We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a “warm little pond.” The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our underst

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering.

This would not be the first time that an ideological system in conflict with the facts has found it prudent to defer to itself. And with predictably incoherent results.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

The thesis that we are all nothing more than vehicles for a number of “selfish genes” has accordingly entered deeply into the simian gabble of academic life, where together with materialism and moral relativism it now seems as self-evident as the law of affirmative action.

the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. Biblical verses are the least of it. A defense is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. Their books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing wi

Confident assertions by scientists that in the privacy of their chambers they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to do with science, and even less to do with God’s existence.

Science as an institution is unified by the lowest common denominator of belief, and that is the conviction that science is a very good thing.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, “in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories