About

Following the argument

A work of philosophy, written for anyone willing to think hard — and honest, at every step, about how sure I am.

Philosophy, not science

The distinction matters. I am not revising Einstein’s equations or quarrelling with evolutionary biology — the science is accepted in full. What I am doing is the older, different job of the metaphysician: taking what physics, mathematics and biology have established, and asking what single picture of reality they together demand. That task needs no laboratory — only the willingness to follow an argument wherever it goes.

From outside any one discipline

I come at it from outside any single academic field, and I have come to see that as a freedom rather than a lack. I have no orthodoxy to protect, no departmental consensus to defer to, no career staked on a prior position. What I have instead is the liberty to follow the argument to its end — and the conviction, which you will either come to share by the close of it or you will not, that what is built here is the most coherent account of the whole I have been able to find. That is not arrogance. It is the ordinary confidence of anyone trying to build something new.

How it started

It started with two questions, a long time ago, and neither of them was grand.

The first was about dimensions. I was taught that a dimension is defined by sitting at ninety degrees to the others, and it never sat right with me — particularly at the step from three to four, where the answer was that I would not be able to picture it. That raised the question I actually cared about: was it that I could not picture it, or that nobody could? A definition by right angles tells you how to draw the axes. It does not tell you what a dimension is.

The second came from a friend who held that there must be a negative universe somewhere, balancing this one. I wondered why you would begin with something as elaborate as a three-dimensional positive and a three-dimensional negative. Start with one dimension, I thought, and see what it takes.

That was sixteen-year-old thinking, and the two questions gradually meshed into one. I have been following them through ever since. Nothing arrived by revelation, but an idea has to have an embryonic point somewhere, and that was mine — followed by a long time spent testing it against the tradition, which turned out to be the real work and an education in itself. I was not assembling a position from borrowed parts; I was checking an independent one against the best that had been thought before.

I did not set out to write about God. My first draft never mentioned the word. But as the argument matured, God kept arriving uninvited — and by the end I understood why: described with enough depth, the universe turns out to be the thing the tradition has long called by that name. Not a person above the world, but Spinoza’s God: the rational order of nature taken whole.

Two commitments

Calibration. At every step I tell you plainly whether you are on settled science, on a deduction I think is forced, or on a bet. You never have to guess how sure I am. Where I have got something wrong, it goes on the record rather than quietly out of the text — the corrections page is kept in public for that reason, and it separates what was simplified in order to teach from what was simply wrong.

Readability. Big ideas deserve a wide audience, so this is written to be serious and readable at once — assuming no specialist background, and never patronising one.

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Where to start

Both are free, and both are running now. The essays come out twice a week; the video course builds the argument from the beginning, a new one every few days.

Or read the framework in plain terms first, if you would rather see the shape of the argument before committing an hour to it.

— Robert Carey