I was raised in a traditional Christian religion. But while I was in college, I started to realize that it had never really met my needs. In fact, the more I thought about it, the whole notion of a God “up there” somewhere seemed a little silly. I came to the conclusion that God didn’t really exist and that life must be governed by chance or luck. But I kept an open mind—thankfully.

Eventually, it occurred to me that there had been events, such as the Cuban missile crisis and World War II, in which humanity appeared to come to the brink of destruction but was saved. I found this curious. If things were truly random, each possible outcome should be equally likely and, over the long term, should happen with about the same frequency. This, however, didn’t appear to be the case. How could mankind continue to be so lucky? There seemed to be a bias toward good. There were other things as well that didn’t make sense to me—such as kindness and love. What was their basis in a world of randomness or chance? And how could a bias toward good be explained? Could it be because there was a God? Maybe God wasn’t anything like what I had been taught growing up.

I thought about this a lot. I tried coming up with new concepts of what God might really be like and labeled them “non-standard concepts of God.” I concluded that there probably was a higher power of some kind, but one that was quite different from the one I had been taught about.