Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

In this line Abbey rejects metaphysical consolations—formal religion and the promise of an afterlife—in favor of what can be touched and tested: the physical earth. Calling the rock “apodictic” (self-evidently true, beyond dispute) frames nature as his bedrock certainty, a kind of secular faith grounded in direct experience rather than doctrine. The stance is characteristic of Abbey’s desert writing, where wilderness is not merely scenery but an ethical and spiritual reference point. The quote’s force lies in its inversion of religious language: instead of belief pointing upward to the unseen, it points downward to the tangible, insisting that meaning and reverence can arise from material reality itself.