The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

Because of the vitality of religious faith in the world, efforts to suppress or control it often serve only to make it stronger. When the Chinese Communists expelled Western missionaries after the Second World War, they thought they were killing off Christianity in China. Instead, this move only served to make the leadership of the Chinese church more indigenous and therefore to strengthen it.

He contended that doctrinal differences between Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism were superficial and insignificant, that they all believed in the same God. But when I asked him who that God was, he described him as an all-loving Spirit in the universe. The problem with this position is its inconsistency. It insists that doctrine is unimportant, but at the same time assumes doctrinal beliefs about the nature of God that are at loggerheads with those of all the major faiths. Buddhism doesn’t believe in a personal God at all. Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in a God who holds people accountable for their beliefs and practices and whose attributes could not all be reduced to love. Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself. It holds a specific view of God, which is touted as superior and more enlightened than the beliefs of most major religions. So the proponents of this view do the very thing they forbid in others.

it is argued, the religions of the world each have a grasp on part of the truth about spiritual reality, but none can see the whole elephant or claim to have a comprehensive vision of the truth. This illustration backfires on its users. The story is told from the point of view of someone who is not blind. How could you know that each blind man only sees part of the elephant unless you claim to be able to see the whole elephant? There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others] . . . We have to ask: ‘What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make?’8 How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?

Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isn’t that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the ‘sin’ of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, ‘Our culture’s approach to other cultures is superior to yours.’ We are then doing the very thing we forbid others to do.13 The historian C. John Sommerville has pointed out that ‘a religion can be judged only on the basis of another religion’. You can’t evaluate a religion except on the basis of some ethical criteria that in the end amounts to your own religious stance.14

which is, of course, an article of faith. As he admits, he can’t avoid believing that it would be better for people if they adopted his beliefs about reality and human dignity rather than Billy Graham’s. It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.

What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing.

Pragmatists say that we should leave our deeper worldviews behind and find consensus about ‘what works’ – but our view of what works is determined by (to use a Wendell Berry title) what we think people are for. Any picture of happy human life that ‘works’ is necessarily informed by deep-seated beliefs about the purpose of human life.21 Even the most secular pragmatists come to the table with deep commitments and narrative accounts of what it means to be human. Rorty insists that religion-based beliefs are conversation stoppers. But all of our most fundamental convictions about things are beliefs that are nearly impossible to justify to those who don’t share them. Secular concepts such as ‘self-realisation’ and ‘autonomy’ are impossible to prove and are ‘conversation stoppers’ just as much as appeals to the Bible.22

but Ms A could retort, ‘Who says ethics must be the same for everyone?’ Ms B would finally exclaim: ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a society like the one you are describing!’ In this interchange Ms B has tried to follow John Rawls and find universally accessible, ‘neutral and objective’ arguments that would convince everyone that we must not starve the poor. She has failed because there are none. In the end Ms B affirms the equality and dignity of human individuals simply because she believes it is true and right. She takes as an article of faith that people are more valuable than rocks or trees – though she can’t prove such a belief scientifically. Her public policy proposals are ultimately based on a religious stance.23

Christianity provides a firm basis for respecting people of other faiths. Jesus assumes that non-believers in the culture around them will gladly recognise much Christian behaviour as ‘good’ (Matthew 5:16; cf. 1 Peter 2:12). That assumes some overlap between the Christian constellation of values and those of any particular culture28 and of any other religion.29 Why would this overlap exist? Christians believe that all human beings are made in the image of God, capable of goodness and wisdom. The biblical doctrine of the universal image of God, therefore, leads Christians to expect non-believers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs could make them. The biblical doctrine of universal sinfulness also leads Christians to expect believers will be worse in practice than their orthodox beliefs should make them. So there will be plenty of ground for respectful co-operation. Christianity not only leads its members to believe people of other faiths have goodness and wisdom to offer, it also leads them to expect that many will live lives morally superior to their own. Most people in our culture believe that, if there is a God, we can relate to him and go to heaven through leading a good life. Let’s call this the ‘moral improvement’ view. Christianity teaches the very opposite. In the Christian understanding, Jesus does not tell us how to live so we can merit salvation. Rather, he comes to forgive and save us through his life and death in our place. God’s grace does not c...

The Graeco-Roman world tended to despise the poor, but Christians gave generously not only to their own poor but to those of other faiths. In broader society, women had very low status, being subjected to high levels of female infanticide, forced marriages and lack of economic equality. Christianity afforded women much greater security and equality than had previously existed in the ancient classical world.30 During the terrible urban plagues of the first two centuries, Christians cared for all the sick and dying in the city, often at the cost of their lives.31

Philosopher J. L. Mackie makes this case against God in his book The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982). He states it this way: If a good and powerful God exists, he would not allow pointless evil, but because there is much unjustifiable, pointless evil in the world, the traditional good and powerful God could not exist. Some other god or no god may exist, but not the traditional God.4 Many other philosophers have identified a major flaw in this reasoning. Tucked away within the assertion that the world is filled with pointless evil is a hidden premise, namely, that if evil appears pointless to me, then it must be pointless. This reasoning is, of course, fallacious. Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Again we see lurking within supposedly hard-nosed scepticism an enormous faith in one’s own cognitive faculties. If our minds can’t plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can’t be any! This is blind faith of a high order.

If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’? . . . What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? . . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too – for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. . . . Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple.6 Lewis recognised that modern objections to God are based on a sense of fair play and justice. People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction and violence of the strong against the weak – these things are all perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair and unjust? The non-believer in God doesn’t have a good basis for being outraged at injustice, which, as Lewis points out, was the reason for objecting to God in the first place. If you are sure that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make your judgement.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga said it like this: Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live. . . . A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (. . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God].7 In short, the problem of tragedy, suffering and injustice is a problem for everyone. It is at least as big a problem for non-belief in God as for belief. It is therefore a mistake, though an understandable one, to think that if you abandon belief in God it somehow makes the problem of evil easier to handle. A woman in my church once confronted me about sermon illustrations in which evil events turned out for the good. She had lost a husband in an act of violence during a robbery. She also had several children with severe mental and emotional problems. She insisted that for every one story in which evil turns out for good there are one hundred in which there is no conceivable silver lining. In the same way, much of the discussion so far in this chapter may sound cold and irrelevant to a real-life sufferer. ‘So what if ...

The Gospel narratives all show that Jesus did not face his approaching death with anything like the aplomb and fearlessness that was widely expected in a spiritual hero.

We cannot fathom, however, what it would be like to lose not just spousal love or parental love that has lasted several years, but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. Jesus’ sufferings would have been eternally unbearable. Christian theology has always recognised that Jesus bore, as the substitute in our place, the endless exclusion from God that the human race has merited. In the Garden of Gethsemane, even the beginning and foretaste of this experience began to put Jesus into a state of shock. New Testament scholar Bill Lane writes: ‘Jesus came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven opened before him, and he staggered.’8 On the cross, Jesus’s cry of dereliction – ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – is a deeply relational statement. Lane writes: ‘The cry has a ruthless authenticity . . . Jesus did not die renouncing God. Even in the inferno of abandonment he did not surrender his faith in God but expressed his anguished prayer in a cry of affirmation, “My God, my God”.’9 Jesus still uses the language of intimacy – ‘my God’ – even as he experiences infinite separation from the Father.

The biblical view of things is resurrection—not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater. A few years ago I had a horrible nightmare in which I dreamed that everyone in my family had died. When I awoke my relief was enormous – but there was much more than just relief. My delight in each member of my family was tremendously enriched. I looked at each one and realised how grateful I was for them, how deeply I loved them. Why? My joy had been greatly magnified by the nightmare. My delight on awakening took the terror up into itself, as it were, so that in the end my love for them was only greater for my having lost them and found them again. This same dynamic is at work when you lose some possession you take for granted. When you find it again (having thought it was gone for ever) you cherish and appreciate it in a far deeper way.

Embracing the Christian doctrines of the incarnation and cross brings profound consolation in the face of suffering. The doctrine of the resurrection can instil us with a powerful hope. It promises that we will get the life we most longed for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice or salvation.14 Dostoevsky put it perfectly when he wrote: I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.15 More succinctly, C. S. Lewis wrote: They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.16 This is the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering. It will not only be ended but so radically vanquished that what has happened will only serve to make our future life and joy infinitely greater.

The future glory of a glorified world

However, the objection that all truth is a power play falls prey to the same problem as the objection that all truth is culturally conditioned. If you try to explain away all assertions of truth as one or the other or something else you find yourself in an untenable position. C. S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man: But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? . . . a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.6 If you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement. If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement. To see through everything is not to see. Foucault was pressing the truth of his analysis on others even as he denied the very category of truth. Some kind of truth-claim, then, seems unavoidable. The inconsistency of working against oppression when you refuse to admit there is such a thing as truth is the reason that postmodern ‘theory’ and ‘deconstruction’ is perhaps on the wane.7 G. K. Chesterton made this very same point nearly a hundre...

Christianity requires particular beliefs in order to be a member of its community. It is not open to all. This is socially divisive, critics argue. Human communities should instead be completely inclusive, open to all on the basis of our common humanity. Proponents of this view point out that many urban neighbourhoods contain residents of different races and religious beliefs who nonetheless live and work together as a community. All that is required for such community life is that each person respects the privacy and rights of others and works for equal access to education, jobs and political decision-making for all. Common moral beliefs are not necessary, it is said, in a ‘liberal democracy’. Unfortunately, the view just expressed is a vast oversimplification. Liberal democracy is based on an extensive list of assumptions – a preference of individual to community rights, a division between private and public morality, and the sanctity of personal choice. All of these beliefs are foreign to many other cultures.9 A liberal democracy is based then (as is every community) on a shared set of very particular beliefs. Western society is based on shared commitments to reason, rights and justice, even though there is no universally recognised definition of any of these.10 Every account of justice and reason is embedded in a set of some particular beliefs about the meaning of human life that is not shared with everyone.11 The idea of a totally inclusive community is, therefore, an...

Inclusivity is a distinctly western belief that other cuktures do not share. therefore how can we say that our morality is correct or greater especially since this philosophy only started recently recently

Any community that did not hold its members accountable for specific beliefs and practices would have no corporate identity and would not really be a community at all.13 We cannot consider a group exclusive simply because it has standards for its members. Is there then no way to judge whether a community is open and caring rather than narrow and oppressive? Yes, there is. Here is a far better set of tests: which community has beliefs that lead its members to treat people in other communities with love and respect – to serve them and meet their needs? Which community’s beliefs lead it to demonise and attack those who violate their boundaries rather than treating them with kindness, humility and winsomeness? We should criticise Christians when they are condemning and ungracious to unbelievers.14 But we should not criticise churches when they maintain standards for membership in accord with their beliefs. Every community must do the same.

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith . . . in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture. . . . The converts had to work out . . . a Hellenistic way of being a Christian. [So] no one owns the Christian faith. There is no ‘Christian culture’ the way there is an ‘Islamic culture’ which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco. . . .24

This oversimplifies, however. Freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. In fact, in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation. If you have musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practise, practise, practise the piano for years. This is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won’t be able to do with the time you invest in practising. If you have the talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. What have you done? You’ve deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things. This does not mean that restriction, discipline and constraint are intrinsically, automatically liberating. For example, a five-foot-four, 9-stone young adult male should not set his heart on becoming a top American footballer. All the discipline and effort in the world will only frustrate and crush him (literally). He is banging his head against a physical reality – he simply does not have the potential. In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanise us.

If we only grow intellectually, vocationally and physically through judicious constraints – why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?

The popular concept – that we should each determine our own morality – is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the church for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that ‘Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.’ I always responded to the speakers by asking, ‘Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behaviour?’ They would invariably say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I would ask, ‘Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is “there” that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?’ Almost always, the response to that question was a silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.

One of the principles of love – either love for a friend or romantic love – is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy. If you want the ‘freedoms’ of love – the fulfilment, security, sense of worth that it brings – you must limit your freedom in many ways. You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy. The French novelist Françoise Sagan expressed this well in an interview in Le Monde. She expressed that she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets: Interviewer: Then you have had the freedom you wanted? Sagan: Yes . . . I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone. . . . But one’s not in love all the time. Apart from that . . . I’m free.28 Sagan is right. A love relationship limits your personal options. Again we are confronted with the complexity of the concept of ‘freedom’. Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.

At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanising. Surely it will have to be ‘one way’, God’s way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God – there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me. While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us – in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition – as sinners – and died in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, ‘I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I’ll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me.’ If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and others. St Paul writes, ‘the love of Christ constrains us’ (2 Corinthians 5:14).

Think of people you consider fanatical. They’re overbearing, self-righteous, opinionated, insensitive and harsh. Why? It’s not because they are too Christian but because they are not Christian enough. They are fanatically zealous and courageous, but they are not fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving or understanding – as Christ was. Because they think of Christianity as a self-improvement programme they emulate the Jesus of the whips in the temple, but not the Jesus who said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ (John 8:7). What strikes us as overly fanatical is actually a failure to be fully committed to Christ and his gospel.

Extremism and fanaticism, which lead to injustice and oppression, are a constant danger within any body of religious believers. For Christians, however, the antidote is not to tone down and moderate their faith, but rather to grasp a fuller and truer faith in Christ.

If this world is all there is, and if the goods of this world are the only love, comfort and wealth I will ever have, why should I sacrifice them for others? Bonhoeffer, however, had a joy and hope in God that made it possible for him to do what he did: It is not a religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia [repentance]: not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ. . . . Pain is a holy angel. . . . Through him men have become greater than through all the joys of the world. . . . The pain of longing, which often can be felt physically, must be there, and we shall not and need not talk it away. But it needs to be overcome every time, and thus there is an even holier angel than the one of pain, that is the one of joy in God.18

Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings about the consequences of seeking power and control rather than wisdom and glad enjoyment of the ‘givenness’ of God’s creation.5

We believe so deeply in our personal rights in this realm that the very idea of a divine Judgement Day seems impossible. However, as Lewis shows us, this belief is tied to a quest for control and power that has had terrible consequences in recent world history. Not all the human race today has accepted modernity’s view of things. Why should we act as if it is inescapable?

a woman told me that the very idea of a judging God was offensive. I said, ‘Why aren’t you offended by the idea of a forgiving God?’ She looked puzzled. I continued, ‘I respectfully urge you to consider your cultural location when you find the Christian teaching about hell offensive.’ I went on to point out that secular Westerners get upset by the Christian doctrines of hell, but they find biblical teaching about turning the other cheek and forgiving enemies appealing. I then asked her to consider how someone from a very different culture sees Christianity. In traditional societies the teaching about ‘turning the other cheek’ makes absolutely no sense. It offends people’s deepest instincts about what is right. For them the doctrine of a God of judgement, however, is no problem at all. That society is repulsed by aspects of Christianity that Western people enjoy, and are attracted by the aspects that secular Westerners can’t stand.

‘How can a God of love be also a God filled with wrath and anger? If he is loving and perfect, he should forgive and accept everyone. He shouldn’t get angry.’ I always start my response by pointing out that all loving people are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite of but because of their love. If you love a person and you see someone ruining them – even they themselves – you get angry. As Becky Pippert puts it in her book Hope Has Its Reasons: Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.6 The Bible says that God’s wrath flows from his love and delight in his creation. He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying its peace and integrity. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and loving toward all he has made . . . The Lord watches over those who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy. (Psalms 145:17-20)

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who has seen the violence in the Balkans, does not see the doctrine of God’s judgement that way. He writes: If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence – that God would not be worthy of worship. . . . The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God. . . . My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many . . . in the West. . . . [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die . . . [with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.7

That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying ‘I’m sorry! Let me out!’ The people on the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would rather have their ‘freedom’, as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a supreme and tragic irony, their choice has ruined their own potential for greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, ‘the greatest monument to human freedom’. As Romans 1:24 says, God ‘gave them up to . . . their desires’. All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that? Lewis writes: There are only two kinds of people – those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.13

The belief in a God of pure love – who accepts everyone and judges no one – is a powerful act of faith. Not only is there no evidence for it in the natural order, but there is almost no historical, religious textual support for it outside of Christianity. The more one looks at it, the less justified it appears.

When evolution is turned into an All-encompassing Theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, feel and do as the product of natural selection, then we are not in the arena of science, but of philosophy. Evolution as an All-encompassing Theory has insurmountable difficulties as a worldview. We will look at these difficulties in Chapter 9. Dawkins argues that if you believe in evolution as a biological mechanism you must also believe in philosophical naturalism. But why? The same year that Dawkins’s The God Delusion was published, Francis Collins published The Language of God. Collins is an eminent research scientist and head of the Human Genome Project. He believes in evolutionary science and critiques the Intelligent Design movement that denies the transmutation of species. However, Collins believes that the fine-tuning, beauty and order of nature nonetheless point to a divine Creator, and describes his conversion from atheism to Christianity. Here then is what Dawkins says can’t exist, someone with a firm belief in evolution as biological mechanism, but who completely rejects philosophical naturalism. Collins, of course, is not alone.7