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.

It is not remotely surprising that each of them had a destabilizing influence on specific institutions, theologies, and religious loyalties.

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,

you may still doubt the straightforward goodness of the system—because the world is so often painful, dangerous, tragic, a vale of tears—and question the perfect benevolence of whatever Power governs it. But that Power clearly matters to your existence in such a fundamental way that it would be strange not to wonder about its purposes or where you

For a general religious attitude to be safely discarded as irrational, modern science would need to have proved more than just the fallibility of the Ptolemaic system, or done more than sow doubts about the historicity of the early books of Genesis. It would need to have demonstrated that it’s a fundamental mistake to interpret the universe as a

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.

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

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

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