I write about what happened when a sceptic started asking questions.
Faith memoir and honest writing for evidence-minded readers – people who want the account to stand up, not just sound good.
Faith memoir and honest writing for evidence-minded readers – people who want the account to stand up, not just sound good.
I’m a project management consultant from Swindon. A husband, a father of six, and for most of my life, not a believer. I spent years trusting evidence, process, and things I could verify – and then found myself asking questions I couldn’t put down.
In early 2026 I was baptised, alongside my wife, at St Philip’s in Upper Stratton. My first book tells the story of how that happened – plainly, honestly, and without asking the reader to take anything on trust that I didn’t have to.
A first-person account of a conversion nobody saw coming, least of all me. Written for the reader who is sceptical by nature – because I was one. No pressure, no polish, just what actually happened and the questions that got me there.
Out now★★★★★“I read this book in one day, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a personal account of finding faith that cannot fail to touch your heart, candid with momentum and honesty. I found it heart warming and inspiring.”
Rebecca Romer · verified purchase on Amazon
Already read it? A few honest sentences help more than anything else I can do – review it on Amazon or on Goodreads. If you were given a copy rather than buying one on Amazon, Goodreads is the easier of the two.
This book exists because people were patient with my questions long before there was any reason to be. My wife, who was asked to defend her faith at a moment’s notice more times than was fair. The friends who kept answering. And the congregation at St Philip’s in Upper Stratton, who made room for a sceptic before he had worked out what he was doing there.
To everyone who has bought a copy, borrowed one, or passed it to somebody they thought might need it – thank you. I wrote it hoping it would reach one person who thinks faith is not for people like them. Every copy that leaves a table makes that a little more likely.
The Unexpected Path to Faith ended at the water, with my baptism in February alongside my wife and two of our sons. This is what happened next. Over a single year, doors I never asked to be opened kept opening. People kept noticing. Responsibilities kept appearing. From an unplanned prayer in front of six people to leading the parish’s first summer fête in years, it is the story of how I moved from the back pew to the front of the room, and said yes long before I would have called it calling.
Coming soon
Jack cleans the children’s ward of a Hull hospital. He works the same route every day, in the same order, and most people stopped noticing him a long time ago. That suits him.
Then a child dies while he is mopping the floor of her room. The parents pray, and something in Jack that was closed a long time ago opens again.
The dreams come back. A valley full of dry bones. Wheels of fire. A throne above the smoke. Beasts climbing out of the sea. Jack has no words for what he sees at night, but the prophets did. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, Joel and John wrote it all down thousands of years ago.
His doctor has an explanation, careful and honest. An old priest has another, and a secret he has kept for twenty-seven years.
The Interpreter is a novel for anyone who has stood at the edge of their own certainty and felt it give a little. You can read Jack’s story as the work of a singular mind, and defend that reading to the last page. Or you can ask the question it leaves open: what if God is reaching out to him?
Coming soon
Shorter pieces alongside the books – reflections on faith, doubt, and the questions that started it all. If there’s a question about faith you’d like an honest, non-preachy answer to, I’d like to hear it – it may become a piece here.
The war in heaven, demons and the devil. I think the battle is closer to home.
Hard Old Testament passages, read with Jesus as the lens.
Everything on my list adds something. Fasting is the one thing that takes away.
The doubts that arrive after you believe, not before. This one has no answer yet.
If He had that power, why did He not use it? The answer is love, the long way round.
One historical question decides the whole thing. Go and test it properly.
The liberty that lets someone reject faith was built by people who held it.
The short version of how an evidence-minded atheist changed his mind.
Science answers how. The questions underneath belong to someone else.
Full immersion at thirty-seven, with my questions intact.
Liar, deluded, or telling the truth. I could only make one option work.
The first believer in our family was ten years old.
Joshua is an engineer from Manchester, one of the team building BeyondEarth’s settlement on Mars. One day, drilling somewhere he was not meant to be, he uncovers a stone too perfectly shaped to be natural, cut with markings nobody can read.
When a machine tries to lift it, the stone breaks the machine, and nobody can shift it from where it falls. Then Joshua picks it up in front of everyone, as easily as any other stone.
Months of decoding turn the markings into coordinates: a point in the outer solar system where telescopes see nothing. Yet for decades, comets passing that way have bent around empty space, each one written off as a measurement error. Now the errors line up. The probes sent to look go silent, return data no one can interpret, or come back with their clocks wrong.
Scientists see a hardware fault. The Church sees a warning. Everyone assumes the mind behind the stone belongs to another species, because that is the only box they have. And the stone answers to one person. If anyone goes, Joshua goes – the least qualified member of the crew, with no reason anyone can find except that he was the one who found it.
Code Name Eden is a novel about how far science can carry us, and what might be waiting at the point where it runs out.
In production
St Philip’s is the Church of England parish church for Upper Stratton, Swindon – and the place where much of this story happened. Sunday service is at 11am on Beechcroft Road, and everyone is welcome, wherever you are with faith. It’s where I was, when I first walked in.
Give to St Philip’s. Scan the code or use the link above to support the parish through the Parish Giving Scheme.
If the book helped you, made you think, or left you with a question – I’d like to hear from you. That’s the whole reason it exists.
Email meOr write directly: hello@scottgough.com