From the author of this book — a hundred years on

I shall put no new argument to you in this paper; I have said what I have in the pages behind us. But I do not claim it is a neutral paper: a man who tells you his own story has asked for your trust, and trust persuades more than reasoning does. So count that against me as you read. And a man's story is evidence of nothing: his honesty in going back over himself does not make him right, nor his error make him wrong.

I want one thing of you and no more: that we try a device in writing, and then part.

The device is this: that each of us write his own story as a man who never knew him would write it, a hundred years after his death. In the third person. 'There was a man called…'. No 'I', no defence, and no opponent reading over the shoulder.

And it has a reason I know and do not hide from you: looking at oneself across a long stretch of time lowers the heat of feeling. Psychologists have studied it under the name 'self-distancing', and its references are at the end of this paper, and with them what those studies do not say: they do not say that this device changes an opinion, nor that it shows the writer the truth about himself, nor that it will serve as evidence for anything. It lowers the heat, no more — not more correct, and not more honest. The most careful measure taken of it is a small effect, and the people who took the measure say themselves that most of the experiments lack the power needed to catch it (the fourth reference, and the figure is in it). So I do not offer it to you as evidence; I offer it because I found it useful to me in the writing, and that is one man's experience, not the result of a study.

And I begin with myself — not because I have 'stripped myself bare': most of what you will read about me below is a creditable fault, a man late to exactness, and that is the easiest thing there is to own. I begin with myself because whoever asks for a craft should show how it is done.

What a historian might write in 2126

'In the year 2026 — that is, a hundred years before these lines were written — there was in an Arab country a man who wrote software and lived by it. He was no scholar, nor a student of scholarship. He inherited his religion as people inherit their language: with no choosing and no resistance. Had he been born in another house he would have inherited another, and he knew this about himself and did not like to be reminded of it.

In his youth he was taken with articles saying that the Qur'an holds numbers that chance does not make: "this world" a hundred and fifteen times and "the hereafter" as many, and "day" three hundred and sixty-five, the number of the days in the year. They took him because they were numbers, and he was a man of numbers, so he thought he had found in his religion something that addressed him in his own language. And he passed them on to those around him for years, confident and at ease.

Then the thing happened. It was no book he read and no opponent he debated — it was that he had built with his own hand an index of the text of the Qur'an to serve a website with, so that counting became for him a thing carried out in a fraction of a second. And one night he carried it out, with no thought of putting anything to the test.

"The hereafter" came out at seventy-one. And "day" came out at two hundred and seventeen.

And the historian pauses at this moment: a man who holds the machine that gives the lie to what he loves, and runs it. He dropped four articles from his site, and wrote the true figures in their place, and gave his reason in a line that outlasted them: that a claim attributed to the Qur'an which the count belies is more harmful than silence about it, because the reader receives it as religion, then finds that it does not hold, and the damage falls back on the Qur'an itself.

And here he was at fault — or years before here. The machine had been in his hand the whole time, and the counting cost him nothing, and he did not count. No incapacity stopped him; what stopped him was that the numbers were on his side, so he never asked after them.'

And here I step out of the third person for one line, because it is mine alone and I do not want an imagined historian to carry it for me: to this day I do not know what I would have done had the count come out in agreement. I think I would have published it and not checked it a second time. I have no witness for this and none against me; it is a man's guess about himself, and the worst of it is that it is the likelier guess.

'And he made a bigger mistake than that one:

He had built dozens of checks on the text of the Qur'an, and set over each part of it a guard that would cry out if something went wrong. And the checks were every one of them from inside his own house: he set the text against itself, and the index against the text, and the page against the index. A year went by and not one of those guards cried out. Then he set the text — for the first time — against a source outside his house, and found in it five damaged places, which had come to him from the transmitter he had taken it from and had never searched. In one of them was a letter too many inside a Qur'anic word, which no eye and no recitation uncovers, because its shape in the script is all but the shape of the right letter.

And all that while he was putting the text before people and saying it was verified.

And the historian writes: the man was not lying, he was confident. And searching from inside the house does not uncover the fault in the door.

Then the historian pauses a third time, and this is the harshest of the three: that the machine was never once turned on the root of what he believed. It counted figures claimed by the enthusiasts for his religion, and it tested the pipe along which the text had come to him. Both are the claims of men about the religion, not the religion itself. So whoever called it "a machine that gives the lie to what he loves" widened the description: it is a machine that gives the lie to what his own side says, and that costs him far less.

And one matter in his story was never settled: did he believe because he had tested, or test because he believed? He wrote in the last of what he wrote that the difference between the two states cannot be seen from the inside at all, and that he left the question hanging and never claimed to have settled it.'

And three lines sum it up: a man inherited a certainty, then built a machine that tests, and the machine gave the lie to some of what he had inherited and he dropped it, then to some of what he had built himself and he mended it. And the machine was never turned on the root, and it was never settled whether he believed because he tested or tested because he believed. And one thing only may rightly be taken from it: whoever does not make for himself something that can give him the lie will never know that he was wrong.

And now you write — if you wish

And before the questions I own a fault that was in them, which I noticed late and did not mend until it was pointed out to me: the story I wrote of myself is the story of an argument — an index, a count, and a checking against a source. And the questions I was going to put to you ask you about your feelings — what you feared, what you lost, what loneliness you found. That is, I tell my own story through the intellect and yours through the soul, and that is an unjust division, and it carries a message I did not intend: that I have an argument and you have a wound. So the first of the questions is now about your argument, and what comes after it you may write or leave entirely.

Write in the third person, as I wrote. Do not write it for publication, nor for some opponent you imagine reading it. Write it as a historian writes of a man he neither loves nor hates. You may find your hand writing things you would not have said in the first person, and you may not — people have tried it and nothing came of it for them, and there is no verdict in that on you or on the device.

1 · What is the premise you hold to be sound and I hold to be unsound? This is the first question and the first in importance. Write it in a single line in your own words, not in mine. Two examples of what is often put to me, and I make light of neither: 'evil on this scale does not sit with a God who is able and merciful', and 'a God who wants to be known does not stay hidden like this'. If your premise is one of those two, say so; and if it is some other, it is the more useful to me.

2 · And how did you arrive at it? By long reading that accumulated, or by one particular event, or by both. And if the road was reading and reflection, then write it so without apology — and do not suppose I am waiting on a tale of pain from you before I will believe you. Write the first place where something moved, not the conclusion you came to; the conclusion has been tidied since, and the beginning is nearer to what happened.

3 · Did you fear anything when you began to doubt? And what was it? Not what you concluded — what you feared. And if you feared nothing, write that; it is an answer to the question and not an escape from it, and there are people who have gone through this door and found no weight in it at all.

4 · And where did your verdict lead you — if it led anywhere? In yourself and in those around you, and in both directions: what you gained in ease and in honesty with yourself, and what you lost if you lost. And if it led to nothing worth mentioning, that too is a state to be written down, and to my mind it is a complete answer.

5 · And if a historian wrote of you a hundred years from now, which line would you wish him not to write?

And this question is about me before it is about you, and you may pass it over: I set it down because I have such a line myself, and I wrote it with my own hand a little while ago: the man who had the machine in his hand and did not run it for years. And I know the limit of that line of mine: it is the line of a man late to exactness, not the line of a man laid bare. And I am not asking of you anything heavier than I have paid.

Write it for yourself, then do with it what you like. You may burn it.

And if you wish, send it — and these are the terms of sending, before the offer

I have a definite offer for you. And I begin with what I ought to have begun with: with what happens to what you send, not with what I promise you.

I read them alone. If I call on anyone over a matter I am not equal to, I shall name him to you in the reply and ask your leave before it. And not a word of them is published except by your leave, written in a second letter, after you have seen what I mean to publish. And if you ask for it to be destroyed after the reply, I destroy it and keep no copy, and I do not need you to say why.

And I do not promise you what is not mine to give. Mail passes through servers that are not mine, and what has entered a network I do not govern I cannot answer for. So if you are somewhere where this talk would cost you a price — and I write from a country where I know that price — do not send. Write it for yourself and destroy it; the whole device is yours and not mine, and you lose nothing by not sending. And cut from your text whatever points to your family and your city; I need not a letter of it.

If you wish after this, then send what you have written. Or — if you would rather not write about yourself — send something you have lived through that you find no explanation for, or an argument you hold to be irrefutable. By which I mean: a claim you think stands up to everything I might bring against it; its plain example is the two premises I wrote out in the first question. Send it to the address set down at the end of this book.

And this is what I bind myself to, written down for you to hold me to:

• I restate your argument in my own words and put it to you before I answer. If you say 'that is not my argument', I go back to your words and do not dispute the point. This condition is here because I caught myself answering a version easier than the one put to me, and did not notice until some time had passed.
• Every claim in it that can be counted I have counted, and set against its own original source and not against whoever passed it on. And this is the price of my own error, not a favour from me.
• And most of what is brought against me cannot be counted. The argument from evil cannot be counted, and hiddenness cannot be set against a source — so binding myself to counting alone leaves the heaviest thing you have without an answer. So whatever is of that kind: either I answer with an argument that can be discussed, or I say I have no answer and write it down as it stands.
• And I write in the reply what I found, without flattery: what is right in it, what has been corrected, and where you spoke honestly and where you leaned towards what you wanted — and the first man judged by that standard is me.
• And if your point knocks something in this book down, the place of publication is the page of the mistake itself on the site — the one people read — and with it the date of the correction and the text of what stood there before, so that anyone who wants to see what I changed can see it. As for the printed copies, they have left my hand and I cannot call them back; the correction goes into the next edition, and that is the limit of what I can do, so I promise you no more.
• And what I could not answer I said of it: I do not know. And I left it written down as it stands.

And the question I ought to have asked myself

I was asked: what would have to happen for you to know that you were wrong — not in some article on your site, but at the root? It is my own question to you turned about, and I had named it in this paper and then passed over it, so that I drew the credit for courage and never paid it. And this is my answer:

In the transmission of the text: were there to appear in its passage down the centuries material differences in meaning — not in the script and not in the known readings — a large foundation would fall for me. And this is actually tested, and I have tested a small corner of it, and found the fault in my own transmission and not in what I set it against.

And as to the further root — that there should be a God — I have no test I know of that would overturn it. Everything brought against me I can turn aside with an interpretation, and interpretation is a door that never shuts. And that is a deficiency in my position which I own and do not dress up: a man whose claim has nothing he knows of that would overturn it holds a claim weakened in his own eyes before it is weakened in yours. I say it and do not know how to get out of it, and it troubles me, and to this day I have found nobody to get me out.

So if you have a way out of it — or something to add to it — that is the letter I am truly waiting for, and not the paper of your own story.

And I do not demand of you what is not yours to give

I have asked at length, so let me lift something off you before I go.

Sometimes going back on an idea is not in your hands. Conviction is not a button to be pressed, nor a decision taken in a moment. You do not choose what seems true to you, any more than you choose what tastes bitter to you. A man may read everything written on a subject and then nothing in him stirs, and that is no failing of his.

So if you have read this book to its end and nothing has changed with you, do not blame yourself. And I claim no knowledge of what lies between you and your Lord, if you have a Lord; that is not my paper nor any man's paper, and I say not a letter about it. I speak only of what is mine to speak of: that I do not ask of you what cannot be asked.

And do not counterfeit a conviction that has not come: the man who counterfeits loses two things — his honesty today, and the chance that the conviction should truly come tomorrow, because he has blocked the door with an image of himself.

It is enough that you keep the door open. And an open door is not a position, nor a commitment, nor a promise; it is that you do not say: I am finished.

And after all this: this book is incomplete. I know some of the places where it falls short and do not know most of them, and there is certainly in it an error I am as confident of today as I was confident of three hundred and sixty-five.

And one reader who writes to me with a mistake in it is worth more to me than a thousand who applaud. The one who applauds leaves me where I am; the one who corrects moves me from my place one step towards what is right — and that step is all I have.

And if you do not write, nothing is held against you, and I count it neither for you nor against you. You have reached the last line of a book that disagrees with you, and this is the last of what I have.