The scientist and inventor of the alternate time machine, which had the unique ability to travel not through the fabric of actual time but to traverse all possible worlds, was not satisfied with his first journey.

In it he had found a world in which God had both been discovered through scientific means and disproved just as quickly. For God would not be found in His own creation any more than a woodworker would be found in the wood, or a computer programmer would be found in the program.

And who was to say that the world he occupied was not one big computer program, played out on a large scale? If it were, would God be found in it? No, he could not. Unless He Himself had built into the master program from the very beginning the means for man to find Him.

The scientist pondered, but in a little while lost confidence in such thoughts, for after all, there was simply no evidence for such a being called God. He turned to his new invention once again and calibrated it to explore yet another possible world.

In the next world, he found himself in a small study. A man with long bushy hair sat hunched over his desk with a small oil lantern casting light upon its surface. A parchment lay before him, and he wrote upon it with much concentration. He too was a scientist, but as our scientist was to find out, one of a different order entirely. For this world was of a different order entirely.

It was a world in which the laws of science were regularly violated. That is to say: It was a world in which miracles took place, and they took place with great frequency. A large object moving at great speed would suddenly stop. The sun, instead of setting, would stand motionless. An object, for no apparent reason, would suddenly float in midair. Even the scientific laboratory of this world could not escape such observations. This world was rich with the miraculous, certainly the best evidence for a supernatural agent at work, of God at work in His own Creation.

And our scientist who was a stranger to this world, drawing nearer to the man at the desk and peering over his shoulder, observed his colleague was writing on this very subject. On the parchment, in ink  still wet, it read:

The world in which we live is a strange world indeed. Things occur without seeming any explanation. We observe in one moment apparent uniformity and regularity, almost as though things conform to or are governed by a set of laws dictated by a Creator. But in the next moment, we observe just the opposite, contradicting the hope for any such uniformity and regularity. It is a puzzle of the deepest mystery, as scientists throughout the generations have observed. And as they have also concluded, the only reasonable explanation for these exceptions are, simply put, the world is without explanation.

In this undeniable fact, we must face the hopeless reality that we are truly alone. For we are rational beings, but we find ourselves in an irrational world. And that, at the most fundamental level. Our minds expect to see logic and consistency in the world around us, but we only find it in ourselves. Above all, we crave a world that can be both explored and understood. But exploration is folly, for there is nothing to be understood. If there be anything beyond what we see with our own eyes, as some suggest, it is most certainly not a Mind like our own.

And this alone is perhaps the most damning evidence against the case for God.”

The words stuck in our scientist’s head like a ten-car pile-up on a foggy stretch of highway. He and his colleague from another world had arrived at the same conclusion, but for exactly opposite reasons. This would require more thought, and perhaps the exploration of another world.

And with that, he silently stole away, boarded his invention, and returned to his own world.