Following the argument

This is a work of philosophy, not science, and 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.

I come at it from outside any one academic discipline, and I've 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'll either come to share by the close of it or you won't, that what's built here is the most coherent account of the whole I've been able to find. That isn't arrogance. It's the ordinary confidence of anyone trying to build something new.

The framework at the centre of it arrived uninvited, more or less fully formed, some years before I wrote a word. It then sat quietly while I spent a long time testing it against the tradition — which turned out to be the real work, and an education in itself. I wasn't assembling a position from borrowed parts; I was checking an independent one against the best that had been thought before. The testing only deepened my confidence in it.

I didn't 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 shape how all of this is presented. The first is calibration: at every step I tell you plainly whether you're on settled science, on a deduction I think is forced, or on a bet — you never have to guess how sure I am. The second is that 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. And unusually for metaphysics, the framework makes a prediction that could prove it wrong — which I've put on the record rather than hedged.

If that's the kind of thing you'd spend an hour on, the best place to start is the five free videos.

— Robert Carey