How this is published

This writing appears on my own website, not in a peer-reviewed journal, and the choice is deliberate. I want to be exact about the reason, because it can be misread, and the misreading matters.

It would be easy to assume I am avoiding criticism. I am not. I am inviting more of it than review would allow. The discussion is open, beside the text: post your sharpest objection there, and it stays in public, under your name, for anyone to read and answer. Nothing here is hidden behind a gate, a paywall, or three anonymous referees. The exposure is greater, not smaller.

What I decline is not the scrutiny. It is the verdict. Peer review does two things at once: it filters for error, and it crowns a winner. I welcome the first and refuse the second, because the crowning is what this writing is about. The argument bundles science and religion, and every religion, not only the two I happen to cite, up to the level of thought, where they are not rivals but parallel readings of the same unfolding. To submit that to a process built on adjudication, right against wrong, accepted against rejected, would be to re-impose the very duality this writing exists to dissolve. The form would contradict the content.

So I should name the weakest wall myself, since a reader is right to look for it. “He skips review to escape being told he is wrong” is the fair suspicion, and I will not pretend it away. Here is how you can tell it is not that: an evasion reduces exposure, and this increases it. I am also telling you where this writing is unfinished. It walks to the edge of the hard problem and does not claim to have crossed it, and I do not yet know whether the spiral belongs to life itself or only to our telling of it. Those are the seams. I am pointing at them, not papering over them.