The cosmos as memento mori: the ultimate significance of modern science.

"IN TERMS OF FULFILLMENT of declared intentions," writes medical researcher and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, "science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon. Visit and land on the moon? A fait accompli. Abolish smallpox? A pleasure. Extend our human life span by at least a quarter? Yes, assuredly, but that will take a little bit longer." (1) Even in the late nineteenth century, science had accomplished so much that Friedrich Nietzsche feared that the boundless philosophical "optimism" inherent in "the spirit of science" had driven all sensitivity to tragedy out of Western culture. (2) And writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, neo-Darwinian philosopher of science John Gray has complained that many people now suppose that "science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realised. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal." (3)

When the focus shifts from the technological to the theoretical, from what science can do to what it can explain, the same attitude of triumphal optimism often prevails. After all, science can now explain the beginning of the universe in a pre-Big Bang fluctuation in a quantum vacuum, can account for the origins of species (including Homo sapiens) through the winnowing effects of natural selection on random mutations, and even appears close to linking the physics of relativity to the physics of quantum mechanics through the sophisticated eleven-dimensional mathematics of String Theory. Science has grown so conceptually powerful that many regard other sources of truth as quite superfluous. Many of those well-versed in the sciences regard religion and theology as particularly irrelevant. As twentieth-century American physicist I.I. Rabi once declared in the youthful exuberance of his initiation in astrophysics, "It's all very simple, who needs God?" (4)

Such sanguine scientific godlessness strengthens what Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecky identifies as the central belief governing modern scholarship: namely, "the deeply stimulating conviction that man ... can alone and unaided by any divine grace or revelation reach in thought the Absolute, discover the ultimate nature of the world and his own nature." (5) A hopeful scientific atheism also swells the litany of beliefs that philosopher Leszek Kolakowski characterizes as a type of modern Prometheanism: "Human self-creativity has no limits, evil and suffering are contingent, life is infinitely inventive ... the human mind does not need any revelation or teaching from without." (6)

However, the modern confidence in science as a prop for ebullient atheism turns out to be grievously misplaced. For only a shallow and largely technological perspective on modern science harmonizes with a godless optimism. The theoretical pioneers of modern science actually offer cheery-minded atheists very little to support their optimism. Instead, these scientific pioneers actually confront those who are deeply knowledgeable with their findings with a stark choice: either a rigorous and exclusive reliance upon science within a universe of hopelessness, barren of any ultimate grounds for meaning or morality and doomed to eventual extinction, or a chastened and partial reliance upon science within a universe endowed with hope, meaning, and morality by a Deity whose wondrous powers transcend scientific categories.

To their considerable credit, scientists do force hard choices by insisting on hard realities. Unlike the many modern scholars who have reduced truth to mere individual interpretation, socially negotiated, scientists still dare use the word truth without the skeptical quotation marks now de rigueur among academic sophisticates. Biologist Richard Dawkins, for instance, ridicules modern sophists whose doctrines of the cultural relativity of all socially constructed meanings imply that "a tribe which believes that the moon is an old calabash tossed just above the treetops ... [holds a view] just as true as our scientific belief that the moon is a large Earth satellite about a quarter of a million miles away" (7) Such theorists, Dawkins asserts, betray the falsity of their doctrines every time they make a journey by relying on aerospace engineers rather than flying-carpet fabulists. "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite," he writes. (8)

Science writer A.K. Dewdney likewise attacks cultural relativists who would dissolve all objective truth in a sea of cultural relativism. "A stone thrown in a vacuum will [actually] execute a parabola with a precision great enough to rule out any other polynomial function as a possible path," Dewdney insists, as he mocks the cultural relativists who suppose that "Galileo and Newton lay this fantasy upon us because they were Italian or English" or because they were "expressing a post-Renaissance yearning for perfection." (9) Philosopher Robert Fogelin highlights the epistemological importance of science in an age of skeptical relativism when he discusses how the initial failure of the Hubble Telescope "illustrates what is it is like to encounter reality--to be constrained by it.... There are certain things that you can't talk your way out of." (10) Fogelin thus takes the Hubble episode as paradigmatic of the way empirical science "provides a check against our thought," its experiments bringing us up against an "external permanency ... something upon which our thinking has no effect." (11)

By bringing us into contact with "external permanency," science thus overthrows the fantasies of intellectuals who suppose that hermeneutic communities are entirely free to construct their own realities through imagination, interpretation, and dialogue. "Empiricism," the scholar of science W.E. Hocking remarks, "is ... a form of self-denial, a moral will to let the object speak for itself. Empiricism holds that if we allow it to do so, the object will speak, i.e. that truth is accessible." (12) Expressing the deep scientific faith that objects can speak to us in ways that transcend individual and cultural bias, the American physicist Joseph Henry invoked theological language just before performing an important scientific experiment: "We are going to ask God a question. Let us pray that we do not miss his answer when He gives it to us." (13)

The problem for those who would take science as their guide in seeking some pattern of hope, meaning, and morality in the universe is not then its objectivity. That objectivity is a virtue, a strength. Such objectivity can at least challenge the solipsism and cultural relativism now widely prevalent in a truth-averse world. Rather, the problem with taking science as a guide to hope, meaning, and morality is that the objective truths of modern science are utterly lacking in metaphysical content. Indeed, on its own terms, science cannot even give a satisfying account of human beings as seekers of truth. Within the neo-Darwinian paradigm, all human behavior--like the behavior of every other species--ultimately derives from the quest for reproductive success, nothing more. "Darwinian theory," Gray writes, "tells us that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. More often it is a disadvantage.... In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage." Because "truth has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error," Gray draws the only scientifically consistent conclusion: "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." (14)

A science that denies humans the power to seek truth must inevitably also deny them the power to seek virtue and goodness. Thus sociobiologist E.O. Wilson explains that "all higher ethical values" are "constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool.... Human behavior--like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it--is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function." (15) Dawkins puts it even more bluntly: "We are survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." (16)

Even a neo-Darwinian commentator like Matt Ridley, who argues that the biological selfishness of individual genes can still actually foster cooperative and even altruistic behavior in the right social environment, must concede that to shape our social environment in ways that will elicit congenial behaviors while also suppressing certain genetically-programmed traits of brutality, greed, and rapaciousness, social engineers must deliberately propagate untruth. Though he admits that "it is a distasteful idea for those of us who think the truth is more interesting than lies," Ridley's neo-Darwinian ethics compels him to conclude that "the first thing we should do to create a good society is to conceal the truth about humankind's propensity for self-interest, the better to delude our fellows into thinking that they are noble savages inside." (17)

In any case, Ridley's elitist, manipulative, and deceptive attempt to rescue goodness from the mixed ethical patrimony of evolutionary biology finally exposes the ultimate amorality of his scientific premises. As political scientist John G. West has pointed out, "Almost by definition in Darwin's system, whatever exists must somehow be good in a biological sense. So, of course, biology supports traditional morality--just as it supports traditional immorality. Every trait that survives, after all, is somehow a product of natural selection.... When modern boosters of evolutionary psychology .... argue that rape, infanticide, and adultery are fundamentally the products of natural selection, they are simply following in Darwin's footsteps.... Darwin's theory makes it [much] harder to argue for natural distinctions between virtue and vice." (18) And it is with neo-Darwinian ruthlessness that Gray delivers the coup de grace to any traditional conception of human virtue: "We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine." (19)

Just as morality disappears in an exclusively scientific world view, so too does any coherent understanding of or appreciation for human language. Even an agnostic linguist such as Noam Chomsky--who attributes the human capacity to speak to "random mutations"--admits that modern science can give "no idea why or how" humans speak. (20) In a compelling refutation of all scientific attempts to explain language origins, Chomsky concludes apodictically: "Neither physics nor biology nor psychology gives us any clue as to how to deal with these matters." (21) Nor should it be forgotten that Darwin--who vainly expended tremendous effort in trying to account for language origins--himself experienced a "curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic functions," aesthetic functions necessary for the appreciation of the most refined form of language: namely, poetry. Darwin traced his eventual loss of responsiveness to poetry to a single-minded focus on science that had transformed his mind into "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts," and he worried that this loss of responsiveness might possibly be "injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." (22)

But then the miracle of literary artistry can hardly stir a sense of wonder in the minds of scientists whose theoretical premises deny to the poet--and to everyone else--the volitional autonomy traditionally central to human dignity. Poems, like all other products of human activity, inexorably emerge from a neural biochemistry that simply plays out the possibilities scripted in the probabilistic equations of quantum micro-physics. The freedom of the will foundational to any sense of human dignity simply does not fit within modern science. "For reasons I don't really understand," remarks biologically-minded philosopher John Searle, "evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behavior." Nonetheless, Searle discounts that "experience of freedom" as illusory because "the bottom-up conception of physical explanation ... on which the past three hundred years of science are based" can only mean that "psychological facts about ourselves ... are entirely causally explicable in terms of and entirely realised in systems of elements at the fundamental micro-physical level. Our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical freedom," (23) meaning the only kind of freedom that gives human nature moral dignity. Gray follows a similar line of scientific logic in discarding freedom of the human will: "Autonomy," he writes, "means acting on reasons I have consciously chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing." (24)

Because it denies the mind the power to pursue truth, the soul the agency to choose its own path of action, a modern science divorced from all other sources of truth must rob thought of meaning and purpose. If not complemented by other sources of truth, modern science indeed pushes the thinker trapped within its metaphysically barren limits toward what G.K. Chesterton aptly called "the suicide of thought." Chesterton perceptively analyzed that suicide as the consequence of "modern fashions of thought" that destroy intellectual life by fostering the belief that "there is no validity in any human thought." The radical scientific skeptic, Chesterton points out, must ask "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" (25)

But then how can human thought not risk self-extinction so long as it remains within a modern science that views human consciousness itself as a scandalous puzzle? By the mid-nineteenth century, the origin of consciousness already loomed as a problem that biologist and co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Wallace regarded as an insoluble riddle within "the physics of the brain." This riddle, in Wallace's view, counted as strong evidence that "man does not owe his entire physical and mental development to [evolution's] unaided action." (26) Writing in the late twentieth century, physicist Andrew Zee still identifies "the exclusion of consciousness" as "a fundamental guiding tenet of science," as he marvels "that science in general, and physics in particular, do not address this most striking of all observable phenomena." (27)

But if science remains mute when contemplating the origins of human consciousness, theoretical physicists have much to say about the ultimate destiny of that consciousness. And in what modern scientists have to say about mankind's ultimate destiny, they make science the ultimate source of despair, not hope. For as physicists look into the far-distant future, they anticipate not a vista of perpetual progress but rather a vista of utter extinction. They anticipate the extinction of not only all of mankind, but also of all this planet's other life forms. They indeed foresee the eradication of all life everywhere in the cosmos; they even anticipate the eventual extirpation of all sources of light and energy in the universe. In the very end, they anticipate the dissolution of the very atoms that make up the universe. Thus chemist Lawrence M. Krauss pauses only briefly to remark that "our home [Earth] ... has been uninhabitable before, and it certainly will be again," before hurrying on to contemplate "the dying solar system" in which this Earth spins. Finally, Krauss ponders how "the very processes that created the matter that makes up the universe of our experience will one day slowly return our dust to nothingness." He thus peers into a far distant future when "all memory of the star that sheltered the planet [Earth] ... for a brief 10 billion years will have long disappeared." At that point, Kraussmuses, "The memory of the galaxy that housed the sun will have long disappeared. Even the light from all of the stars in the universe may have long disappeared." And then the time comes when even the subatomic particles left over from the now dark and lifeless universe begin to disappear: "The Process will continue until ... all atoms in the universe are no longer.... [When] protons and neutrons cease to exist, they may in turn decay into electrons and their antiparticle partners, positrons. By this time, the universe will be too diffuse for electrons and positrons to find each other in the desert of largely empty space." (28)

Prometheus, it would appear, has stumbled into a very dark and dreary place!

Though he disapproves of their labors, physicist and Benedictine priest Stanley Jaki does see some physicists trying to dispel this ultimate darkness by trying "to give eternity to the universe" with "steady-state" and "oscillating" models for the universe. (29) But because physicists lack any empirical evidence for these models, physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne sees empirical observations compelling "most cosmologists" to accept the ultimate future sketched out by Krauss, a future in which the universe "grow[s] steadily colder and more dilute." In any case, Polkinghorne adds that in the only other cosmological scenario now claiming any scientific plausibility, "the universe implodes into a cosmic melting pot." "However fruitful the universe may seem today," Polkinghorne remarks, "its end lies in futility," with universal death awaiting mankind in all of the "certain prognostications of the cosmic future." (30)

A rigorous and probing investigation of science thus thoroughly dispels the optimism surrounding the scientific enterprise. Based on mere fascination with technological marvels or on superficial knowledge of a few explanatory schemata, such optimism disappears from a science that strips man of all moral dignity, grants no secure place for consciousness or free will, and consigns all life to eventual oblivion. Even the Baconian slogan "Knowledge is power"--so useful to centuries of propagandists of science--proves ultimately illusory. For the knowledge that science finally delivers about the destiny of the cosmos renders mankind not powerful but powerless, utterly incapable of averting the death of the very stars and the atoms that constitute them.

Once scientific meliorism has been exposed as a cosmic fraud--or, at best, a very temporary palliative for those marking time while awaiting certain extinction--nothing but despair awaits those who regard science as their only source of truth.

Still, those who would defend ultimate human hope and dignity err greatly if they simply dismiss science as irrelevant or attack it as a philosophic enemy. Science threatens human dignity only for those who unnecessarily allow it to contract and define the limits of truth. For those who see in it only a part of truth--a significant part, but not the most important part--science can complement and enrich truths derived from other sources. Science can indeed clarify our non-scientific thinking in several important ways.

First, because of the very way an exclusively scientific perspective undercuts the metaphysical premises of hope, of dignity, and of free will, examining that perspective actually--and paradoxically--can open up a clear and definitive human choice. On the one hand, the modern thinker can shield himself against error and confusion by restricting his intellectual horizons to empirically test-able and mathematically predictable scientific truths. Such is the choice of those who ruthless apply Ockham's Razor of conceptual parsimony to cut away from their scientific world view every bit of poetry, religious doctrine, or imaginative vision not testable in the laboratory or demonstrable through mathematical proof. But whether they initially realize it or not, those who make this choice finally trap themselves within a cosmos lacking in ultimate hope or meaning. On the other hand, the modern thinker may hope to find philosophical, moral, and noumenal truth by venturing beyond science--so exposing himself to increased risk of error, deception, and illusion, but also opening up the possibility for finding hope and moral purpose.

Perhaps surprisingly--given the large claims he makes for science--Medawar himself chooses the second option by refusing to keep his search for truth within scientific parameters. Medawar wisely acknowledges "a limit to science," a limit that is exposed by "its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things--questions such as 'How did everything begin?' 'What are we all here for?' 'What is the point of living?'" Medawar stresses that these are "questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would enable it to answer," and he regards as foolish those who have "dismissed all such questions as nonquestions or pseudoquestions" simply because science cannot answer them. To find answers to these questions, Medawar believes, we must turn to "the domains of myth, metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion." (31)

One of the benefits of investigating science thoroughly and rigorously is thus the discovery of the profound human need for non-scientific truths. What is more, the grim ultimate cosmologies can lend urgency to the search for these very truths. If, as literary critic Joseph Schwartz has asserted, "the certainty of death is the very condition of recovering oneself," and if that condition of mortal urgency underscores "the force of memento mori in formulating a belief and an ethic," (32) then modern science has summoned all of mankind to sober thoughts by revealing the entire universe to be a cosmic memento mori. The galaxies themselves must die. In a piquant way, the grim ultimate cosmology re-casts Pascal's Wager in an unexpected way by giving the wavering soul even more reason to bet on God rather than on the ultimately hopeless alternative. The appeal of a Deity who promises to "create new heavens and a new earth" (Isa. 65: 17) shines with particular luster when science endorses in the strongest possible way the dark scriptural prophecy that "the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner" (Isa. 51: 6).

Pascal's Wager, of course, draws us into religion, only one of the four domains of meaning listed by Medawar as necessary supplements to science. But in exploring all four of these non-scientific domains, we would do well to remember what science can teach about truth as an objective reality, an "external permanency ... something upon which our thinking has no effect." The scientific insistence on objective truth can thus serve as an anchor in an intellectual world in which hermeneutic virtuosity and cultural relativism have all but overthrown the Parmenidean principle of non-contradiction and nearly reduced truth to a quaint anachronism for the naive. Furthermore, the discipline of scientific thought may even help us to recognize that although Medawar lists four different non-scientific domains in which to search for answers to mankind's "elementary questions," one of these domains clearly claims precedence over the others. For while we can identify one ultimate and transcendent source (i.e., Deity) for religious truth, we still probe behind or beyond imaginative literature, mythology, and metaphysics for the origins of their truths. In neither Shakespeare, nor Woden, nor Kant do we encounter anything like the self-existent "I AM THAT I AM" of Scripture (Ex. 3: 14).

Rigorous training in empirical science and long pondering of its grim ultimate prophecies for the cosmos may indeed prove especially beneficial in preparing the seeker of non-scientific truth for the faith that focuses on the Incarnate God, Jesus Christ. Indeed, Polkinghorne urges his fellow Christians to recognize a rare opportunity for evangelism among those whose schooling in science has taught them its limits. "Many people who can see that science of itself is too limited to tell us all that we need to know," writes Polkinghorne, "seem nevertheless to be at a loss to know where else to turn. In the face of this situation, religion must not lose its nerve in proclaiming that it too is concerned with the search for truth." Polkinghorne recognizes, in particular, an opportunity for proclaiming religious truth in answer to "the gloomy prognostications of scientific cosmology," in which he sees "a challenge to which theology must respond." And he finds that response in affirming "Jesus' resurrection as the origin and guarantee of human hope." "The resurrection of Jesus," avers Polkinghorne, "is the seminal event from which the whole of God's new creation has already begun to grow." (33)

Nothing in all of religion--not the Enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, not the visions of Mohammed, not the hymns in the Hindu Samhitas, not the creation myths of Shinto--resonates with empirical expectations like the instruction the risen Jesus gives his perplexed disciples in order to verify the truth of his Resurrection: "Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24: 39). In the same way, the risen Lord urges the doubting Thomas to carry out the very empirical tests which Thomas had earlier demanded in order to make him believe: "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing" (John 20: 27; cf. 20: 25).

To be sure, the risen Jesus did not make his resurrected body available in some open laboratory for inspection by any and all skeptical natural philosophers. More importantly, even as he reproved his apostles (Luke 24: 38; John 20: 27, 29) for the unbelief that made it necessary for him to give them palpable proof of his resurrection, Jesus pronounced those "blessed ... that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20: 29). Nonetheless, because Jesus did provide the requisite palpable proof, we can recognize his Resurrection as a physical truth of the sort scientists understand, not some subjective fantasy, not a hermeneutic representation, not a heuristic metaphor, and not a therapeutic parable. It is of the absolute truth--that is, the real physicality--of Jesus' Resurrection that St. Peter speaks when he declares, "We have not followed cunningly devised fables ... but were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (II Pet. 1: 16).

It is indeed with a profound recognition of the way in which the Resurrection at once fits within yet still transcends the empiricism of modern science that John Updike testifies of the Resurrection in his marvelous "Seven Stanzas at Easter":

  Make no mistake: if He rose at all
  it was as His body;
  if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the
  molecules reknit, the amino acids
  rekindle, the Church will fall. (34)

Even if they understand the limits of science, it may still vex some scientifically-trained seekers for non-scientific truths that they were not present with Peter, Thomas, or the other eye-witnesses permitted to touch and handle the risen Lord's body. But the future may yet satisfy every empirical appetite of the faithful: Polkinghorne piquantly suggests that the end of the world "will either verify or falsify Christian belief--though if the latter is the case, there will be no human person there to witness the disproof." That is, "eschatological experience will provide the ultimate vindication of belief" in the promises of the God of Scripture. (35) In the new heavens and new earth of which our own risen bodies miraculously will become a part, we may, then, finally employ empirical methods of verifying religious truth as we use our hands and fingers to touch and feel our own resurrected bodies, and those of our loved ones.

As our wonder and joy in verifying the truth of our own resurrection grows, will we then recall anything of what we experienced as mortals struggling to understand the truths of biochemistry, medicine, or physics?

Or will we simply praise God that--for all we learned on earth about quantum mechanics or polysaccharides--his grace and mercy finally vouchsafed to us supernal truths far beyond science?

1. Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science (Oxford, 1984), 65. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London, 1909), 131. 3. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London, 2003), 123. 4. John S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen (New York, 1987), 23. 5. Florian Znaniecky, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (1940; rpt. New Brunswick, 1986), 161. 6. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There Is No God, the Devil, and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion (New York, 1982), 202. 7. Qtd. in Richard Bailey, "Overcoming Veriphobia--Leaning to Love Truth Again," British Journal of Educational Studies 49 (2001); 159-172. 8. Ibid. 9. A.K. Dewdney, Beyond Reason: Eight Problems that Reveal the Limits of Science (Hoboken, 2004), 2-8. 10. Robert Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason (New York, 2003), 137. 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Qtd. in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (New York, 2001), 120. 13. Qtd. in Bulent Atalay, Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci (Washington, 2004), 24. 14. Op. cit., 26-27. 15. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass, 1975), 177, 201-202. 16. Qtd. in Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York, 1997), 19. 17. Ibid., 261. 18. John G. West, "Darwinian Relativism," Rev. of Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, by Janet Browne, Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2004), 63. 19. Op. cit., 115. 20. Noam Chomsky, "On Cognitive Structures and Their Development: A Reply to Piaget," Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, ed. Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 36. 21. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York, 1968), 62. 22. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Nora Barlow (1887, rpt. New York, 1958), 138. 23. John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (London, 1985), 98. 24. Op. cit., 115. 25. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. 26. Qtd. in Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, 2004), 282, 284. 27. Andrew Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (New York, 1986), 278-279. 28. Lawrence M. Krauss, Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth ... and Beyond (Boston, 2001), 227, 281-282. 29. Stanley L. Jaki, Angels, Apes & Men (La Salle, 1983), 78-79. 30. John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven, 2002), 9. 31. Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science (Oxford, 1984), 66. 32. Joseph Schwartz, "Life and Death in The Last Gentleman," Renascence 40 (1988), 125. 33. Op. cit., 9, 47, 113. 34. John Updike, Collected Poems: 1953-1993 (New York, 1999), 20. 35. Op. cit., 146, 148.

BRYCE CHRISTENSEN teaches writing and literature at Southern Utah University and is author of Divided We Fall: Family Discord and the Fracturing of America (Transaction, 2005).