I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy.

I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence re­mained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person is wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dis­sected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological argu­ments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of be­ing so inherently determined and mediated by concepts in­herited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immuno­logical value against total skepticism, Nietzsche’s works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented sav­agery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that sci­ence could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, par­ticularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity’s suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or pun­ishment.

It was during this time that I read an early transla­tion of the Koran which I grudgingly admired, be­tween agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. “Even if false,” I thought, “there could not be a more essential expression of religion.” As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sale’s, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it hap­pened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inau­thentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory—how moral judgments were reached—reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaning­lessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.