There is a famous, perhaps apocryphal, story about an anthropologist discussing their creation story with some primitive tribesman or the other. 

What does the world rest on?

A giant turtle.

And what does the giant turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And what does that turtle rest on?

It's turtles, all the way down.

​

I've been through my story before - devout Christian, lost my faith at 19, began a quest for god that went through all the major religions. Did not find (him).

Spent years with relativity and quantum mechanics and evolution. Became familiar with black holes and big bangs.

I can try to come to grips with the universe as it is and understand that billions of years is a very long time, and an almost infinite number of things can happen over that time that can lead to the complexity of today's world.

I can grasp the anthropic principle, which in my telling, is that of all the possible universes, ours has to be precisely - precisely - the way it is in order for life to emerge. Remarkable, but it has to be that way to be any way at all. Therefore, it is that way.

Quantum mechanics is literally bonkers. Maybe it has to be this way, but building reality out of waves, fields and probability is off-the-charts weird. Relativity is strange, but does not even to begin to measure up to quantum mechanics.

It's ok for there not to be a personal god. I would rather it be the other way - I think. Things can go awry when dealing with infinite power in your life in a be-careful-what-you-ask-for kind of way. It does not need to be benign - in fact, it is not clear that the concept of benign would matter.

And a life after death with my loved ones would be indescribeably wonderful.

But, I can't escape the god of the gap - the being (?) that must be there to be the ultimate answer to all of the hard questions.

And the god that made the god of the gap.

And ...

So, I am agnostic without the words to describe the ultimate.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal came out today that does a pretty good job of describing where I am and where I will be stuck, because there is nowhere to go from here.

Except a leap of faith to Yahweh, Jesus or Allah or some(body), and I can't do that.

There is a song from 1952 by Frankie Laine - I Believe - that I still love. It includes the lines, "Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf, or see the sky - I believe."

I don't believe, but I do marvel - and wonder.

It's still turtles, all the way down.

​

God, Creation and ‘The Story of Everything’

HOUSES OF WORSHIP

By Peter Robinson

The most striking feature of “The Story of Everything,” the science documentary that will appear in theaters on April 30, is the sheer nerve of the thing. First it claims that modern science has reality all wrong—and then that we know this because of science itself. By the end of the film’s 97 minutes, you’ll likely find yourself concluding those claims aren’t wrong.

The film opens with 19thcentury figures who gave science a purely materialist view of reality. Clips of contemporary scientists show this view remains dominant today. “Science,” biologist Richard Dawkins says, “has now achieved an emancipation” from the idea of a “Creator.” “Existence,” physicist Lawrence Krauss announces, is “a cosmic accident.” Astrophysicist Neil de-Grasse Tyson reduces the notion of a Creator to a quaint absurdity. As “The Story of Everything” demonstrates, these scientists haven’t been paying attention.

The documentary presents three basic scientific findings over the past century. The Big Bang comes first. A hundred years ago Einstein himself held to the then-standard belief that the universe had no beginning. Astronomical observations forced him to change his mind. In the 1960s Stephen Hawking demonstrated the Big Bang in theory, while Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had detected the background radiation that proved decisive evidence of the event.

If the Big Bang produced the universe, what produced the Big Bang? “Any entity capable of causing the universe,” says narrator Stephen Meyer, a philosopher of science, “must be external to, or separate from, the universe itself. It must . . . transcend time and space.” In discovering the Big Bang, in other words, science itself has walked us to the doorstep of what philosophers called the Prime Mover.

“The Story of Everything” then turns to the discovery in recent decades of fine-tuning. The universe possesses

a long list of properties, each of which must be just so. If gravity were infinitesimally stronger, all matter would have collapsed back in on itself. But if gravity were infinitesimally weaker, stars and galaxies would never have formed. To support life, Earth itself must lie just the right distance from the sun, project just the right magnetic field, possess just the right gravity to hold in place an atmosphere of just the right density, and on and on.

The most arresting argument against materialism arrives with the third scientific finding the documentary presents, the discovery of the astonishing complexity of even the simplest forms of life. One lowly bacterium possesses a flagellum— a tiny tail or rotor. The flagellum comprises more than 30 distinct parts, so similar to those of an outboard motor that biologists speak of the flagellum’s propeller, drive shaft and so forth. How could such a structure possibly have evolved its way into existence one random mutation at a time?

This brings us to DNA. Each double helix contains vast arrays of chemical subunits that function like the zeroes and ones in a computer program. By itself, DNA, which lies in every living cell, accomplishes nothing. It functions as a set of instructions. It tells the cell both how to construct each of the complex proteins it needs to function and how to create new cells. DNA represents, in a word, information. Code.

This poses a problem for materialists. In Darwin’s day scientists could assume that cells contained only a kind of undifferentiated protoplasm. The discovery of DNA means that the cell is, as Mr. Meyer says, “an enclosure of a sophisticated information storage, transmission and processing system.” We have already encountered the Prime Mover. Here we learn that the entity is also the Prime Coder.

“The Story of Everything” isn’t some snake-handling tent revival. It demonstrates the inadequacies of materialism unapologetically, insisting that the Big Bang, fine-tuning and DNA all indicate that behind reality stands

A new documentary claims that modern science has reality all wrong.

not nothing but something. Something intelligent. But there the documentary stops, making no attempt to convert viewers to any particular belief in the divine.

Only once does the film display toward the materialists even a whiff of condescension. Certain materialists have come up with a couple of new theories. One posits the existence of billions of universes, arguing that happenstance alone accounts for the improbability of our inhabiting this one. The other holds that we live in a simulation. All that we take for reality, according to this theory, exists in some gigantic supercomputer. “There is nothing wrong with any of this,” mathematician David Berlinski tartly remarks. “It just shouldn’t be mistaken for anything serious.”

The documentary concludes with “the beauty problem.” “Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that’s relevant for their survival,” Mr. Meyer says. “This is actually a big problem in evolutionary biology.”

The film cuts to a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower on a cactus, a sea turtle floating over a coral reef, pink flamingos on a green lake, a snowflake, a butterfly. Philosopher Timothy McGrew then observes that Mr. Dawkins “ has famously said that ‘the universe has at bottom just those properties one would expect if there were no design, no purpose, only blind pitiless indifference.’ That’s an interesting claim.”

By this point, if you’re like me, you’ll be unable to help yourself. All that? The result of blind indifference? Yeah, right.

Mr. Robinson is a distinguished policy fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Civitas Institute.