Chapter 5: BREAKING AWAY FROM AGNOSTICISM & ATHEISM

Let us renew our understanding that humanity has debated atheism and theism since time immemorial. The debate continues to thrive among accomplished philosophers, thinkers, scientists, and academics from all sides of the spectrum.

answers we agree with, we must always be open to the possibility of be-ing wrong and be willing to sincerely judge any challenge to our beliefs based on the reasoning presented. We should strive to decide matters on their merit as best as we possibly can.

In my late teens, I briefly identified as an agnostic, with a strong inclination toward atheism. This was largely due to the perceived moral, rational, and scientific shortcomings of the prevalent religious teachings around me, combined with the authoritarian attitudes of the religious clergy I encountered. I refer to myself during that phase as an agnostic atheist, but it was a very brief period of my life.

Similarities of Religious Ideas Across Cultures Separated by Time and Geography – A Reason for Serious Investigation

Almost everyone in the world has heard the idea that a God created everything and that this God will hold everyone accountable after death, resulting in a permanent consequence. I heard it too, and initially dismissed it as a narrative humans invented to make sense of the world they didn’t understand and to exert control over society. As I discussed earlier, the potentially severe consequences of divine judgment should prompt everyone to continually assess whether there is any truth in these matters. Consequently, I always kept an eye out for information that might challenge my atheism. One peculiar reason, however, persuaded me to seriously investigate these ideas: almost every human culture in recorded history, with very few exceptions like the Amazonian Pirahã people, has held generally similar concepts about God and divine judg-ment. While the details of these concepts vary widely, they generally include similar themes: a creator God, contact and exchange of infor-mation with the divine or otherworldly entities, continuation of con-sciousness after bodily death, divine judgment following death, and a permanent positive or negative outcome based on that judgment.

At first glance, this might not seem noteworthy, but when you consider it deeply, it becomes quite perplexing. Imagine cultures and societies, separated by time and geography and having never exchanged information, all arriving at generally similar concepts about existence.

Religion – the belief in supernatural beings, including gods and ghosts, angels and demons, souls and spirits – can be found throughout history and in every culture. Every known human culture has creation myths, with the possible excep-tion of the Amazonian Pirahã people, who also lack number words, color words, and social hierarchy.¹

We will delve into the details of these similarities in a later chapter when I discuss the Quran’s explanation of other religions. For now, I want to emphasize what prompted me to consider more seriously the possibility of being created by some intelligence and being held ac-countable by that intelligence. Why did almost every human culture independently arrive at generally similar ideas about our origins and purpose—about an intelligent creator and some form of accountability by that creator? There are various speculations within expert circles, but for me, this became one of the primary reasons compelling me to investigate the possibility of God and divine accountability.

The question of an intelligent creator kept resurfacing, as it’s not just religion that persuades one to consider the idea of intelligence as the source of everything—indeed, the very nature of reality itself compels one to wonder if such a possibility could be true.

The first crack in my atheism appeared around 2004-2005 when the famous and influential atheist philosopher Antony Flew renounced his lifelong atheism at the age of 81. He proclaimed his belief in an intelligence behind everything and detailed his beliefs in his book “There is a God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.”² Flew rejected religions and the religious concept of God, instead believing in an intelligence that created everything but did not involve itself in the daily affairs of humans. Nonetheless, his conversion made me re-examine my own atheism.

After a serious reassessment, my brief romance with atheism be-gan to wane because the very foundations on which I had based my worldview started to crumble. I used to think I had everything sorted concerning my worldview. I believed that we are a mere speck in an enormous existence, implying that we are nothing more than an ac-cident of probability. The fundamental reality, the uncaused cause of everything, is some primordial mix of energy fields and laws. I believed that random quantum fluctuations caused everything. I considered my brain to encompass all of me, and the termination of my brain meant the end of me. All discussions of a conscious, intelligent entity creating everything and my consciousness continuing after bodily death were deemed by me as mere religious myths, based on subjective human experiences with no evidence or foundation in scientific reality.

However, all of that changed. My belief that science and rational-ity had completely justified atheism turned out to be false. Here are the main reasons why I could not remain intellectually satisfied with atheism.

Reasons for Doubting My Atheism

1 – Significance of Consciousness and Intelligence

I used to be perplexed by the universe’s capacity to allow for the exis-tence of consciousness and intelligence. At the same time, I believed that we humans tend to be narcissistic, attaching undue and unde-served importance to ourselves. This narcissism, I thought, was most pronounced in our religious beliefs—an expression of self-importance driven by the need for a special creator who created us for a distinct purpose. If other animals don’t question their existence, why do we? Is it merely because of our higher IQ , or is it also because we cannot bear to feel ordinary, unimportant, and purposeless, doomed to die soon and fade into oblivion? I believed that all notions of humankind’s significance, as preached by religion, had been shattered by discoveries demonstrating that we are not the center of the world, and our world is not the center of the universe. We are merely one species among millions, inhabiting a small planet that orbits a medium-sized star in a galaxy containing more than 200 billion stars in a medium-sized galaxy in an ocean of millions, possibly billions, of galaxies. Because we are such a minuscule part of an overwhelmingly large existence, we don’t matter in any objective manner and should not feel the need to invoke any special creator to explain our existence.

Size and Value

However, I soon realized that physical size and proportions are by no means adequate criteria for measuring the value of anything. In fact, rarity and scarcity often increase value rather than diminish it. Consider gold and diamonds, for example, or a small oasis of fresh water sur-rounded by hundreds of miles of barren desert.

Consciousness – The source of All Significance

More importantly, indeed most crucially, consciousness holds funda-mental significance because it is the source of all meaning and value, as it requires conscious minds to begin with in order to attach any kind of significance, meaning, or value to anything.

Intelligence: One of the Most Powerful Forces in the Universe

As far as intelligence is concerned, it is significant because it is one of the most powerful phenomena in the known universe. It can overcome supposed natural limits by manipulating the forces of nature at increas-ingly finer levels, allowing us to utilize these forces and processes to achieve our goals.

Importance of Lifeless Matter Becoming Sentient

Then, of course, there are intangible concepts that some may argue have an independent existence – love, beauty, truth, sacrifice, justice, oppression, pain, and suffering. When lifeless matter becomes alive and acquires the capacity to experience and inflict all the above, to some, that represents the most significant event in the history of an otherwise inanimate pile of matter that constitutes the universe.

To summarize, one pillar of my atheism was the belief that we humans are insignificant, and all stories attributing our significance to God are false. However, my perspective shifted when I realized the true nature of significance and how profoundly significant we are.

2 – An Atheist’s Notion of an Uncaused First Cause Is Not Any Simpler Than the God Hypothesis

Our universe exists due to the extraordinarily fine-tuned values of laws and forces that govern matter. Even minor changes to these values would result in a universe drastically different from our own. Consider gravity: an increase in its force, however slight, would cause everything to collapse inward, while a decrease, however slight, would prevent objects from clumping together. This would eliminate the possibility of physics, chemistry, biology, planets, stars, and galaxies emerging. Although there is ongoing debate among scientists, it is generally rec-ognized that there are around 26 such constants, with the possibility of many more. The believer points to the fine-tuning of the cosmos as evidence of an intelligent design behind it—meanwhile, the atheist offers counter-theories, such as the Multiverse theory. This theory sug-gests the existence of an unimaginably large number of universes, each with varying constants, popping in and out of existence; our universe just happens to have the right constants to support life and intelligence. However, there is a point of consensus between believers and atheists: the necessity of an uncaused cause for everything. This uncaused cause was also the subject of my reflections.

Because everything exists, both the atheist and the theist are com-pelled to accept the existence of an uncaused cause that gave rise to everything. This is a compulsion because we cannot have an infinite regression of causes, as that would imply that nothing could ever come into existence. Let me share an example: if you were to travel to Paris from any starting point and you eventually reach Paris, it implies that the distance traveled was finite. If the distance between Paris and your starting point were infinite, you would never reach Paris, as you would be traveling endlessly without arriving at your destination. This principle also applies to existence itself. The fact that our reality exists implies that there is a finite number of causes behind it. This logically suggests the existence of a fundamental, ultimate reality that exists by necessity, giving rise to both us and the reality that surrounds us. The only difference between those who believe in God and atheists is that the former assert this ultimate reality is a primordial mind or a consciousness capable of realizing whatever it intends, while the latter believe that the ultimate reality is some kind of primordial mix of mat-ter, energy, and laws that cause everything purely through mindless, undirected processes.

I believed in the atheistic solution because it seemed simpler, and thus more rationally appealing than the ever-so-complex entity known as God. However, as I pondered more about the non-theistic first uncaused cause, it appeared not so simple when compared to the God hypothesis. This “simple something”—the ultimate reality for atheists—needed to encompass all the ingredients and mechanisms required to eventually evolve into intelligent, sentient beings with emotions, ethics, morality, and aesthetics. It also had to support a reality that caters to these attributes, including color, music, beauty, justice, oppression, and everything both wonderful and grotesque. It didn’t seem like a very simple assumption that all the above just happened to be contained within that simple something purely by necessity. Matter, even in its most primordial form, has always possessed extraordinary potentialities that require an explanation.

The notion that an ultimate reality, inherently conscious and in-telligent, exists by necessity and unfolds through mere chance and coincidence is not, by any means, more plausible on the scale of relative simplicity compared to the idea that such a reality exists intentionally and intelligently, giving rise to everything through deliberate design. This realization put a significant check on my tilt towards atheism, making the hypothesis of a god or divine intelligence seem less complex than the atheistic alternative. It dispelled my false belief that the latter was more rational and scientifically plausible than the former. But there is more to this—as I delved deeper into our understanding of space and time, I realized that our notion of what is simple and what is complex is too limited. It cannot be used as a basis to consider one hypothesis more plausible than another in the debate between belief in God and atheism. Let me explain this point briefly in the following section.

3 – The Irrelevance of Our Understanding of What Is “Simple” and What Is “Complex”

Emerging theories such as String Theory, Causal Set Theory, and Loop Quantum Gravity propose that space and time are not fundamental. Additionally, proponents of the Big Bang theory argue that time and space themselves emerged from a singularity around 14 billion years ago. Now, purely speculatively speaking, imagine if indeed space and time are not fundamental. This scenario would open the door to the ex-istence of realities beyond space and time—a reality beyond the concepts of “Where” and “When.” We, as humans, are limited to experiencing and comprehending reality within the constraints of time and space. If there exists any reality without or outside space and time, we cannot comprehend it at any level. Our definitions of simplicity and complexity would not apply in that reality because all our definitions, perceptions, and experiences exist within the framework of time and space.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment—can you imagine anything existing without occupying any space? Or can you imagine anything existing that is not affected by time? Probably not! An overly simplistic parable or analogy of what I am trying to convey might be that in the zero-gravity environment of space, all our definitions and perceptions of weight and how heavy or light something is become irrelevant. Hence, if a reality exists beyond space and time, then our definitions of what is simple and what is complex would become totally irrelevant in such a realm. Rejecting the idea of God because it seems too complex as a first cause, based on our very limited experience within space and time, is a very narrow approach toward reality.

4 – Believing in a Creator Having Similarities With Us: A Justified Belief

Someone once said that if dolphins could wonder where they came from, they would probably imagine a creator who is essentially a great dolphin. I would contemplate such statements and reflect on the folly humankind has committed by seriously entertaining the possibility that a consciousness much like ours could be the creator of everything: a God who is conscious, thinks, intends, talks, feels happy, shows mercy, and gets angry. Attributing such human traits to the uncaused cause of everything is surely no different than the naivety of those dolphins.

However, if a group of dolphins became intelligent enough to con-template existential questions, while considering all sorts of possibili-ties regarding who or what created them, they would also be justified in positing the existence of a creator who is at least similar to them in a way that it also possesses intelligence. Moreover, if those dolphins became adept at understanding and manipulating their reality, much like us humans, I would not blame them for thinking that they might share some level of finite similarity with whatever infinite force caused everything, simply because their reality is so intelligible to them. For example, if we discovered an empty alien spaceship on Mars and learned how the spaceship operates, we could reasonably assume that while the owners of the ship could be very different from us in many ways, they are at least mentally similar to us in some ways, because we understand how their spaceship functions. So, if we comprehend reality so well, we can rightfully assume that if the uncaused cause of everything is a someone rather than a something, then that someone is at least similar to us in a way that we can understand many of its actions.

5 – The Idea of an Intelligent Consciousness as the First Cause of Everything – A Realistic Possibility

Consciousness might be a fundamental part of reality

The religious proposition that the first cause of everything is an entity with consciousness seemed entirely fallacious to me. I believed con-sciousness to be solely a function of the brain—an emergent property of electrochemical reactions. How could a brain function be a part of the first cause of everything? It appeared to be a ludicrous and fictitious religious idea with no grounding in the non-religious realm. However, I discovered theories within non-religious circles—taken very seriously by credible scientists—which suggest that consciousness might not merely be an emergent phenomenon of the brain. It could be something funda-mental to reality itself. Of course, I am not implying that this verifies a conscious entity like God created everything. I am simply stating that the non-religious acknowledgment of the possibility that consciousness could be more than just a brain function—and, in fact, a fundamental part of all reality—elevates the idea of a conscious first cause from being merely a religious proposition with no basis in non-religious reality to being a serious possibility rooted in non-religious discourse.

One such theory is Panpsychism, which proposes that conscious-ness is not an emergent property arising from the complex interaction of matter, but rather a fundamental field that permeates reality. This theory suggests that everything in existence possesses some level of con-sciousness: humans exhibit a high level of consciousness, dogs possess consciousness on a lower scale, insects on an even lower scale, and even subatomic particles hold an extremely minuscule level of experience and consciousness. A few decades ago, such a theory was considered prepos-terous. However, there is now growing comfort and acceptance among the scientific community for this idea. Respected and reputable publi-cations in the scientific world, such as “New Scientist” and “Scientific American,” are increasingly exploring and discussing this theory as a very serious scientific possibility.

I read some interesting articles on this matter in the scientific jour-nals “New Scientist” and “Scientific American.” When such credible platforms give room to a theory, it signifies that it is gaining serious attention from the scientific community. Michael Brooks writes:

The question of how matter gives rise to felt experience is one of the most vexing problems we know of. And sure enough, the first fleshed-out mathematical model of consciousness has generated huge debate about whether it can tell us anything sensible. But as mathematicians work to hone and extend their tools for peering deep inside ourselves, they are con-fronting some eye-popping conclusions.

Not least, what they are uncovering seems to suggest that if we are to achieve a precise description of consciousness, we may have to ditch our intuitions and accept that all kinds of inanimate matter could be conscious – maybe even the universe as a whole

This could be the beginning of a scientific revolution, says Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany.³

The idea that everything possesses some degree of consciousness might have religious or spiritual implications. However, this concept is also gaining popularity among materialist and naturalist circles. Assuming consciousness as a fundamental property of reality offers a very non-supernatural explanation for consciousness.

Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing su-pernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “ from the outside,” in terms of its behavior. But matter “ from the inside”—i.e., in terms of its intrinsic nature— is constituted of forms of consciousness.

What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.⁴

Panpsychism is also gaining acceptance due to the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi.

As Horgan writes:

Panpsychism strikes me as self-evidently foolish, but non-foolish people – notably Chalmers and neuroscientist Christof Koch – are taking it seriously. How can that be? What’s compelling their interest? Have I dismissed panpsy-chism too hastily? – These questions lured me to a two-day workshop on integrated information theory at New York University last month. Conceived by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (who trained under the late, great Gerald Edelman), IIT is an extremely ambitious theory of consciousness. It applies to all forms of matter, not just brains, and it implies that panpsychism might be true. Koch and others are taking panpsychism seriously because they take IIT seriously.⁵

I believed that the religious idea of a conscious being creating every-thing was conclusively negated by science. I thought science had proven beyond doubt that consciousness is merely a product of a material brain. However, when I encountered serious non-religious thinkers exploring the possibility that consciousness might be fundamental to reality rather than just a result of the brain, I began to see the idea of the first cause of everything having consciousness as no longer impossible. However, consciousness does not equate to intelligence. Do we have similar research and findings that suggest the consciousness, which might potentially be the uncaused cause of everything, also possesses intelligence? Yes, we do. We find hallmarks of intelligence at the very core of the processes that enable life, and signs of intelligence may well be embedded in the very fabric of reality itself.

DNA – Hallmarks of Intelligence

Darwinian evolution is often presented as the ultimate biological proof that God does not exist. However, a significant number of scientists challenge Darwinian evolution—the idea that all species evolved from a single cell—and propose alternative evolutionary mechanisms to ex-plain the origins of biological diversity. ‘The Third Way’ is an excellent resource for exploring these alternative theories.⁶ But my point is, even if Darwinian evolution were true, it wouldn’t necessarily negate the existence of a deity; it would merely challenge the concept of a God who does not use evolution through natural selection as a means to generate life’s diversity. The proposition that through random mutations and natural selection a single cell evolved into both you and me over a relatively short period, even by our standards of time, is a testament to the efficient nature of DNA. This capacity to produce such diverse life, ultimately culminating in intelligence and all that comes with it, stems from DNA—the cornerstone of all life processes. This has led me to question my atheism rather than reinforce it.

Bill Gates, in his 1996 book “The Road Ahead,” aptly stated, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”⁷ DNA fundamentally comprises instructions on how to create and manage a living organism, written in a four-letter lan-guage. These letters represent the nucleotide bases: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytosine (in RNA, Uracil replaces Thymine). These instructions are coded and stored within every cell of every living or-ganism and there is a complex mechanism within every cell that reads, deciphers, edits, replicates, and executes the coded instructions. This instructive information—information of the highest order, written in a language—is a hallmark of intelligence. We humans are the only other entities known to produce such information. We achieved the milestone of writing instructions using letters and alphabets relatively recently, around five thousand years ago, with the advent of writing as we became more civilized and sophisticated. The concept of coding information is even more modern, marking the rise of the information age and stand-ing as one of the greatest milestones of human intelligence.

It is quite extraordinary to find something we identify as a distinc-tive feature of intelligence as a fundamental process of the origin and management of life. However, it is not just at the basis of life that we find coded information; there is also a very strong possibility that coded information might be embedded in the very fabric of reality itself.

Coded Information Embedded in the Fabric of Reality Is a Sign of Intelligence

The notion that some intelligence is responsible for everything is no longer exclusive to religion. The theory that our universe might be a simulation created by an intelligent source is now being discussed among scientists as a serious possibility. Our reality’s ability to reveal facts, which lead scientists to consider such a hypothesis seriously, has reinforced my growing suspicion that some intelligence is a cause of everything.

The theoretical discoveries of the renowned physicist Dr. James Gates are the kind of findings that, for me, added plausibility and reasonableness to the idea of some intelligence as the source of every-thing. I remember watching a discussion entitled “Are We Living in a Simulation?” on YouTube. This discussion, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, was part of the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History. I was amazed at what Dr. Gates, one of the participants, stated:.

In response to the question, “Where has this pursuit taken you?” Dr. Gates responded:

Dr. Gates: Well, partly it’s taken me to these strange images that are behind your head right now (points to the screen). These are pictures of equations. For the last 15 years, I have been trying to answer the kinds of questions my colleagues have been raising. I have come to understand that there are these incredible pictures that contain all the information of a set of equations that are related to string theory. And it is even more bizarre than that because when you try to un-derstand these pictures, you find out that buried in them are computer codes just like the type that you find in a browser when you go search the web. So, I am left with the puzzle of trying to figure out whether I live in the matrix or not.

Neil: Wait! You are blowing my mind at this moment. So, are you saying that your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature leads you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable from the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers?

Dr. Gates: That is correct.

Neil: Wait – I have to be silent for a minute here. So, you are saying that as you dig deeper you find computer code written in the fabric of the cosmos.

Dr. Gates: Into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos – Yes.⁸

Dr. Gate’s theoretical discovery is supported by what we can observe about space itself. If Einstein was right, then there is no such thing as “Empty Space” anywhere. What we perceive as empty space around us is a medium with its own specific properties. This means the fabric of reality, the very space in which everything exists, or what Einstein called “Space-Time,” is saturated with information. We understand through gravitational lensing that space can bend and curve. Matter instructs space on how to curve, and space dictates how matter moves. This interaction explains why subatomic particles revolve around the nucleus, planets orbit the Sun, stars orbit within galaxies, and galaxies rotate around their axes, possibly moving in some uniform pattern within the universe.

Empty space is filled with encoded information. This is also the stance of modern string theorists, who propose the “Holographic Principle.” According to this principle, space is a hologram gener-ated from information encoded on a lower-dimensional plane. Leonard Susskind, the founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, supports this view:

The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience – the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people – is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface. This new law of physics, known as the Holographic Principle, asserts that everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of informa-tion restricted to the boundary.⁹

The possibility that the very fabric of reality is embedded with coded information, which is crucial for the cosmos to be the way it is and for life and consciousness to exist, is the kind of thing that prompted me to start leaning in favor of the “Intelligence” hypothesis as an ex-planation of our reality which recognizes instructive information in the form of a code as a distinct hallmark of intelligence.

The only known source of information in the form of coded instruc-tions is us, humans—an intelligence! Considering that a) intelligence is the only known source of coded digital information, b) this type of information is essential for making life possible, and c) there is a possibility that such information is embedded in the fabric of reality, it would be rational and reasonable to infer that there might actually be an intelligence responsible for this. This line of thinking was actually developed by the renowned Charles Darwin himself. Let me explain in the words of Dr. Stephen Meyer:

Darwin pioneered a method of historical scientific rea-soning where he realized that if you wanted to explain an event in the remote past, you should try to explain it through causes you see now in operation (in the present). He got this principle from the great geologist Charles Lyell. In eastern Washington where I live, there are little patches of white powdery stuff still on the ground from an event that happened in May 1980, and if you don’t know what caused that white powdery stuff, you would use a standard historical method of reasoning called the ‘method of multi-ple competing hypothesis’ – maybe it was a flood, maybe it was an earthquake or maybe it was a volcanic eruption – which of those explanations is best according to Darwin and Lyell’s principle? It’s the volcanic eruption, because we have seen volcanos produce white powdery stuff and flood, and earthquakes don’t do that. So, if you apply this principle of reasoning and look for a cause now in operation and ask yourself what is the cause now in operation that produces digital information – you come to one and only one type of cause, and that’s a mind.¹⁰

6 – Non-religious Reasons to Believe in a Soul and an Afterlife

The findings from scientific circles lend credibility to the hypothesis that a conscious, intelligent force could be the uncaused cause of everything; this sounded like God to me. If God is a plausible reality, might divine accountability also be plausible? For divine accountability to occur, some aspect of this entity known as “Me” must possess a degree of existence independent of my brain and survive beyond bodily death. Is there any reason, from non-religious discourse or our observable and measurable reality, to believe in the plausibility of my existence, independent of my brain and enduring after brain death? Indeed, there is.

Possibility of Consciousness Having an Independent Existence From the Brain – The Binding Problem of Consciousness – No Place in the Brain That Is “For Me”

Consciousness is something we humans know most intimately because we are all conscious—yet it remains completely alien to us because we have no understanding of what makes us conscious. Different sensory inputs are processed in various areas of the brain—for instance, infor-mation about the color of an object is stored in one part, while informa-tion about its shape is stored in another. Yet, there is no specific location in the brain where this information combines into a unified perception and experience that is “Me!” In neuroscience circles, this is referred to as the “binding problem” of consciousness. But it’s more than just not having found the location in the brain that produces this constant, continuous, uniform experience that is “Me”—it’s deeper than that. We have evidence suggesting that this “Me,” who thinks and decides, might have a separate, independent existence from my material brain.

Penfield Experiment – This “Me” Who Intends to Do Something Might Be Independent of My Brain

Wilder Penfield, an American-Canadian neurosurgeon, applied elec-trodes to the motor cortex and was able to make patients involuntarily do things such as raise their hands or recall a memory. The cerebral cor-tex is the part of the brain considered responsible for many higher-level processes including learning, thought, language, emotion, intelligence, personality, and decision-making. This is known because brain activity in this region can be observed when an individual engages in the afore-mentioned activities. In his experiments, although Penfield could make his subjects perform actions involuntarily by applying electrical stimuli, he could not make his subjects “want” to do anything. A causal force was missing from the material brain. In his words:

There is no place in the cerebral cortex where an electrical stimulation will cause a patient to decide.¹¹

Penfield concluded that this meant that the will (he called it the “mind”) was not in the brain, or at least not in any part of the brain that he could stimulate and that the will was not a physical thing. The will was free, in the sense that it could not be evoked by material means.¹²

This implies that even though we can prompt the brain to influ-ence the body through artificial stimuli, we cannot compel a person to make a decision. This “Me” who makes decisions does not appear to be influenced by stimuli to the brain.

I Can Change My Brain With My Intentional Thoughts

Jeffery M. Schwartz, an American psychiatrist and leading researcher in the field of neuroplasticity, demonstrated that conscious thought can literally change the physical brain without any external intervention Schwartz’s OCD patients experienced relief from their symptoms as they successfully reorganized and changed their brain patterns by in-tentionally modifying their thoughts and behaviors. Furthermore, when artificial stimuli were applied to the same areas of the brain that showed improvement in symptoms, it did not yield effective results.

In simple terms, I can intentionally think and modify specific re-gions of my brain. However, when the same region is artificially stim-ulated without my conscious input, it does not induce the same change.

Swartz describes this process in the following way: When stimuli identical to those that induce plastic changes in an attending brain are instead delivered to a non-attending brain, there is no induction of cortical plasticity. Attention, in other words, must be paid.¹³

This implies that it’s not solely about the signal or stimuli. The in-volvement of this “I” that I am, or this “Me” who thinks, intends, and acts, is necessary to alter the physical brain. This “Me,” which appears to be separate from the brain, can actively influence my material self in a very pronounced way.

It is becoming a serious idea within science that the material brain might not fully explain the mind. This raises the question: could what we are missing in our understanding of the brain also be missing from our understanding of existence as a whole? It appears that the brain and the mind are not entirely separate, yet they are not identical. This opens up the possibility that consciousness might have some kind of independent existence. If consciousness is not solely produced by the material brain, could it be explained by something more fundamental? Or is consciousness itself one of the fundamentals of reality?

This “Me” That I Am Might Continue After Brain Death

I would often make tea for myself around 5 a.m. and marvel at how incredible it is that this “I”—which cannot be pinpointed in my brain—can change my material brain merely through consistent, intentional thoughts. Mind over matter indeed appears to be true. However, this separation of mind and brain could just be some trickery of the quan-tum world and does not convincingly imply that this “I,” seemingly separate from the brain and possibly continuing after bodily death, had to be believed on faith alone with no grounding in observable reality. It seemed unlikely that any serious voice from the scientific commu-nity would come forth and bring forth authentic research to directly support the continuation of my consciousness after bodily death—until I encountered the research of Dr. Sam Parnia. Previously, I discussed that it is a very serious scientific possibility that some part of me might possess an existence independent of my material brain. Dr. Parnia’s research advances the matter further by suggesting that this “Me” can survive intact even when the brain ceases to function.

Dr. Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, is the director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He led a team of doctors and scientists in a project studying individuals who had suffered cardiac arrests and, in medical terms, passed the threshold of death before being resuscitated back to life. This study, which con-cluded in 2012, involved 33 investigators across 15 medical centers in the UK, Austria, and the USA. The results of the study were published in October 2014.

The researchers on the study represent many medical disci-plines, including the neurosciences, critical care, psychiatry, psychology, social sciences, and humanities, and represent many of the world’s most respected academic institutions in-cluding Harvard University, Baylor University, University of California Riverside, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Universities of Southampton and London

Among their conclusions:

Due to advances in resuscitation and critical care medicine, many people have survived encounters with death or being near-death. These people — who are estimated to comprise hundreds of millions of people around the world based on previous population studies — have consistently described recalled experiences surrounding death, which involve a unique set of mental recollections with universal themes. The recalled experiences surrounding death are not consistent with hallucinations, illusions, or psychedelic drug-induced experiences, according to several previously published studies. Instead, they follow a specific narrative arc involving a per-ception of – (a) separation from the body with a heightened, vast sense of consciousness and recognition of death – (b) travel to a destination – (c) a meaningful and purposeful review of life, involving a critical analysis of all actions, intentions, and thoughts towards others – (d) a perception of being in a place that feels like “home” – (e) a return back to life.

The experience of death culminates into previously uniden-tified, separate subthemes and is associated with positive long-term psychological transformation and growth.

Frightening or distressing experiences in relation to death often neither share the same themes, nor the same narrative, transcendent qualities, ineffability, and positive transfor-mative effects.¹⁴

One major conclusion of this extensive study is:

Cardiac arrest survivors commonly experience a broad range of cognitive themes, with 2% exhibiting full awareness. This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness.¹⁵

To make it easier, I will quote Dr. Parnia’s words from his interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the famous video series “Closer to Truth,” titled “Is Life After Death Possible – Sam Parnia”:

Robert: Sam, your work in studying the nature of conscious-ness during cardiac arrests – what some people call Near Death Experiences – some would say casts doubt on scientific assumption that life after death is impossible. Do you think that is right?

Sam: Going through science of it, we don’t have all the answers today, but I think we have made enormous strides to answer the question of what happens when we die. We have to remember that death is a process. And just because a person has died and they have been given a time of death and essentially called a corpse, the cells inside the person’s body have not become so damaged that we can’t bring them back. As science has progressed, we are now able to manip-ulate those processes for hours after death and bring back a whole person and study their consciousness during that time – which was impossible until very recently. And so, the incredible discovery through this one we can bring back people and send them home, we can really have the miracle of science take someone who is dead and make them alive again – which is amazing! But the other amazing part of it is that we can study what people experience when they have gone beyond death and the evidence so far suggests that – that entity we call the human mind, the consciousness, what the Greeks called ‘The Psyche’ that was later translated into ‘The soul’, the Me, Sam – does not become annihilated just after a person has died even if we write him a death note and certify him as being dead. That entity continues and it continues even when the brain does not seem to be functioning raising a question that consciousness maybe a separate entity from the brain, it’s not magical, it’s just not discovered yet, but it doesn’t die. Now I can’t tell you what happens 3 hours, 4 hours, 10 hours after a person has died – I can’t tell you whether consciousness gradually fades away and disappears into thin air as some people might believe or does it continue forever longer periods of time – certainly the bodily func-tions, bodily cells, will die with time there is no doubt about that – what happens to our real self, consciousness, is as I explained it continues for a period of time! Now you have to make your own conclusions – I don’t have evidence beyond that – which is one of two ways: One is that you may say that Ok, I am going to accept that consciousness may continue for a few hours after death in some format and gradually wither away OR you may also argue that if consciousness was able to continue if the brain wasn’t functioning, why would it suddenly disappear away few hours later because don’t forget even 10 minutes after you have died or even 30 seconds after you have died – your brain does not function anymore! Even when we do CPR and try to resuscitate someone there is not enough blood that gets into the brain to enable the brain to function even during resuscitation – the brain remains flatlined. And so – certainly there is “Life After Death” for a period of time but does it continue forever I don’t know but certainly for a period of time afterwards consciousness remains.¹⁶

The observation and conclusion by scientists and medical experts that my consciousness—the essence that defines my identity and ex-periences—can persist in some form despite clinical bodily death, with no observable brain activity, shattered my previous notion that life after death was merely a religious fiction devoid of scientific or medical backing

For me, the concept of an intelligent consciousness as the first cause of everything, the idea that I have an existence independent of my brain, and the notion that my consciousness can continue after my brain has flatlined are not merely religious propositions to be accepted solely on faith without any foundation in non-religious academic and scientific discourse. There are very credible reasons from non-religious discourse that make these ideas a very serious possibility. This realization led me to reconsider God and divine accountability after bodily death as serious possibilities that needed further investigation.

7 – The Fallacy of the Statement: “We Exist Because Given Very Long Periods of Time, Anything and Everything Can Happen”

If one wishes to advocate for atheism, it is comforting to believe that seemingly miraculous events can occur purely by chance, given the factor of unimaginably long periods of time.

Firstly, it is incorrect to say that the universe and we had to come into existence because anything and everything will happen given ex-tremely long periods of time. The accurate statement is that given enough time, anything and everything can happen, but only within the realm of possibilities. Something must have the potential to transform into something else for it to undergo changes over time. For instance, we understand that water can become ice or steam. However, no matter how much time is allotted, water on its own cannot become jet fuel. It would be impractical to assert that, given enough time, water could transform into jet fuel. For water to turn into jet fuel, it must contain specific ingredients — in essence, water must have the potential to become jet fuel in order to transform into it over time.

So, the universe and humanity did not come into existence simply because anything and everything can happen, given enough time. We exist because whatever fundamental reality exists—the base reality that must exist by necessity, from which all other realities emerge—had to have the ingredients necessary to eventually unfold into us over long periods of time. If it lacked the ingredients needed to produce us and our universe, then no amount of time would have resulted in our existence. As I drifted away from atheism, I could no longer find comfort in the belief that my existence was simply the result of a series of mind-less, undirected events over an extensive period. The notion that, given enough time, anything and everything can happen seemed implausible. Instead, I was compelled to focus on the core question: Did the fun-damental, underlying reality of the universe contain all the necessary elements to produce me and everything around me by sheer coincidence, or is this fundamental reality an intelligent consciousness that inten-tionally crafted everything as it is? As previously mentioned, I found the latter idea more compelling.

Secondly, I came to a rather embarrassing realization about time, one that is embarrassing because it is so obvious, yet many of us choose not to think of it this way. Today, we know from everyday science that time is not a uniform entity. Different objects at different speeds expe-rience time very differently. We know that as you approach the speed of light, time significantly slows down. Nowadays, it is understood that a photon does not experience time at all. For a photon, billions and tril-lions of years mean nothing. If I were to travel near the speed of light, what feels like just one generation in my time could equate to billions of years on Earth. When we refer to “Long or Short Time” and “Billions of Years,” we are imposing our very specific and limited perception of time on the entire universe to make sense of it. Our perception of time depends on Earth’s rotation on its axis, forming our 24-hour day, and it takes 365 of these rotations for Earth to revolve around our star, marking what we call a year.

For a thought experiment, imagine if it took 1 billion years for our planet to orbit the sun, and our planet’s rotation and our perception of time adjusted accordingly—then we might currently be saying that the universe came into existence only 13.8 years ago, which would not seem very long! Similarly, if we were beings the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we might think of the universe as having come into existence just a few months ago, and if we were beings composed of photons, the very question of “When” would become irrelevant.

Realizing that time is such a fluid entity, it seemed like a childish mistake to impose my own specific and limited perception of time on the entire universe to justify its existence as per my worldview.

Again, a reminder—science has not proven the existence or non-ex-istence of God. There are counterarguments and explanations for all of the research and findings I mentioned above. The point of mentioning them was to establish the fact that there are scientific theories, research, and findings that provide a realistic basis for the idea of a conscious in-telligence as the uncaused cause of everything. This idea is by no means any less plausible than the alternatives provided by the “No God” camp.