You cannot meet a real person by improving your mental picture of them. At some point the picture has to give way to the one who walks in and refuses to match it. This is the essay where the whole series turns.
For thirty-six installments, this series, *THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN’T REAL*, has been doing demolition.
That demolition was necessary. Before you can build, you have to clear what is already standing there, and what was standing on most of our lots was a structure nobody chose deliberately, assembled out of secondhand materials, that we had mistaken for the truth about God. So we have been taking it down, piece by piece. The angry deity of the bad pulpit. The God your pain painted. The gap-filler who shrinks a little more every year. The cosmic scorekeeper weighing your deeds. The caricature the village atheist mocks, which no thoughtful believer has ever actually worshiped. One forgery after another, identified and turned to the wall.
But demolition is not the point. Nobody clears a lot in order to stand admiring the empty space. The clearing is for the sake of what comes next, and what comes next is the entire reason the series exists, and it is a different kind of thing altogether from everything that came before it.
Every one of those false gods had something in common, and naming it is the hinge on which the whole back half of this series turns. Every one of them was a projection. A picture assembled inside your own head, out of your own materials, and then projected outward onto the universe and labeled God. The wound projected a cruel God. The bad church projected a petty one. The culture projected an absent one. In every case the direction of travel was the same: from inside you, outward. You built the image and then you cast it onto the sky.
And here is the thing about a projection. You can refine it forever and never once meet anyone.
Let me make this concrete, because it is the most important distinction in the whole series and it is easy to nod at and miss.
Imagine you have never met a particular man, but you have heard about him for years. From people who hated him. From people who feared him. From your own bad experiences with men who reminded you of him. Over time you assemble a detailed picture. You know, or think you know, exactly what he is like: cold, controlling, quick to anger, impossible to please. The picture becomes so vivid and so consistent that you would swear you know the man himself.
Now. You could spend the rest of your life refining that picture. Adding detail. Adjusting the shading. Debating with other people about whether he is more cruel or more indifferent. And in all of that activity, however sophisticated it became, you would never once have met him. Because the picture is not the man. The picture is a thing you made. And a thing you made, no matter how detailed, cannot surprise you, cannot correct you, cannot walk into the room and turn out to be different from what you expected. Only the real man can do that. Only an actual encounter can overthrow a projection, because only an actual encounter introduces something you did not put there yourself.
This is why so many people who have thought carefully about God, who have read the arguments and weighed the evidence and formed detailed and defensible opinions, have still never met him. They have been refining the picture. And the picture, however rigorous, is still something they built, and a built thing cannot introduce itself to you. It just sits there being whatever you made it.
The turn this series has been driving toward is the turn from the projection to the encounter. From the God you assembled to the God who is actually there. And those are not the same activity done better. They are different in kind, the way studying a map is different in kind from arriving in the country.
There is a man alive right now who is one of the best possible witnesses to this exact distinction, precisely because his whole professional life is spent building models of reality and testing whether they hold.
James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist at Rice University, and by any measure one of the most accomplished scientists alive. He has been named among the most influential scientific minds in the world. He has published hundreds of research papers and holds over a hundred patents. He builds molecules, tiny machines a few atoms across that can drill into a single cell. He is not a man on the margins of science. He is at the center of it, doing some of the most sophisticated model-building the field has.
He was born and raised a secular Jew in New York. Not particularly religious, not looking for God, on the front edge of a career that would have given him every reason to regard faith as a relic. And if you had asked the young James Tour about God, he could presumably have offered you a picture. Most thoughtful people can. A projection, assembled from his upbringing and his reading and his sense of how educated people are supposed to think.
What changed him was not a better projection. This is the part that matters, and it is the reason I am using him here rather than in an essay about the design of the cell. What changed him was an encounter.
It came, of all places, through an ordinary person in an ordinary moment, someone who told him the plainest possible version of the Christian claim: that there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood, that the sacrifices of the old covenant pointed forward to Christ as the final Passover lamb, that the debt he could not pay had been paid. It was not a sophisticated argument. It was barely an argument at all. But it sent him to look for himself, and on the seventh of November, 1977, alone in his room, the model gave way to the thing itself. He did not conclude that God probably existed. He met him. He has described it ever since not as reaching a verdict but as encountering a person, the love and reality of Jesus, and his life changed in that moment and has not changed back in the near half-century since.
Here is what I want you to notice, because it inverts the story everyone expects. The science came after. Tour did not reason his way from the machinery of the cell up to God. He met God, and then spent forty years in the machinery of the cell finding that the tidy stories he had been told about how life assembles itself on its own simply do not survive contact with what is actually there. When he looks at a single cell now, at the staggering complexity of the mechanisms inside it, his response is not the confident just-so story of the textbook. It is wonder, and a refusal to pretend the story is finished when it is not. But that came second. The encounter came first. The wonder is what the encounter left him free to see.
That is the order this series has been arguing for the whole time. Not: assemble a airtight model and then, if it checks out, permit yourself to believe. But: be willing to meet the one your models were always inadequate to contain, and let the meeting reorganize the models. Tour is living proof that a first-rate scientific mind is not an obstacle to this. His mind was not the thing that had to be overcome. His mind was the instrument that, once the encounter had happened, spent a lifetime confirming that the real thing is stranger and larger than any projection he could have built.
https://jmtour.com/
Now, the honest objection, because a thoughtful reader will have it ready.
You will say: an encounter is exactly what I cannot manufacture. A projection I can at least work on. I can read, think, adjust. But you are telling me the thing that actually matters is a meeting I cannot summon, and that feels like being told the door is unlocked and then that I am not allowed to touch it. If the encounter is the point, and the encounter is not something I can produce by effort, then what exactly am I supposed to do?
That is a fair objection and it deserves a straight answer.
You are right that you cannot manufacture an encounter. You cannot force another person to walk into the room, and God is not less free than another person. But there is something you can do, and it is the one thing the projection has been preventing all along. You can stop defending the picture. You can hold the assembled God you have been so sure of, the one built from the wound and the bad church and the secondhand reports, and you can loosen your grip on it enough to say: I might have this wrong. I have been refining a portrait. I have never actually let the subject speak. And then you can do the thing Tour did, which was not to construct a proof but to look, honestly, with the picture held loosely enough that something could correct it.
That is not manufacturing an encounter. It is clearing the doorway. It is taking down the projection that has been standing exactly where the real one would have to enter, and it is the only move that is actually yours to make. The projection is the thing you built and therefore the thing you can set down. What comes through the cleared doorway is not up to you. But the clearing is. And in my experience, and in the experience of a great many people far more resistant than you would guess, the clearing is rarely wasted for long.
So this is the turn, and everything after this essay in the series is on the other side of it.
We are done, mostly, with demolition. The false gods have been named. What remains is not to build a better projection than the ones we tore down, a more accurate mental portrait to admire from a safe distance. What remains is the encounter itself, which no essay can give you, because words about a person are not the person, any more than a picture of the man is the man.
What I can do, what this whole series has been trying to do, is get the doorway clear. Take down the forgeries that were standing where he would have to come in. Show you that the God you rejected was, in all likelihood, a projection you inherited and never chose, and that setting it down is not the loss of God but the precondition for meeting him.
You spent a long time refining the picture. It was a reasonable thing to do. Everyone does it.
But you were never going to meet anyone that way.
Set the picture down, just enough that it could be wrong, and look. The doorway is clearer than it has been in years. That part was the work of demolition. The rest is not a conclusion you reach.
He is a person you will meet. One way or the other.
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Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. A.C. Rosenthal is the author of The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son. Further analysis at:
acrosenthal.com/
https://thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com/
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