Robert H. Nelson - God? Very Probably

Religion in the academic environment I have worked in for more than twenty yearsat the School of Public Policy of the University of Marylandis an awkward subject. Unlike some other departments, it is not that my longtime colleagues are hostile to religion or do not acknowledge the potential practical benefits of religionmany of them would readily admit that religion, for whatever reason, often seems to make people more agreeable, more honest and trustworthy, good neighbors if you willor reliable business partners. But many of these same colleagues would say that religion has little to offer with respect to explaining the fundamental truths of the world. For that, they look to science, both in its physical science and social science versions. Religion for them is a kind of happy illusion, however great a role it has obviously played over the totality of human history, perhaps overall for the good but sometimes also with terribly destructive consequences.

As a professional economist by training and thus more broadly a social scientist, I fit well personally in many ways in this academic environment. My own professional history, however, shows some significant indications of heretical tendencies. After majoring in mathematics at Brandeis University, and then getting a PhD in economics at Princeton University in 1971 , I left the academic world in 1972 in part because I was uncomfortable with what I saw as a limited understanding of the realities of the human condition in my own field of economicsand that seemingly was also true of the other social sciences, although I was less familiar with them. I ended up working as an economist in the Office of Policy Analysis of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior in Washington, DC from 1975 to 1993 . I resolved by the mid- 1980 s to explore in my own writings the religious dimensions of public policy debate in the United States as necessary to achieving a fuller understanding of the American political and policy making worldsfocusing on my professional areas of special concern, natural resources and environmental policy. I did not realize it at the time, but this was taking me into the realm of theology.

Since 1990 , while also continuing to pursue actively more conventional public policy subjects, I have been spending a good part of my time thinking and writing about religion (including in this category belief systems such as economics and environmentalism), including three books and many scholarly (and also more popular) articles, an area of intellectual activity of mine that my School of Public Policy colleagues today often find meritorious (for one thing, I have had some success) and intellectually interesting but it clearly puts me well outside the social science and public policy mainstreams.

This book takes me even further afield. In it I explore the question of whether a god exists (throughout this book, I will write generically of a god assumed to be a monotheistic god, unless it is specifically the Christian God I am referring to, or is being discussed by others, and in such cases I will use God). While I have written a great deal over the past twenty-five years about matters relating to religion, and three of my books have been widely reviewed in religious magazines and theology journals (as well as in social science journals), I have not previously attempted a book as ambitious as this one. Like many people, however, I have often wondered over a lifetime whether a god exists. But I have never committed a sustained intellectual effort to answering this questionuntil now. I think by writing, so this book is in part the record of the recent progress of my thinking, taking me from a long-standing basic agnosticism as recently as about eight years ago to now believing that a god (very probably) exists. This god may well resemble but is not necessarily the precise divinity of Christianity or any other of the traditional major religions of Western or other world history.