Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

The architects of artificial intelligence still have no idea how to build a conscious self the way you might build an automobile engine—piece by piece and part by part, until the system is ready to be given a jolt of energy and spring into its work. Instead we are building machines that simulate the output of a human mind—writing, coding, poetry, e

As science has revealed the laws and equations governing the universe, some scientists have convinced themselves that laws and equations are somehow an alternative to an argument for divine intelligence rather than evidence in its favor—that if one could just reduce the entire universe to an original condition and a set of especially beautiful equa

an understandable habit of mind among scientists that rules out religion a priori, as a kind of violation of guild rules. “We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door,” the eminent biologist Richard Lewontin said, because science is in the business of figuring “the regularities of nature,”12 and the introduction of any sort of divine rulemaker raises

Spencer Klavan, in a recent essay on the long wrangle over quantum mechanics, makes the point this way: It has become customary to speak of the universe as existing for “billions of years” before the advent of conscious life—an empty cathedral built by no one, hurled into existence by a great burst of energy. The various competing explanations of t

Our expanding horizon of knowledge has also consistently revealed a system that’s precisely balanced, exquisitely poised, in the alignments necessary to generate our specific kind of biological life.

If Darwin’s theory arguably undermined a traditional Christian understanding of human origins, then the Big Bang theory offered a striking support for the Christian understanding of cosmic origins—offering particular vindication to Augustine of Hippo, who insisted in the fourth century AD that God created time as well as space ex nihilo and exists

what really made the evolutionary idea novel, relative to older understandings, is not the idea of gradual development within an ordered system. It’s that Darwinian theory let skeptics and materialists argue that an important part of the system works blindly, with no certain destination in its process. The program that generated human beings could

Prior to Darwin’s account of life’s slow ascent from bacteria to Bach, it was easier to believe in a kind of special creation, where having first made the cosmos God then sculpted each species in its finished form, making every plant and animal’s mere existence a standing proof of the miraculous. The mechanism of evolution by natural selection, by

the progress of science has been guided throughout by assumptions initially instilled by the religious perspective, which few of the original Copernican revolutionaries doubted—that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, that its ordering should be consistent across different regions and at different levels up and down,