Is consciousness a product of the soul or an illusion the brain creates? Has creation always existed or does it have a point of beginning? Is matter infinitely refineable, or is there some indivisible building block for all of physical creation? Is there a Creator whose design has guided the evolution of human society, or did creation and human society come about by pure chance? And if there is a Creator, why does He seem to allow injustice to thrive and the innocent to suffer so that we call natural disasters "acts of God"? In Close Connections author and scholar John Hatcher employs axioms drawn from the Baha'i Faith as tools for probing answers to these and other questions.