May 30, 2025
Dear Leland,
About a year ago I read you and your brother The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as a bedtime story. Early in the book, you both enjoyed the experience, and the story captured your interest. You, ever the night owl, typically wanted me to keep reading past your bedtimes. Everett, the early bird, sometimes fell asleep while I read (causing me to reread sections to Everett the following afternoon, so he wouldn’t miss out on the story). Over time, the book prompted us to talk about God; Aslan, after all, serves as something of a metaphor for God. As we neared completion of the book, Everett started asking questions about God, something he periodically does to this day. Conversely, you started muttering skepticism, saying things like “I don’t think God is real”. Part of me interpreted those mutterings as provocative, perhaps even meant to challenge me or my authority; I’m not clear if my interpretation was imagined on my part or intended on yours. Whatever the intention, I declined to take the bait. It’s up to all of us to decide for ourselves how we feel about and react to God, and I attempted to relay as much to you in these discussions.
Our discussions about God temporarily spilled over into car rides; I distinctly remember a conversation or two during school drop-off. During one of these rides you asked why I believe in God. I responded as honestly yet simply as I could: because I feel like God talks to me. Whatever my visions are or have been, they don’t feel as if they come from me, yet they (at least sometimes) seem to hold deep truths.
[I should pause here quickly to note: when I invoke God, I don’t explicitly mean the Christian interpretation of God. My interpretation is that all religions, including much “new age” spiritualism, ultimately reference the same God. God is bigger than humans can comprehend, and so God is revealed to us in images, in metaphor, and in inspiration of unknown origin. My sense is that we attempt to flesh out, interpret, and understand these experiences, ultimately creating the religions of the world. Religions, being created and interpreted by people, are ultimately incapable of fully comprehending God, but serve as potentially useful tools pointing us in the right direction. My point: whatever entity serves as the source of inspiration for the world’s religions, for much of the great art the world has ever experienced, and for the various miracles available for the willing to see…that is what I reference when I talk about God. Christianity seems a serviceable pathway to deepening one’s understanding of God, and it’s a pathway with which I am already familiar, so it’s the pathway I mostly pursue these days. What I am trying to convey is that, to me, God is something we cannot adequately describe nor convey, but we can each experience in our own way…if we allow the experience.]
A few months ago the two of you were preparing to take showers as part of your bedtime routine. Everett asked me a question along the lines of “Dad, does God….”. Sometime during this exchange you climbed into my arms. After I answered his question to Everett’s satisfaction and he turned to get in the shower, you muttered something along the lines of, “The Big Bang created the atoms in the universe. Eventually those atoms formed into stars and planets, and from that matter life formed and evolved. God doesn’t exist!” I asked you who told you that, to which you responded “no one”. The implication: this was your interpretation based on available evidence. I was struck by hearing my then nine year old son rather concisely summarizing the Materialist worldview. I’ve heard many folks articulate some version of the same philosophy, but these were always adults. You were, by about a decade, the youngest person I had encountered to articulate this idea.
I concede the possibility that someone shared with you the Materialist worldview without you remembering. But you have an uncanny ability to recall accurately and precisely where you learned things. It’s also possible that you chose not to share where you discovered Materialsm, but you are exceedingly honest by nature, and I believe I’ve developed some intuition for when you are lying or even withholding elements of the truth. Indeed, the most interesting possibility is also the simplest: you came to the Materialst worldview on your own.
See, I think it’s relatively safe to say that, at nine years old, you weren’t entirely reasoning from first principles. Perhaps said differently, it’s not as if you have dedicated years of deep thought to Materialsm. And yet, you spoke with such determination, as if you wanted to will your point to be true. The thought that struck me forcefully in the moment (and one I still believe): you picked up the Materialst worldview in the ether around you.
You wouldn’t know this as I write, but as far as I can tell Materialsm stands as the dominant worldview in educated society today. This marks a substantial change from my youth and young adulthood; then, Christianity was sufficiently dominant that Materialism (and it’s oft paired cousin, atheism) was mostly confined to highly educated contrarians, at least in public discourse. During my adolescent and young adult years, an intolerant Religious Right emerged; young intellectuals instinctively turned away, and in the process, largely left Christianity. In America we’ve long divorced our spiritual and intellectual selves, but in my adult years our spiritual selves have largely been buried. In intellectual circles, Materialism ascended to become a much more dominant worldview, and Christianity an increasingly marginalized fringe. In one episode of the television show Silicon Valley, the writers made the joke that a startup founder was nonplussed about being outed as gay, but horrified when was outed as a Christian. The joke landed, at least in part, because of how quickly it both became socially acceptable to be gay and socially unacceptable, at least in intellectual circles, to be Christian.
Where this gets interesting to me: again, somehow you picked Materialism up from the world around you. The great irony is that picking up ideas from the ether is precisely a spiritual phenomenon, and itself argues strongly against Materialism. Perhaps more importantly, you can’t prove Materialism (or, in your own words, that the Big Bang led to matter which led to people, and God doesn’t exist) any more than I can prove the existence of God. You can, of course, accumulate evidence you consider compelling…and, of course, so can I. At the end of the day, whether one believes in God, or one subscribes to Materialism, one ultimately rests one’s beliefs on an article (or articles) of faith. There are things we cannot prove definitely, and we just have to decide what we believe. What I want to stress here is the universality of faith, of belief. See, for most of my adult life Materialists have presented themselves as rationalists, and painted religious folk (often referred to collectively by the revealing catch-all term “believers”) as antiquated, superstitious, and of lower intelligence. I’m not sure why it took me until the last few years to understand that all of us, even the Materialists, ultimately rest our faith on something. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
What surprises me now is the degree to which others are seeing the same thing I see (which reinforces my perception that some ideas come to us, either through the ether or an inner source of inspiration). Joe Rogan, a comedian-turned-podcaster, recently quipped about how believing in Jesus makes more sense than believing in the Big Bang. A podcast series I follow called the Telepathy Tapes argues fealty to Materialism led to a perversion of scientific scholarship. I even saw a clip from a comedy special joking about how believing “nothing” created the universe seemingly makes less sense than believing God did so. Comedy’s ancient tradition is speaking truth to power in ways that 1) are unthreatening to the powerful, and yet 2) allow the rest of society to blow off steam. When the comedians are coming for you, that means that 1) you have power, and 2) that power has blinded you, at least somewhat.
Materialism retains its dominance, but somehow I find it far less threatening than I once did. I sorta imagine the Materialist as creating a very small box, holding that box tight in his fist, and then demanding I convince him God exists in the box. The parameters of the debate are just so absurd: perhaps, if one makes the box small enough and holds the box tightly enough, one can exclude God. But that world is so vanishingly and depressingly small, even compared to the universe available to us. Compared to the dimensions barely perceptible to us, that box is incomprehensibly miniscule. You are welcome to live there if you choose. I cannot imagine why one would, but again, that’s a decision we must all make for ourselves.
A few weeks after the “God isn’t real” discussion, you woke up in the middle of the night. You rarely wake up at night, so this itself surprised me. That night you happened to be sleeping in my bed while your mom slept in your brother’s. You left the room momentarily, and when you came back I asked where you went. You told me you left to tell your mom you were hearing the voices again. Um, what? I asked for more details, and you explained that you heard loud voices almost shouting inside your head. I asked if this was the first time, and you said it had happened before, but not often. We went back to sleep, but I asked a few more questions the next day. You said the voices (plural, I confirmed there were more than one) weren’t saying anything, but that it felt as if they were shouting at you. You volunteered the sense that, as the voices shouted at you, the world was caving in around you. You did not enjoy this experience, and admitted it being scary. The experience did not sound pleasant, and I’ll admit concerns me at least a little.
Whatever it is, your experience sounds like a spiritual phenomenon to me, and I approached it as such. I reminded you about how you asked me why I thought God was real, and that I told you it was because I sensed God talks to me. I proceeded to explain that this was the type of experience to which I was referring, and posited the possibility that either angels or demons were trying to communicate with you. I offered that, though the voices were scary, it might be wise not to fight them, but instead to try to understand what they are trying to communicate. While you didn’t respond, you did listen earnestly, and I sensed an openness to what I was trying to convey than I cannot imagine happening under other circumstances.
And so now we wait and see what happens next. Was it just a bad dream? Do you have a strange and obscure medical condition? I’m open to any possibility, and will respond when we get more data. For now, we wait and see. Regardless, I celebrate one small aspect of the experience: I sensed you were open to considering the possibility of a world beyond atoms, if only for a moment.
I love you kiddo.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 