As I continued to go to church in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found that I simply believed less and less of the Christian tradition in anything like a literal sense. Was God the creator?  Well, maybe in some kind of ultimate sense, but not literally.   The universe was billions of years old, it came into being at the Big Bang, it has been expanding ever since, and the reaches of space – with its unfathomable numbers of galaxies each with billions of stars –as surely not “created” by a being principally concerned with a form of life that happened to evolve on one small planet circling one relatively small star, one of many, many billions in one relatively small galaxy.  The human-centeredness of the view of “creation” did not, at the end of the day, really make sense to me. And God himself?  Did he exist?  Yes, I thought he did.  But I wasn’t sure we could possibly know much if anything about him.   I assumed he was somehow in some sense [...]