregant understands; these would be called what we currently call the African equivalents: primitive ritual, superstition, paganism. The stories would still share their parallels with the Bible. The only difference would be which set we call “scripture” and which we call “myth.”

VIII. Against Atheism Too: The Engineering That Cannot Be Accidental

I must be precise here, because the foregoing pages might tempt the reader to file me alongside the atheists. That would be a misunderstanding. I am not arguing that there is no God. I am arguing that I do not know which God—and that, certainty, in either direction, outruns the evidence.

The atheist looks at the same biblical data I have just catalogued and concludes: therefore, no God. I look at the same data and conclude: therefore, I do not trust the portrait. The difference matters. Because when I turn from scripture to the physical world, I find something the atheist struggles to explain away—an engineering so precise, so layered, so breathtakingly integrated that the word “accident” becomes absurd.

Consider the human body alone. The eye processes ten million colour variations and adjusts its aperture in real time to shifting light: a camera that redesigns itself moment by moment. The heart beats roughly 100,000 times a day, every day, for decades, without scheduled maintenance. DNA encodes three billion base pairs of information in a molecule so compact that all the DNA in your body, uncoiled, would stretch to Pluto and back. Yet, it folds into a space invisible to the naked eye. The immune system catalogues every pathogen it has ever encountered and manufactures bespoke antibodies within hours of a new threat; a pharmaceutical factory that invents its own drugs on demand. The brain forms roughly a quadrillion synaptic connections, enabling you to simultaneously regulate your temperature, interpret language, compose music, and feel grief.

Zoom out further. The fine-tuning of physical constants; the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron, the cosmological constant; sits on a razor’s edge. Shift any of these values by a fraction and you get a universe incapable of producing atoms, let alone stars, let alone the biochemistry required for a single cell. The physicist Fred Hoyle, himself no friend of religion, admitted that

“a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics... The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.”

— Fred Hoyle

I find it difficult to argue with him. When I encounter a system this elegant, this interdependent, this ruthlessly functional, I recognise engineering. I have built systems for a living. I know what design looks like, and I know what accident looks like. The universe looks like design.

So my agnosticism is not a disguised atheism. It is a dual refusal. I refuse the certainty of the believer who insists he knows the designer’s name, address, preferences, and voting record. And I refuse the certainty of the atheist who, confronted by a cathedral of molecular machinery, shrugs and says: chance. My honest position is simpler and more uncomfortable than either: something staggering is going on, and I do not have the clearance to read the full blueprint. What I can say is that the character of the creator—if there is one—is not reliably captured by any text I have read. The engineering speaks of intelligence. The scriptures, taken literally, often speak of something closer to tyranny. Perhaps different books describe different beings. Perhaps our human need for narrative coherence has collapsed multiple encounters into a single character called “God.” Perhaps the true architect is so far above the biblical drama that the entire Old Testament reads, from that vantage, like a provincial dispatch from a minor outpost.

I do not know. And I have made peace with not knowing. What I will not do is pretend to know—either that God is exactly as the Bible describes, or that no intelligence stands behind the astonishing machinery of existence.

IX. The Inner Kingdom: What Is Already Written Within

And yet—despite all this uncertainty about external divine realities—there remains an internal certainty that I cannot shake. There is a voice within, a moral compass, a source of wisdom that operates prior to and independent of any religious instruction.

I discovered this most clearly through my own children (read my letter to them on Identity and Inner Power ). Before I ever introduced them to any concept of a divine being, I spoke to them about good and bad behaviour; how to treat their friends, why hitting is wrong, what it means to share and to comfort someone who is sad. They grasped these concepts immediately. Not because I threatened them with divine punishment or promised them heavenly reward, but because something in them already recognised the truth of what I was saying. The moral law was not being inscribed from without; it was being awakened from within.

This experience has become, for me, evidence of something profound: the essential moral equipment is inbuilt. A good designer—whether we call that designer God, evolution, or cosmic intelligence—builds the critical systems into the product itself. A car designed with genuine care for its passengers includes collision detection that operates automatically. The driver does not need to consult a manual in the moment of crisis; the safety systems engage on their own.

When I was learning to build semi-autonomous systems, I found remarkable parallels to the human form. A competent engineer bakes essential functions within the system itself. External instructions are a backup, a supplement; not the primary guidance mechanism. You place context externally only when there are limitations preventing you from embedding it within. If God is without limitations, why would He rely on external texts, fallible institutions, and easily corruptible messengers as the primary delivery system for the most important information in existence?

The Gospel itself points to this when Jesus declares that the kingdom of heaven is within. The Tao Te Ching speaks of returning to the “uncarved block”—the original nature before society’s labels shaped us. Paul writes in Romans that the Gentiles, “which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law… which shew the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15). Even scripture acknowledges that the moral law precedes scripture.

Let me be clear: I do not say the Bible is useless. The texts within it are timeless, and if practised, would genuinely repair much of what is broken in human society. My concern is different. Religious institutions, in practice, seem to peddle a disarmament of the inner power that is already present. They create dependency on external validation, external ritual, external intermediaries. They teach that divine intervention must occur for you to manage life, that you cannot navigate moral reality without constant reference to authorised interpreters.

But does this not suggest that God made an incomplete design? A creation that cannot function on its own, that requires constant external input to operate correctly? Unlike knowledge, morality is never forgotten. A person who loses their memory still feels the wrongness of cruelty, still responds to kindness with warmth. Moral understanding is stored deeper than factual memory; woven into the very structure of consciousness itself. The kingdom of heaven is within; why do we keep looking elsewhere?

X. The Ritual and the Genuine

I once asked my mother, after she finished saying grace before a meal, whether those words had come from the spirit or from memory. She paused. I pressed gently: “When you said ‘thank you Lord for this food,’ was it genuine gratitude rising from within, or was it the catechism speaking, a sentence you have repeated so many thousands of times that it now runs on autopilot?” “Would you eat without the prayer? And if not, is it because you are grateful, or because you are afraid that something bad might happen if you skip it?”

This is the quiet crisis at the heart of institutionalised devotion. Prayer, which should be the most intimate act of the soul—a spontaneous reaching toward whatever is greater than us—has been industrialised into a schedule. Before meals. Before bed. Before journeys. The words become reflexes. As I usually call it, like automated love SMS/WhatsApp-messages to your partner. The gratitude becomes performance. And the underlying engine is not love but fear: fear that omitting the ritual will invite misfortune, that you will fall out of God’s favor, that God is keeping score of your liturgical attendance.

I think about all of this when I watch my own children. They are small and vulnerable, entirely dependent on me. Imagine if I required them to formally petition me each morning for breakfast, to kneel before receiving a glass of water, to recite a prepared statement of gratitude before I agreed to keep them safe at night. What kind of parent would that make me? What would I be trying to fulfil—other than introducing unnecessary, avoidable overheads into a relationship that should be governed by unconditional provision? A good parent provides because the child exists, not because the child performed the correct verbal sequence. And when you further think about it, there are no schools that teach a child to love their parent, it’s absurd that we have to be taught to love our God; who has given us more than our parents ever could.

The same displacement of substance by symbol runs through the sacraments themselves. In my late teenage years, a priest recounted during a sermon how he had refused to baptise an infant because the parents had chosen the name Mohammed. He instructed them to select a “Christian name” or take their child elsewhere, and urged all parents present to dedicate their children by choosing saint names rather than secular ones. I went home and looked up the name he had rejected. Mohammed derives from the Arabic hammada—the passive participle of praise. It means “praiseworthy.” A name whose literal meaning is an act of praise was turned away from a ceremony of dedication because it belonged to the wrong linguistic tradition. What mattered to the priest was not the meaning of the name but the language it came from; as though Arabic, because it is associated with Islam, is itself contaminated. This is the policing of symbols rather than the cultivation of substance.

The pattern is not limited to Catholicism. Islam requires prayer in Arabic across non-Arabic-speaking countries; millions reciting words they cannot parse, trusting that the sounds carry weight regardless of comprehension. The Catholic Church conducted its own liturgy in Latin for centuries before Vatican II, a language the congregation did not speak and was never meant to. In both cases, inaccessibility serves a function: the priest or imam holds the code, the people hold the silence, and the asymmetry is dressed up as reverence. People still ask me—since my children are not yet baptised and carry names that are neither saint names nor “Christian” names (even though they are)—whether a priest will agree to baptise them. I ask in return: where did the saints get their names? From other saints? Before there were any? Every saint name was once a first-of-its-kind. Who says with certainty that my children will not be the first saints to carry theirs?

XI. The Problem of Fate and Selective Interpretation

On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight AI171 crashed 32 seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. The sole survivor, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was seated in 11A—an emergency exit row. The side of the aircraft where he sat fell into the ground floor of the building it struck, and a gap opened near the broken door. He unbuckled himself and walked out. His brother, seated just rows away, did not survive. Months later, Ramesh told reporters: “God gave me life but took all my happiness.”

That sentence contains both faith and devastation, and they do not resolve. He did not say God saved him. He said God gave him life while taking everything that made it worth living. This is not a testimony of grace. It is a description of a transaction whose terms no one agreed to.

How does the believing world interpret an event like this? If one person survives and 241 die, the believer says God had a higher purpose for the survivor. Reverse the arithmetic—241 surviving, one righteous person dying—and the same believer says God called that soul home. If the survivor was devout, his faith saved him. If he was not, then God’s grace is mysterious. If the dead included saints, their reward was heaven. If they included sinners, their punishment was due. Run every permutation of outcome and belief through this framework and no result—none—can challenge the thesis. Every configuration confirms it. A thesis that cannot be falsified by any evidence is not a thesis. It is a reflex dressed as reasoning. It explains everything, which means it explains nothing.

XII. The Problem of Hell and the Arc of Salvation

By most religious accounts, life after death is a dichotomy: heaven for the righteous, hell for the sinful. Consider the earthly parallel. On earth, we lock criminals in institutions we call “correctional centres”; the name itself reveals the intent. The purpose is rehabilitation: to correct the offender and, where possible, return them to responsible citizenship. Even repeat offenders receive multiple chances, proportional to the severity of their crimes. Only those deemed impossible to rehabilitate receive life sentences, and in some jurisdictions, death. These measures serve two purposes: to correct, and to make an example. And critically, the example must be visible to the public; otherwise it ceases to be one.

Now consider hell. It fails on both counts. As correction, it is incoherent—there is no rehabilitation in eternity, no parole, no mechanism for the condemned to demonstrate reform. It is not correction; it is disposal. As deterrence, it is almost irrelevant—no one has been able to demonstrate the existence of the heaven-hell dichotomy except through accounts that fall squarely within what I have elsewhere called the Solitary Witness Paradox: unverifiable, unrepeatable, and unfalsifiable. A prison that no one can confirm exists does not discourage crime. An earthly justice system that sentenced every offender to permanent, irreversible torture—regardless of the crime’s severity—would be universally condemned as barbaric. Yet we attribute precisely this system to a God we call loving, and we do not flinch.

If you have children, I want you to sit with a question. What is the worst thing they could do to you, the most grievous betrayal a child could inflict on a parent, that would make you sentence them to burn for eternity? Not a year. Not a lifetime. Eternity. Take your time. I have asked this of many parents and the answer is always the same silence. We cannot imagine it, because no finite act, however monstrous, warrants infinite punishment. And we are merely human. We are told God loves more than we do.

And yet the Old Testament describes a God who does not merely punish but rages. He is jealous, wrathful, vengeful. He drowns a planet. He rains fire on cities. He sends plagues when His people complain about food. If anger is a weakness in humans, a failure of patience, a collapse of self-mastery, then what is it in God? We discipline our children for losing their temper, then worship a deity who loses His on a civilisational scale and call it righteousness.

Consider the covenant of the rainbow. After drowning every living thing on earth except eight souls and a boatload of animals, God makes a promise:

“I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth... and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

— Genesis 9:13, 16

Read that carefully. God does not say the rainbow is for us, to remind us of His mercy. He says He will look on it to remind Himself. The omniscient, omnipresent architect of the universe, the being who knows every sparrow that falls, sets Himself a visual reminder not to drown everyone again. This is the language of a person tying a string around their finger. Either God can forget, which contradicts omniscience, or the text was written by people projecting human frailty onto a being they did not fully understand. In either case, we are left with a question the text does not answer: if the Bible can misrepresent something as simple as whether God needs a reminder, what else has it misrepresented about His character?

There is a deeper failure here, and it extends beyond the afterlife into the arc of salvation itself. A God who needs a rainbow to remember His own promise is a God whose follow-through we are entitled to examine. So let us examine it.

The scriptures promised a Messiah who would save mankind. It has been two thousand years. Ask anyone over fifty whether the world's moral condition has improved or deteriorated, and you will hear a remarkably consistent answer: it has gotten worse, or at best, stayed the same. "These days," they say, "this never used to happen." One might argue that two thousand years is nothing on a cosmic timescale. But if God can intervene decisively in an individual's short lifetime, hardening Pharaoh's heart, striking Uzzah dead, rescuing Daniel from lions, why has the generational arc shown so little measurable improvement? If divine justice can operate with surgical precision within a single biography, its absence across a hundred generations is not patience. It is either indifference or constraint. And if it is constraint, then we must ask what exactly omnipotence means when even its grandest promise, the redemption of humanity, remains, after two millennia, conspicuously undelivered.

XIII. The Courage of Honest Inquiry

The practical implications of this philosophical position are neither cynicism nor licence. The agnostic who takes moral life seriously, who genuinely wishes to be good and do good, need not abandon ethics while questioning metaphysical certainty. Indeed, there may be a peculiar integrity in doing right without the promise of reward or the threat of punishment. What the divine; however we understand it; would want us to be may matter more than which particular tradition claims our allegiance.

This means treating every human being as equally worthy of dignity and concern; not because they share our label, but because they share our humanity. It means approaching those who believe differently with genuine curiosity rather than defensive certainty. It means sitting with our children and teaching them not tribal allegiance but human compassion, not external rules but internal discernment.

Let it be said clearly: the position taken here does not claim to refute Christianity or any other tradition. It acknowledges that it might be wrong, that the believer who reads this might possess truths that I have not yet grasped. Ignorance is not a permanent state; when we know better, we should change our views. The mind that adapts as it learns new information is preferable to the mind that calcifies around early conclusions. But nor will this position accept claims it cannot verify simply because they are ancient or popular or emotionally comforting. Like Thomas, it asks for evidence. And like the cryptographer, it understands that evidence comes in different grades; and that the grade we have been given is telling.

In cryptography, a public key lets you verify what is authentic. You can confirm that a message is genuine, that it has not been tampered with, that it was signed by someone who holds the corresponding private key. But the public key does not tell you who that someone is. It does not reveal their face, their motives, or the room in which they sit. You can trust the signature without knowing the signer.

I believe the universe carries such a signature. The fine-tuning of physical constants, the recursive elegance of DNA, the fact that consciousness exists at all and that it arrives pre-loaded with a moral orientation — these are signed messages. I can inspect them. I can verify that they are not random, not corrupted, not accidental. The signature checks out. But I do not possess the private key that would let me identify the author, and I will not pretend otherwise.

In 2016, an Australian computer scientist named Craig Wright declared publicly that he was Satoshi Nakamoto — the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Don’t judge me 😂, I believed him at first and 7 years ago, I even published a blog in his defense; I won’t disclose the website 😆. The crypto community's response was immediate and unanimous: sign a message with Satoshi's private key. Not a recycled signature from an old transaction. Not a private demonstration behind closed doors. Not circumstantial evidence or emotional testimony. Just sign. The one act that only Satoshi could perform. Wright never did. He produced what turned out to be an old signature copied from the blockchain; something anyone could have retrieved. He staged private signing sessions that later unravelled under scrutiny. He filed lawsuits, produced documents that courts found to be forged, and in 2024 the British High Court ruled definitively: Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. The protocol had a test, and he failed it.Regardless, I still take him for a smart guy.

But here is what matters more than Wright's failure: Satoshi's absence has never mattered. Bitcoin works. The protocol is open-source. Every node on the network validates transactions without knowing who designed the system. No one prays to Satoshi. No one needs to. The creator published the whitepaper, released the code, mined the early blocks, and disappeared; leaving behind a system so elegantly self-sustaining that his identity became irrelevant to its function. The gift was the protocol, not the signature.

Now consider the theological parallel. Every major religion claims to hold God's private key — to know not just that a signature exists but exactly who signed it, what He wants, and how He prefers to be addressed. Christianity says the signer is the triune God revealed in Christ. Islam says it is Allah as disclosed to Muhammad. Hinduism offers Brahman wearing a thousand masks. Each presents its credentials with total confidence. But the cryptographer's question haunts every claim: if you hold the private key, sign. Not with recycled miracles from ancient transactions. Not with private revelations behind closed doors that later witnesses recant. Not with institutional authority or emotional testimony. Sign in the open, with something only the one who holds the key could produce.

No tradition has done this. What they offer instead is an interpretation of the signature ; the same signature we can all see; dressed in the cultural garments of whoever first received it. That is not nothing. An interpretation can be beautiful, can be useful, can even be life-changing. But it is not the private key. And those who insist it is, who demand that the rest of us kneel before their reading of the signature as though it were the signer himself, carry the burden of proof they have never discharged. They are Craig Wright, not Satoshi.

And perhaps, like Bitcoin, the system was always designed to work without needing to know the creator's name. The moral law is open-source. Conscience runs on every node. The engineering of the universe validates itself in every breath, every cell division, every gravitational constant holding the stars in place. If God is Satoshi, if the architect published the protocol and stepped back, then the question is not whether we can identify Him but whether we can run the code He left behind. The protocol works. The kingdom of heaven is within. Perhaps the creator, like Satoshi, never intended to be worshipped. Perhaps He intended to be forked.

In the end, we are left with the mystery of existence, the gift of consciousness, and the unmistakable pull toward goodness that operates within us. Whether this inner guidance comes from a personal God, from the structure of the cosmos itself, from beings we cannot perceive, or from some source we have not yet imagined—we may not be able to determine in our current human form. What we can do is follow where that inner light leads, treating one another with the dignity that our shared humanity deserves, and remaining open to truths we have not yet discovered.

The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. And perhaps that has always been enough.

Written in the spirit of honest inquiry,

for those who wrestle with questions that have no easy answers.