Aeternus Costin, a self-taught philosopher, finds enlightenment at the crossroads of science, technology, and deep metaphysical inquiries. Beginning with an epiphany during a casual summer day in 2019, Aeternus’ intellectual voyage spans across centuries of philosophical thought, from Plato to Einstein. This book stands as both a challenge to conventional religious dogma and a fervent call to reconcile logic with spiritual beliefs. By tenaciously arguing for the existence of God using logic and science, it aims to free humanity from antiquated religious ideologies while bridging the chasm between rationality and transcendence. Dive into a transformative exploration that not only seeks universal truths but also hopes to inspire readers to reflect upon reality and their role within it. Join in on a pursuit of knowledge, reason, and an unwavering quest for truth.
Aeternus Costin, a self-taught philosopher, finds enlightenment at the crossroads of science, technology, and deep metaphysical inquiries. Beginning with an epiphany during a casual summer day in 2019, Aeternus’ intellectual voyage spans across centuries of philosophical thought, from Plato to Einstein. This book stands as both a challenge to conventional religious dogma and a fervent call to reconcile logic with spiritual beliefs. By tenaciously arguing for the existence of God using logic and science, it aims to free humanity from antiquated religious ideologies while bridging the chasm between rationality and transcendence. Dive into a transformative exploration that not only seeks universal truths but also hopes to inspire readers to reflect upon reality and their role within it. Join in on a pursuit of knowledge, reason, and an unwavering quest for truth.
I grew up and have lived my entire life in the southeastern United States, a region American journalist H. L. Mencken referred to as the Bible Belt in the 1920s.1 The states that make up the region have less religious diversity than the rest of the nation, with Protestant Christianity being the majority faith by far. Only about half as many people in these states identify as nonreligious compared to the national average. And people in these states attend church more often than those who live in most other states.
My own family were Southern Baptists, although I occasionally attended Methodist churches with friends. My grandmother, who lived in the house next door, attended the First Baptist Church, which you could see one block from our home. She also taught Sunday school, played piano, and sang in church. My mother’s oldest sister was just as devout as my grandmother was. I remember my aunt singing the hymn, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy” to me when I was a child. My father’s parents traveled to churches as part of a gospel singing group, which is how my mother and father first met. Growing up, I wasn’t aware of any‑ one not believing in God.
At some point in junior high school, when I was between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I began to worry about the fate of the souls who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. I was a boy scout, and my scout master was also a Christian minister. I trusted him enough to share my doubts and concerns. I remember asking him what he believed happened to the souls of the Native Americans who had died before Christians colonized the country.
My trust in him was not misplaced. He agreed with me that it did not seem right for their souls to be damned and burn in hell for all eternity simply because they were not aware of Jesus Christ. He also agreed, though, that scripture implied that any‑ one who did not accept Jesus would suffer this horrible fate. He also acknowledged that I’d probably heard something during church service that implied this as well. But then he said it was his personal belief that even though that was what the Bible said, and what some preachers said as well, he did not believe God would do that. He believed instead that many Native Americans were as good as any Christian and had their own beliefs in their own way. He said he felt God would know and understand this and not punish them unjustly.
At the time I can remember feeling relieved. It made sense to me that God would know this. Also, it seemed possible to me that some people, like the Baptist preacher I had heard preaching hellfire and damnation for any nonbelievers, just simply had that wrong about God. But it wasn’t long before new doubts and concerns arose in my mind. I remember sitting alone in the woods while deer hunting as a young teenager wondering about God knowing all my thoughts. This was a strange feeling. Did I truly believe in God? Had I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior? I felt like an imposter. I felt there was a God, and I felt he knew I was a fake Christian because I was having doubts. I felt God knew that I was saying I believed, while not truly allowing Jesus into my heart properly and walking the path of the righteous as I should.
I made up my mind to turn to the source of truth itself: I would read the Bible. I remember this felt like an incredibly important task. I told a religious friend I was going to read both the Old and New Testaments, cover to cover. I was surprised when she got angry and said that it could not be done. This seemed absurd to me. Of course it could be done. My aunt had read both several times. All one had to do was to start and read a little each night, not give up, and eventually the task would be complete. She then countered that even were I to do this, I would not understand what it said. Having not read both books before, I found the idea of understanding the scripture completely a task that I was less certain I could do, but I still believed in myself. In hindsight, I am amazed now by how many people who profess to be believers of any given religion have not actually ever read their religion’s doctrine.
But I believe that I know why, because I did not have to read far before I thought to myself, most of this is completely ridiculous! I can remember telling another friend, “It all just seems like the stories of the people at that time in those places.” He was confused by this, and he asked me, “Do you mean like stories that someone just made up?” At the time, I could not quite artic‑ ulate what I meant, so I told him, “They seem like the stories people around here tell others about events. The people who are telling the stories seem to believe them, and they say that the stories are true, but you know that when you hear some of these stories that they are far‑fetched.” He couldn’t accept this. Later when the topic of God came up in our friend group, he announced that I’d said that I believed the stories in the Bible were just that, only stories told by people long ago and not the word of God. Suddenly I felt as if it had been announced that I did not believe that Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was a good football coach. Everyone laughed and turned to me smiling as if I were the most foolish person on earth. One exclaimed while laughing, “What?!”
I tried to explain myself. I asked the group, “What if, for instance, when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, they came to a part of the Red Sea that usually had water, but for some reason like drought or something, it did not. They crossed that area, but later the Egyptians came along after them and they were not able to cross because there was water there now. And then the people who told the story believed that God protecting them was the reason this had happened?” They all just stared at me smiling, some shaking their heads. One person felt sorry for me I think, or perhaps wanted the awkwardness to end, so they tried to change the topic. Then one of them asked me, “So you don’t believe in God?” I answered, “That is not what I am saying. There is a God. But what if the Bible is just stories written a long time ago by people? I’m saying I don’t think all the stories happened exactly the way they are written, such as people living for hundreds of years, and Jonah being swallowed by a fish and surviving in its belly.”
Afterwards, I was offended that my belief in God had been questioned simply because I raised concerns about the outlandish stories I had read in the Bible. I searched within myself, and I did believe that there had to be a reason and a purpose for everything. I believed that the world and the people in it had to have been caused by something. Surely this was God, but it seemed more likely to me that people had just told all their own stories about this one God, which was how all the various religions and different beliefs had started.
In my early twenties, I joined the military as an enlisted member and left home for the first time. I don’t remember how, when, or even why I decided that I no longer believed in God, but at some point in my mid‑twenties, I decided that the cause of the universe was the big bang, and the idea of a supernatural deity was an absurdity. Over the next decade I would oscillate between considering myself an atheist and considering myself agnostic.
Science was always my favorite subject in school. Perhaps that’s why I was always questioning everything. I was far from the best student in terms of attendance, doing homework, or getting good grades. If school had consisted just of science, history, and literature and I had been allowed to just read what I was curious about or conduct my own experiments all day, I believe I would have excelled. Instead, I was bored. Usually, I could be found in class staring out the window daydreaming. I always scored high on achievement tests and science tests in general, but I was an underachiever academically before I joined the military.
Once in the military I was trained in computer science. It was the mid‑1990s just as personal computers and public access to the internet were taking off. I soaked up my training, finishing in the top of my class. I embraced every new technology, and I would spend countless hours reading, and testing and building networks and systems. After my active‑duty tour ended, I made a career in Information Technology (IT). I quickly became a certified software engineer and a certified network and IT secu‑ rity specialist. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was on the internet night and day reading about new scientific discoveries and new technology.
Sometime during the fall of 2010, I read an article with a sensational headline. The article’s title proclaimed that famed English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had said that no God was necessary for the creation of the universe. Hawking claimed that the big bang was the result of natural laws of physics. The article included excerpts from a new book, The Grand Design, which Hawking had coauthored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow. In the excerpt, Hawking wrote, “Because there is a law such as Gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Hawking went on to say, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
At the time, that seemed intuitive to me. I thought, of course the beginning of the universe was caused by some natural law like Gravity and not some conscious deity as we humans had believed before we created the scientific method and began to discover the laws of physics. I joked with my immediate family members about what Hawking had said. I would say, “I believe in an invisible force responsible for creating the whole universe, and it is everywhere all the time, all around us, and it starts with the letter G … ha! ha! It’s not God! It’s Gravity!” For almost a decade, I gave little more thought to creation. In my mind, I was now an atheist; there was no God. Gravity was the reason for the big bang and that was the beginning of all existence. For me, the matter was settled.
That all changed in 2019. A couple of years before, perhaps in the late spring of 2017, or maybe 2018, I left home to go pick up a family meal of boiled crawfish, potatoes, and corn from a local restaurant. On the drive there I brought up Spotify and saw there was a category for podcasts. I had never listened to a podcast before, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I browsed for something educational and happened upon one called Philosophize This! by Stephen West. I started with the first episode, something about what West called pre‑Socratic philosophy. I had never studied philosophy, but I had a general feeling for what it was—and I’d heard of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
I was immediately hooked. Once I had listened to all the episodes of Philosophize This! out at that time, I moved on to The Partially Examined Life podcast created by a group of people who had all studied philosophy together at the University of Texas. I then listened to History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Peter Adamson, a professor of philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King’s College London, and In Our Time: Philosophy, hosted by Melvyn Bragg.
I don’t remember which podcast I was listening to when I had my epiphany in 2019. I remember it was a warm, sunny day a few months prior to the COVID‑19 outbreak, so it must have been the summer of 2019. I had gone to Wendy’s to pick up a salad to take back to work for lunch. The podcast I was listening to was describing the concept of God’s transcendence, a phil‑ osophical concept I was very familiar with by this time. As the podcast described that the critical feature of transcendence was the existence outside of creation as well as immanence inside of creation, I nonchalantly said out loud to myself as I drove, “Gravity is transcendent…”
In the next moment, I knew immediately what the cliché “it hit me like a ton of bricks” meant. My brain suddenly seemed to freeze. I felt a kind of panic, like I was not able to operate my vehicle. It felt like I had stopped breathing. Should I pull off onto the side of the road? I wondered. As all of this raced through my mind, a single thought so big it seemed my head would burst, tore through my brain. All I can describe it as would be a men‑ tal scream, “Gravity is transcendent!” I couldn’t comprehend why I felt this way. I was still driving, but I wasn’t even aware of where I was. I don’t think I was even sure what it meant or why thinking it made me feel the way I did, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything else.
For the past four years since that moment, I have been digging into what philosophers call metaphysics, which deals with the first principles of being and existence. This journey has taken me through the ages of written human history. I have explored 12 Aeternus Costin the origins of religion and I have studied many different conceptions of God. I have dug deeper into philosophical thought. Along the way I uncovered the beginnings of science and mathematics. I studied the teachings of the greatest minds in human history from Aristotle to Einstein. This book is a record of that journey and the impersonal and universal truth about God that I believe I have uncovered. It’s been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years.Â
The existence or absence of a holy deity has always been the discussion point between science and religion. We have heard many narratives about it, for instance, Nietzsche spoke “God is dead.” Or, some voices speak science as a new God aloud. This book sheds light on the same aspect of human life. The interesting thing is the narrative this book presents lies somewhat among already existing discourses when the author takes the position that may be not the whole science but at least one of the forces of this universe does have characteristics of God.
That force is Gravity. The argument is interesting but not unchallenged. However, I acknowledge that this book has led me to discuss it with my friends on what they think about it. Maybe I was more sceptical or eager about it but that I would discuss later. Here, let me share the immediate response of my friends when they heard the central argument. But let me share the central argument of the author first.
The author states and pins his whole debate around the universal characteristics of God that almost every religion entertains. Stating many of them in chapter 5th of a total of ten chapters, the emphatic ones are omnipresence, transcendence, non-physical, eternal, independent, constant, erroneous-less, and somewhat out of the shackles of the law of causality. About later, Stephan Hawking affirms too that “Because there is a law such as Gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”
If we briefly look at what each chapter presents to the readers, we can find that chapter one sets the pace for the central argument on how this idea emerged in the mind of the author. The second chapter traces very precisely the origin and history of the concept of deity in the kingdom of humankind. The following chapter details how this belief system evolved and modified throughout the history of mankind. The fourth chapter introduces the main ingredient of the discussion; Gravity and the following chapter as mentioned above analyses the potentiality of Gravity as the modern God through the examples and quotes from religious scriptures.
Chapter six of the book discusses the human idea of what God is and what is not. In this chapter, the author brings attention to the fact that God has been bestowed with human qualities by the human mind and has never been treated as an objective or neutral entity based on characteristics of natural phenomena. Chapter seven discussed the supremacy of science or the scientists who denied the existence of God. Chapter eight attempts to strike a balance between theism and anti-theism through the concept of Gravity God whereas the succeeding two chapters present the summary of the whole idea and argumentation and provide concluding thoughts.
Coming back to the immediate response of people to whom I talked about the central argument was quite interesting yet debated. However, if I summarise, the responses ranged from “Science rather laws of Physics are new God,” or, “the argument is interesting yet debatable cause physics does not categorise gravity into forces and it is not as applicable to particle physics as to the celestial bodies.” Further, “Gravity is a physical fact and can be observed but not God, and we do not have any other evidence, so it is a too big hypothesis to rely on. As far as the principle of eternity is concerned it is not independent but rather related to this very universe.”
In essence, all voices make sense but we can not discredit the author’s argument as well. However, I would like to challenge the principle of omnipresence that the author claims is the case with gravity and gives examples from the Bible to relate it to the characteristics of God. However, God is not more or less present in certain places as per the religion's explanations. On the other hand, Gravity is. It varies.
Nevertheless, I suggest this book could be a very interesting read not only to those interested in religion and science but to those as well interested in a general and informative yet entertaining discussion.