Every human culture we have any record of asked the same two questions: what is the world, and who made it? For most of history the same institutions answered both; the split is recent, and William Whewell — who coined the word scientist in 1833, and to whom this essay owes a second word — watched it begin. The war that followed has been long, mostly unnecessary, and fought over a map-reading error: both sides assumed that if two descriptions of reality differ, at least one must be wrong. The burden of the essay is that the assumption is false, that mathematics says exactly where and why, and that the peace on the far side is not a truce of exhaustion. Whewell's word was consilience — the jumping-together of knowledge from independent starting points — and E. O. Wilson spent his last decades arguing it could be extended across everything humans know. This essay extends it to everything humans believe.
And a definition, because unification has a bad history. Every previous attempt unified doctrines — and to unify doctrines you must rank them, and to rank them is to flatten someone's faith into a footnote of someone else's. What can be unified — because a theorem says it is already unified — is the space in which all the doctrines live. No tradition will be asked, anywhere in these pages, to concede a claim, adopt a rival's categories, or accept a translation it did not author. If by the last chapter a devout Catholic, a Latter-day Saint, an observant Jew, a practicing Muslim, a Vedantin, a Buddhist, and a career physicist can each say this model leaves my faith intact and my science honest — that, and nothing weaker, is the test.