Is This True: "Most Scientists Are Non-Religious" According to Jerry Coyne?

Biologist and Atheist Jerry Coyne writes on his science webblog,
"Why else are most scientists nonreligious—far more so than the general public?"

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/ideologically-motivated-teachers-indoctrinate-students-into-thinking-that-science-and-religion-are-compatible/

Caution: Whether or not religion or non-religion, theism or atheism, is true, isn't a popularity contest!

The number of scientists who are or aren't "religious" is only a general indicator of whether or not science and religion are compatible, not whether religion is true or false.

HOWEVER, contrary to atheist Jerry Coyne, according to Pew Research, 51% of scientists aren't atheists.

That means that a majority of scientists are 'religious," not the "most scientists are nonreligious," Coyne's claim.

"According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power."

"Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power."
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

That doesn't sound like "most scientists" are "non-religious."

But let's give professor Coyne the benefit of the doubt; maybe his claim was that "most scientists" are not organizationally Christian?
--

Also, consider this study done by Rice University:
"First worldwide survey of religion and science: No, not all scientists are atheists
AMY MCCAIG – DECEMBER 3, 2015

"Are all scientists atheists? Do they believe religion and science can co-exist?"

"These questions and others were addressed in the first worldwide survey of how scientists view religion, released today by researchers at Rice University."

“More than half of scientists in India, Italy, Taiwan and Turkey self-identify as religious,” Ecklund said.

“And it’s striking that approximately twice as many ‘convinced atheists’ exist in the general population of Hong Kong, for example, (55 percent) compared with the scientific community in this region (26 percent).”

“No one today can deny that there is a popular ‘warfare’ framing between science and religion,” said the study’s principal investigator, Elaine Howard Ecklund, founding director of Rice University’s Religion and Public Life Program and the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences. “This is a war of words fueled by scientists, religious people and those in between.”

"The study’s results challenge longstanding assumptions about the science-faith interface. While it is commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists, the global perspective resulting from the study shows that this is simply not the case."

"Elite scientists: 34% Atheist, 30% Agnostic, 36% Religious"

"The researchers did find that scientists are generally less religious than a given general population."

However, there were exceptions to this:
39 percent of scientists in Hong Kong identify as religious compared with 20 percent of the general population of Hong Kong,
and 54 percent of scientists in Taiwan identify as religious compared with 44 percent of the general population of Taiwan."

"Ecklund noted that such patterns challenge longstanding assumptions about the irreligious character of scientists around the world."

"When asked about terms of conflict between religion and science, Ecklund noted that only a minority of scientists in each regional context believe that science and religion are in conflict."

"In the U.K. – one of the most secular countries studied – only 32 percent of scientists characterized the science-faith interface as one of conflict. In the U.S., this number was only 29 percent."

"In addition to the survey’s quantitative findings, the researchers found nuanced views in scientists’ responses during interviews. For example, numerous scientists expressed how religion can provide a “check” in ethically gray areas."

"Ecklund and fellow Rice researchers Kirstin Matthews and Steven Lewis collected information from 9,422 respondents in eight regions around the world: France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S."

"They also traveled to these regions to conduct in-depth interviews with 609 scientists, the largest worldwide survey and interview study ever conducted of the intersection between faith and science."

About Amy McCaig
Amy is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.
http://news.rice.edu/2015/12/03/first-worldwide-survey-of-religion-and-science-no-not-all-scientists-are-atheists/

Also, consider this survey's results:
NBCNews
updated 6/23/2005 11:42:26 AM ET

"CHICAGO — A survey examining religion in medicine found that most U.S. doctors believe in God..."

"In the survey of 1,044 doctors nationwide, 76 percent said they believe in God..."

“We were surprised to find that physicians were as religious as they apparently are,” said Dr. Farr Curlin, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics."
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8318894/ns/health-health_care/t/survey-most-doctors-believe-god-afterlife/

Of course, probably, Coyne would argue that doctors aren't scientists.

But even discounting doctors, it isn't true that "most scientists are nonreligious."

Professor Coyne needs to edit his incorrect claim, or provide contrary evidence.

In the Light of Ultimate Reality, God, Deity, Divine, Essence, the Good, Transcendence, Process, Higher Power, Meaning,
(or whatever other term religious people use to refer to their convincement
that matter and energy aren't the only reality).

Daniel Wilcox

Part 2--Father of the Burning Acid: Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett

Review of DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA By Daniel C. Dennett


This is a very dangerous book; it proves Christians and Muslims are correct about their worry and fear of evolution, that the latter is very anti-religious.

According to Dennett, Darwinian evolution destroys all religious faith, is indeed a powerful super-acid which burns away all traditional beliefs and explanations about life and humankind completely!

A mighty big claim is it not?

But coming from one of the most brilliant of modern scientists, the claim ought to be studied carefully.

Despite the sincere, thoughtful efforts of scientists who are Christians such as Francis Collins and Simon Conway Morris, most religious people think religion and evolution are opposites, and incompatible.

Secondly, even though intriguing compromises by brilliant evolutionary biologists such as nontheist Stephen Jay Gould put forward ways that evolution and religion can co-exist in harmony as with his N.O.M.A., most don't agree.

Non-religious people think of religion as delusional and contrary to science.

Dennett strongly agrees.

He goes even further, beyond the factual disagreements, and emphasizes that Darwinian evolution is completely atheistic and deliberately hostile to Christianity!

In the lucid and powerfully written book, Dennett explains in great detail, making a fairly convincing argument for Darwinian evolution, not just in the area of scientific detail but as overwhelming fact and the very cornerstone of Existence.

He traces the development of life through natural selection from over 3 billion years ago down to the modern day.

There is a strong tendency toward materialistic determinism as a philosophical truism in this brilliant tome, though at other times Dennett sometimes sounds almost like a secular pantheist!

It's difficult to tell from his prose if this is only a pleasing rhetorical flourish to liven up the complex scientific evidence or if Dennett is conflicted within himself as to the essential nature of reality. My guess is the former.

However in other writings Dennett has stated that he isn’t a hard determinist. So it is difficult to ascertain his real philosophical views based on Dangerous Idea alone.

Maybe he threw in the positive pantheistic-sounding phrases to alleviate the gloomy almost nihilistic negation of his central thesis—that Darwinian evolution burns away everything that humans think.

Consider Dennett’s negative example of a priest’s commitment to celibacy; he says such an outlook and commitment is an “infestation”!

What a biased extremely negative assessment.

However, then—apparently aware of his overstatement--Dennett states two sentences later that he isn’t making a moral judgment on whether celibacy is good or bad.

It’s sort of ironic that even though he emphasizes atheism is the result of the evidence of evolution, he refers to the natural world as “Mother Nature."

His use of the cliched phrase just seems another ‘short hand’ method like many literary writers refer to “Father God,” not meant literally but metaphorically. a tendency to personify nature, evolution, natural selection

Yet how well do we theists know that atheists constantly harp at us for using anything symbolic as drastically deluded and “dishonest.”

But, of course, if they do the same, use language symbolically, it’s fine.

Also, Dennett often uses ‘intentional’ words despite his claim that existence has no intention.

This is a characteristic I have noticed in all atheistic scientists from Bertrand Russell to Richard Dawkins—a tendency to give evolution agency:
“evolution gave us,”
or our brains were “programmed” by natural selection.

Why do they do this?

This is in direct contradiction to their claim that nothing happens for purpose and that there is no meaning, and that evolution has no direction.

What an oxymoron of a word for atheists to use since programming is one of the most complex rational skills one can acquire. What sort of sense does it make to claim that evolution has no purpose, no meaning, no direction, but that it is "programmed"?

Watching my relatives program hour after hour and then trying to read a programming book to understand how it is done, I realize programming is much more difficult than most people realize.

Also, scientists who are atheists will give pages of scientific and philosophical reasons why there is no purpose to existence, how moral realism is fallacious, but then go right ahead and use essentialist terms such as ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and say how it is important to do the “right thing”!

Some even claim to support human rights, yet immediately at the same time claim that there are no ethical truths, that “evil” is only what is “unpleasant” to someone. Heck, some of them even claim that murder is sometimes good or that in a different time and place, rape and slavery would be normal.

Is this perhaps evidence that whether they like it or not, even atheists are “meaning-centered” creatures?

It’s intriguing that Dennett (like Russell, Kurtz, etc.) adopts meaning-centered words such as “sacred’ which would seem to imply that he is at least at a weak level, a secular pantheist, as mentioned before.

But if the whole cosmos and everything in it, especially nature, is totally meaningless and purposeless, how in the world could anything be “sacred”?

Again, in this book, Dennett treats humanity as only a complex organism in a meaningless algorithm repeating eternally.

Indeed, Dennett repeatedly quotes Nietzsche—almost with delight it seems—in his attempt to kill every sacred cow of all theists and essentialists.





It is only when Dennett verges into utter nihilism that he back-steps and uses pantheistic terms and talks about “moral values.”

Despite all of these negative points about Dennett’s questionable philosophical base and a number of ‘sore-thumb’ contradictions in his rhetoric, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is an amazing scientific tour-de-force.

Daniel C. Dennett is an example of a brilliant scientist who has "fathered" my understanding of existence and the natural world, of how natural selection has moved over several billion years to result in us--and in me living now, thinking in Big Time, and typing this book review on a state-of-the-art computer.

Yes, at a scientific and philosophical reasoning level, the book is convincing—at least in the part that I could understand.
(Much of the middle section of the tome is quite technical for the average reader.)

The book maroons us from any theism in relation to specific scientific evidence. It does burn like a super-acid through all our hopes and beliefs, and values and ethics. At least it did mine.

Where Dennett’s argument becomes weak, however, is when he tries to argue that existence could have come from nothing and that life could have come from non-life, etc.

Speculatively, it is possible that everything that IS could have all come about by a cosmic Chance or by a cosmic meaningless Determinism of eternal matter and energy.

But, even given all the evidence that Dennett provides for evolution not having a direction, the question is, how the origin of everything including life and the algorithms of evolution, and the cosmos itself with its “natural laws,” came about?

That is a very different sort of asking. And there is no evidence at this point in history for the whole cosmos coming from nothing; that's only speculation.

There is no scientific evidence that billions of everything only popped into being from nothing for nothing.

So my question for Dennett is, “Why do you prefer to think that meaningless impersonal algorithms eternally ARE rather than think that Intelligence eternally IS?

Based on the existence of consciousness, reason, math, “natural laws,” creativity, and purposefulness which humans discovered in their evolutionary development doesn’t it seem more likely that reality itself has intelligence, purpose, creativity, and purpose?

Which seems more plausible that matter and energy by chance or fate (determinism) brought forth existence and then life in all its incredible forms and then produced millions of intelligent species stretched across the universe or the multiverse
OR
that Intelligence via natural laws brought about existence including life, consciousness, creativity, reason, and purpose?


I agree that there is no scientific proof either way for essentialism or for materialism.

So, yes, I agree with Dennet, the super-acid of natural selection has proven that young earth creationism is bogus and delusional. Most of the public's understanding of life and how everything came to be is illusionary.

Only the most compartmentalized and unthinking humans can hold to such an extreme view. Their irrational commitment to a particular text of ancient literature--whether the Bible or the Qur'an blinds them to the very clear facts of science.

But scientists who adopt the opposite extreme—that of complete materialism, where intelligent life is a complete fluke also seem to have let preconceptions distort the evidence.

Materialism isn’t a necessary, or even a more likely outcome of evolution.

Worst of all such negative speculation ends in nihilism. Then not only has the “super-acid” burned away religion, it has burned away all hope and all humanism.

It’s one thing to show through scientific evidence that evolution led to homo sapiens, that there are no miracles; but it's a totally different claim to state that all of this means nothing and is totally unrelated to intelligence.

Making speculative philosophical claims is very different from the solid evidence of fossils and DNA.

This can be seen by the very fact that many famous scientists totally disagree about such ultimate issues. Despite all the evidence that Dennett marshals in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, about 51% of scientists still think that some God or some higher power is true.

41% are atheists.

Currently, young adult scientists, according to Pew Research, are more likely to think God exists, than older scientists. Why is this so if evolution proves atheism?

For every atheistic Daniel C. Dennett, there is a theistic Simon Conway Morris or a Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky. After all, Dobzhansky is one of the most famous evolutionists of the 20th century, yet is a committed theist.

Even atheists disagree about the most basic philosophical issues related to existence and life. Some atheistic scientists such as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and French biologist and Nobel prize winner Jacques Monod write that life came about by “chance” and “accident.” Gould says that if the universe came only one more time, it's unlikely that homo sapiens would even evolve into existence!

Others contradict that claim and state homo sapiens are part of a vast deterministic necessity. This is the proclaimed view of biologist Jerry Coyne and neuroscientist Sam Harris and others.

Everything is so determined that if Time/Space happened again a “trillion” times, a professional golfer would miss his short putt every time.

And in all those "trillion" times, you would never get to choose what to have for lunch.

So much more tragically worse, every unjust human will by cosmic necessity again pillage, murder,and rape. See, no one has an iota of choice.

Why does Dennett appear to agree at least partially with such nihilistic determinism of those like Coyne and Harris?

Especially since in the book he keeps emphasizing that natural selection has no direction. If natural selection has no direction and involves any chance whatsoever, it would seem that each time the universe pops into existence, that things and events would most likely be different. Because, of course, by definition, determinism is lock-step directional, is, completely, one cosmic block of time/space amber.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Determinism: “philosophy : the belief that all events are caused by things that happened before them and that people have no real ability to make choices or control what happens”
“1a : a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws.”

Figuring out reality, ‘ain’t’ easy:-)

For those who would like to be fathered by a scientist who is a theist, check out professor Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University.

As a cell biologist and convinced Darwinian evolutionist, Kenneth R. Miller wrote a powerful book, Finding Darwin's God, against religious creationism and against Intelligent Design.

But as the title emphasizes his book also strongly disagrees with the views of atheists such as Dennett. He doesn't think that evolution leads to atheism. Miller, himself, is a convinced theist.





In conclusion, Daniel Dennett does a great job explaining in layman’s terms the complex and difficult concepts of Darwinian evolution.

His powerful writing style shows best in his humorist use of metaphor such as the central motif, comparing Darwinianism to super-acid.

Despite Darwin’s Dangerous Idea leaning toward nihilistic conclusions, and at times being difficult for a non-scientist to understand, it is truly a landmark book.

Read the book and be stretched intellectually and philosophically.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

The Sacred Act of Pole-Vaulting and Other Conceits

The Sacred Act of Pole-Vaulting and Other Leaping Conceits
‘Donne” While Surveying and Surviving the Tragic and Absurd Conundrum Called History and the Human Condition

When a young teen in P.E. one year, I jumped the pole vault a few times. The anticipation for and mild fear of the run and leap, tensed us up. The vault didn’t rank with the sheer frighted fearfulness of the high dive in swimming, but it sure beat the dickens out of pushups. As difficult as it was to run and leap up balancing on the wobbly rise of the limber pole, in its back arch and then its swinging forward, up, and over the cross bar, I did manage to clear the bar at low levels.

The eventual goal aimed toward was to set the cross bar higher and higher and yet still achieve the swinging leap up and over. But the higher the bar the more difficult the leap with the rise of the pole and the more dangerous the fall, even if one succeeded in clearing the cross.

Fortunately, pole vaulting lasted only a week or two for us P.E. students, was not required on a regular basis like for the athletic superstars of track and field. Still, isn’t this all intriguing that after many years of hectic adult life with career and family-raising, a few minutes of pole-vaulting still comes back to me so vividly?

Rather conceited wasn’t that opening paragraph? Not proud like a rooster, not like a guy who acts brazenly self-centered, always leaping into the center of any discussion. No, in this short article, we are talking about the extended over-reach of a long-winded, leaping metaphor, in the manner of the metaphysical poet John Donne (you know the 17th century English writer who spent a whole poem comparing his love for his wife to a geometric compass!).

Anyway, such a conceit, an extended metaphor of track and field makes a powerful analogy for the spiritual ‘pole-vaulting’ of faith in the sacred. Consider Christian history.

The bar of belief and action was set very low when Jesus first called his disciples. But then he spoke more and more in metaphoric theological conundrums and esoteric parables such as when he compared Christian faith to a vulture gathering over a dead body

Obviously the bar was being raised higher and higher--incredibly high, and the disciples balked, scratched. Scratching in pole-vaulting means one steps over the line or somehow misunderstands or violates the rules. And many disciples and other humans scratch at life down to this day. Metaphor.

One of the most difficult high raisings of the bar came when Jesus didn’t return in the ‘soon’ time of Paul and John (I Thessalonians and Revelation), but somehow Christians adjusted the bar down and up at the same time! Some biblical theologians reinterpreted the word ‘soon’ to mean ‘rapidly’ rather than in the common sense definition of ‘in the near future.’

They said the return of Christ could happen thousands of years in the future, but when it did it come, it would be ‘rapid’. This seems a very dishonest scratching of language. It is more than an accidental rule violation, but a situation of sure chicanery--straining the gnat and swallowing the camel.

Such fixing of the pole vault should be disallowed. Other Christians have said that ‘soon’ is different for God compared to us, (again a suspect vault, sounds like a scratch).

‘Liberal’ Christians admit Jesus and the NT authors were mistaken, but in so doing they are trying to pole vault up a steep incline while sliding down the slippery slope of increasing doubt and skepticism. If the NT isn’t historically accurate about such a key doctrine as the return of Christ, many ask, how could one rely on Scripture being accurate about anything else? After all, the bar of requirements for historical writing has been set very high in the modern age.

All things, people think, need to be factually accurate, inerrant to be of value. Religion, the spiritual, and the transcendent all need to be judged with the measuring tools of science.

A compass of accuracy needs to discern the geometric lines of theology and faith, to eliminate and banish any heresy that deviates from the true.

The nature of truth is a difficult subject bar none (to throw in a pun and lighten this heavy post;-) The difficulty of faith versus delusion (false faith) and reason versus despair (false reason) is a very high bar indeed--one which guides and misguides. Let us pray moment by moment and think moment by moment so as to rise upward into the transcendent, knowing within that we are loved by God as Jesus said.

Another difficult raising of the cross bar of Christian faith came 1,500 years after Jesus, in the time of Galileo and Copernicus. The Church claimed supreme understanding and control in all matters.

Yet a minority of scientists contradicted the teachings of the Church and, allegedly, the Bible. They claimed to have proved that the sun doesn’t round the earth each day; indeed, the earth is not the center, not the focal point of all creation as Genesis claims.

Soon science increased its claims--our sun is only a very minor star. Contrary to the Scriptures’ statement, “God made the stars also,” in actuality, those stars are much more vast than our puny solar system.

We are on an edge of a galaxy, which is one of millions of other galaxies! So much for the literal understanding of the Bible and common sense! Scratch!

Of course, many choose to twist the plain text in the Bible, cheating again in the sacred game of pole vaulting. They argue Genesis describes the creation of the sun on the fourth day from the perspective of God’s Spirit at the level of the surface of the planet looking up, so it does look like the sun comes after the earth rather than before. What has happened?

A dense, heavy cloud of vapor has hidden the sun during the first three days. The sun finally appears above the earth on the fourth day. But the verse in Genesis doesn’t speak about the sun appearing from behind fog on the fourth day, it says:
“And God said, 'Let there be light in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.' And so it was. And God made the two great lights…” (Genesis 1:14-16)

Yipes, what convoluted rhetoric! Another scratch. Disqualified.

Other faithful humans leaped, instead, out of fundamentalism, and so out the metaphysical window plummeted the 3-storied universe. These Christians leaped over the new cross bar level to a spiritual universe where Heaven still exists with its pristine streets of gold ‘up there’ and Hell abysses ‘down below’ though this spiritual reality has nothing to do with the observable world measured and manipulated by science and technology.

So we got a dualistic existence, where science concerns itself with the observable, and religion concerns itself with the spiritual and moral. Many Christians of the present time manage to make this philosophical leap.

I made the leap as a young adult.

However, I feel uncertain, in brutal honesty, whether I only scratched.

But the bar for Christian faith when faced with the conclusions of science kept ascending. Much more difficult to leap over—maybe impossibly so—was the discovery by Darwin in the 1800’s that life proceeds not by a sudden miraculous creation 6,000 years ago, but by a combination of cosmic luck and survival of the fittest over millions and millions of years.

Later in succeeding years, other scientists tabulated their technical findings and showed the earth came about 4 billion years ago, not 6, 000, and the universe has existed at least 16 billion years!

This setting of the sacred bar careens outrageously high so that only the most blind, or most compartmentalized, or the most ultimately determined can leap the bottomless chasm up and over the cosmically high crossbar of faith.

For where is God if all comes about by accidental meandering and by dog-eat-dog, possibly dog-lick-dog evolution?

Is not God reversed in a kind of spiritual dyslexia, into doG?!

Evangelical Christians simply reset the bar slightly lower, explaining God started Life, so there!

Intelligent Design! We get the God-of-the-Gaps, a creator who hides in the shadow areas of existence where scientists haven’t yet figured out methods of inquiry and extensive evidence. So this compromise hardly solves the problem.

And don’t forget the dogged Fundamentalists and Calvinists. They, despite over whelming evidence, continue to claim scientists are just closet atheists, or brazen ones like Richard Dawkins, who are only rebelling against God by coming up with preposterous geological and biological lies.

But none of this is very encouraging for the honest and the circumspect individual. Why would the Creator start a creative process but then not guide it if God is all Loving, all Kind, all Good, all True?

Why would God major in pain, allowing or predetermining for billions of animals to suffer for countless eons and then go extinct, and for millions of humans to agonize, living excruciatingly painful lives down through a chaotic and vicious history? Why one endless moral/ethical scream?

And what happens to the bar (not speaking of the legal court or the local drinking den;-) if, as many scientists claim, eventually science will be able to explain from a natural point of view even abiogenesis, how first life started?

Then won’t God, the Creator, be simply a superfluous empty word, unneeded (as many scientists claim is already the case) and unwanted?

Then religion will be reduced to the garbage bin like other popular superstitions—astrology, phrenology, humoralism, etc. Astrology led eventually to astronomy, but once scientists understood the mechanism of the scientific method, astrology became so much delusionary baggage to be jettisoned.

The same goes for religion, so they say; once religion gave meaning to humankind, but now science gives meaning to our lives. The account in Genesis has been shown to be fallacious.

Of what use are fanciful myths like the Garden of Eden or 6 days of creation?

They smugly point out that Christians and other religious people have been crying “God,” like the boy of long ago who cried wolf, for so long without any evidence.

Now the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Why should anyone listen to our theological yelling?

A few humans take one last incredible leap. They point out that while the natural observable world is as Darwinians say—a naturally meandering survival game—such a scientific scenario doesn’t prove a Creator doesn’t exist, for the true God is hidden, is a philosophical reality “outside” of the province of the scientific method.

While this is perfectly arguable—this author is embarrassed to admit, in the past, he himself sometimes used the method--this philosophical God is, obviously, not the Creator in Genesis, not the God of Scripture (the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures) who micromanages every moment from eternity.

Thus, this last incredible leap is the most impossible of possibilities (to paraphrase a statement by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr).

This last impossible leap of spiritual pole vaulting jumps so incredibly high ones seems only able to do it by the sheer choosing—an existential leap, philosophical choice, in the manner of Kierkegaard, where one doesn’t weigh the possibility, or the rational doubts, but leaps, because not to leap is to despair.

Martin Gardner, the famous skeptic in his powerful philosophical book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, says he made this spiritual leap, and continues to trust in God because, the leap of Fideism, is worthy, and provides hope.

I am skeptical of fundamentalism, materialism, and fideism.

They all seem to scratch.

Oddly, unlike Gardner, my faith in God isn’t mainly emotional, but intellectual. But like him and other thinkers I admire, I know my days are numbered now that I have passed the halfway bar in my brief life, compared to incomprehensible cosmic deep time.

To half quote the famous metaphysical poet of extended conceits, John Donne: “When one has ‘donne’ his best, one is not done but have more” (from his poem “A Hymn to God the Father”).

There are still more difficulties, higher bars to jump over. Try leaping over not only the moon, but the universe!

The best answer would seem to be Hegelian—that a synthesis is better than either the former thesis (Christian orthodoxy) or antithesis (the Enlightenment).

We humans both yearn and learn.

Francis Collins, a Christian and a scientist, the leader of the Human Genome Project has created one such synthesis and created the BioLogos Foundation: Science and Faith in Dialogue.

We spend whole life-times seeking, and yet still have difficult questions.

Be honest, avoid scratching.

Leap with faith and reason.

Keep them in creative tension.

And cross the bar of existence with zest,
not only with confusion and “my God, why” despair
but, finally, in purposeful “it is finished” hope.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox