An agnostic friend just sent me this quotation by Albert Einstein:

·       “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”

 

Einstein correctly observed a “universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws.” He also correctly noted that a child observes that someone must have designed it all. However, Einstein claimed the this is the “attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.” I suspect that, on some level, the greatest minds must realize this. However, what is apparent is that many such minds deny this.

 

Why? I don’t think that it is because of their intelligence or even their education. Nor do I think that any scientific findings have surfaced that have undermined the many apparent appearances of design that children gladly note. If anything, science has continued to reveal what had first been noted in greater detail—" a universe marvelously arranged.”

 

How then do we explain the presence of atheists? I think that it is simply a matter of will over ID, as NYU Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and avowed atheist, Thomas Nagel had observed:

 

·       For a long time I have found the materialist account [that the world consists of nothing more than molecules in motion] of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes…The current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense. (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 5)

 

Why then does the theory of evolution still hold sway in the halls of science? I think that it is merely a matter of will.