Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

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

with the origins of human life reduced to material causality, the idea that mind existed independently of matter could likewise be set aside—just a mistaken intuition, an understandable misapprehension that turned out to be human egotism all along.

Two hinge points, the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, are understood to have shifted the reasonable default to purposelessness and accident, materialism and atheism.

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

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,

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

Both Copernicus and Darwin profoundly unsettled specific world-pictures connected to specific religious cultures—the world-picture of medieval Catholicism in the first instance, that of early-Victorian Christianity in the second. Their revolutions shook existing syntheses of science, Scripture, and theology, undermined powerful-seeming paradigms, a

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

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