Summary
This article recounts the personal journey of Mohamed Ben Jemaa, founder of the god-database.com project, from deep doubt to a personal certainty grounded in methodical rational probability — a journey of nearly twenty years through more than 1400 books in three languages, which would later give rise to a trilingual academic database on the question of God's existence. It is the testimony of a method, not a call to a conclusion: it shows how the project grew out of a private search for truth long before any thought of publication.
A Search for Truth
At the age of seven, I stood in a small bookshop in my town, holding a children's magazine I had bought with half of my weekly allowance. My father — an illiterate man who had never learned to read — had set me a simple, wise rule: half the allowance for whatever I wished, the other half for savings or for reading. I always chose reading.
I was first in my school, and I caught the attention of some religious teachers who saw in my early aptitude and my passion for reading an opportunity. In the fourth grade of primary school, the headmaster called me in one day and told me I had been chosen for a pilot experiment at the regional level: I would deliver the first Friday khutba at the school level. I wrote my khutba, the headmaster reviewed it and praised it without a single change, and I stood before the worshippers to deliver it. That was the first decisive moment in my relationship with religion. And in early adolescence, I was regularly asked to give the religious lessons.
Between fourteen and eighteen, I devoured books of Islamic history with intense curiosity. But with each new book, the perplexity grew. I discovered the juridical divergences between the schools of law, the doctrinal debates between Sunnis and Shiites, the disputes between the Muʿtazila and the Ashʿarites.
Despite all this controversy, there was a quiet voice within me that refused the idea of absurdity and pure chance — it was the voice of the fiṭra. But it was not enough to confront the philosophical reasoning I would later encounter.
The First Encounter with Atheism
Then came the first encounter with atheism. My high-school Arabic teacher openly declared his atheism. Curiosity drove me further: I read Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Salama Moussa, Abderrahman Badawi, Taha Hussein. I corresponded with churches in Europe and America, and with religious authorities in Iran. I bought hundreds of Salafi cassette tapes.
I found myself before a whole mosaic: not one religion, but religions. Not one school, but schools. Not faith alone, but faith and atheism.
Emigration and Shock
In 1999, I emigrated to Canada, and became a Friday preacher. But emigration brought with it two profound shocks:
The first: the comparison between our Arab-Muslim reality and the Western reality. Why were integrity, justice, and craftsmanship more evident in secular Western societies?
The second: the events of September 11, 2001, then the emergence of al-Qaeda and the spread of a discourse of takfir and violence in the name of "jihad." Could a true religion produce this?
The Great Doubt: On the Minbar and in the Heart
The hardest moment: a Friday night in the harsh Canadian winter of 2005. I was preparing the Friday sermon in my home office. Before me lay books of exegesis and hadith; behind me, on the shelf, the books of Dawkins and Harris. I suddenly stopped writing, and asked myself aloud: "Am I really a believer?"
The following Friday morning, I climbed the minbar as usual. But this time, everything was different. I was reciting the verses, and in my heart a question: is this truly the word of God? I was speaking of Paradise, and in my mind echoed Dawkins's arguments about "the delusion."
I told no one of this doubt. I felt a deadly solitude. Outwardly, a believing preacher. Inwardly, a skeptical researcher.
The Search for a Method: From al-Ghazālī to Databases
I turned to the experience of doubt in Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. I read "Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl" (Deliverance from Error), and recognized myself in it. Then I read Descartes and his methodical doubt. I began to rebuild my certainty from the ground up.
Given my professional experience as a business analyst and IT expert, I decided to apply the scientific method to religious inquiry. I built a structured database using Microsoft Access, where I classified books by date of publication, field of study, author profile, strength of argument, and logical fallacies.
I arrived at a database containing roughly 1400 books in English, Arabic, and French: 600 in the circle of faith, 500 in the circle of atheism, and 300 neutral or academic.
The Turning Point
Statistical analysis revealed a surprising pattern: the strongest arguments of modern atheism had not fundamentally changed since David Hume. Then observations accumulated that tipped the balance:
In a public debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Dawkins placed himself at six on his own seven-point scale — that is, he does not claim certainty that God does not exist, but acknowledges that he is "agnostic" in principle, having no way to prove non-existence. This admission was not a turning point in my journey, but a confirmation of what my analysis had already reached: that the most formidable opponents of faith themselves move within the space of probability, not within the space of apodictic proof.
Then I discovered Antony Flew's book "There Is a God" — the most famous atheist of the twentieth century, who converted to belief through scientific evidence at the age of eighty. And Francis Collins's "The Language of God" — the director of the Human Genome Project whom science itself led to faith.
I understood that atheism is not the end of the rational journey, but a station along the way.
From Access to god-database.com
That small database is the foundation of what has today become god-database.com — a trilingual academic research infrastructure gathering thousands of works and hundreds of authors, with a methodical analysis of arguments and lines of inquiry.
I did not write this project from an academic ivory tower, but from the heart of experience. I lived the doubt, and I lived the reasoned probability. I stood on the minbar preaching to people while doubt filled my heart. And I searched for truth with objectivity. And I published nothing for twenty years, because I was searching for myself before thinking of anyone else.
If you are on a journey of doubt, I understand you completely. Do not fear the hard questions. Methodical doubt is a path toward solid rational probability, not toward ruin.
I claim to have reached what I consider a personal certainty, but this is not an attempt to convince anyone else of a conclusion. It is the testimony of a method: to follow the evidence honestly, and to weigh the probabilities rather than demand apodictic proof where it has no place.
"One must follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion." — Antony Flew