It was not long ago that most people in the Western world took it for granted that some form of God existed. It seemed perfectly rational for intelligent people to assume there must be a Creator. How else could one explain the existence of everything?

The scientific revolution took place in this environment. It was belief in a Creator that gave rise to the quest to understand nature. Indeed, this thirst for information was part of worship. There was a sense that God was pleased for us to work at understanding the laws of nature and the cosmos. The greatest scientists in this revolution of discovery were people of devout faith. They included Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz—and later, Faraday, Cuvier, Herschel, Agassiz, Mendel and Clerk Maxwell—to name but a few.

But then a strain of enlightenment philosophy emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, which gradually led to an undermining of faith. The knowledge of the world that had been brilliantly explored by believers was given as a reason to doubt.  Only human reason and empirical knowledge was allowed. And we became proud. We worked out how the planets moved, and the sun shone. We understood about chemistry and the way of molecules. We harnessed electricity. We built amazing machines. It was as if by understanding so much, we no longer needed anything else to account for it all. We short-circuited God, abolishing him from our world view.

Then we had Darwin, the reluctant and anxious agnostic, who seemed to pull the rug from under our assumptions about life. A spirit of disbelief grew, and his acolytes continue even now, to blow cold on any efforts to bring God back in. I was one of those who wholly agreed with this form of scientism.

But when we really dig down to the facts, the atheist position starts to look very shaky indeed.

Let us look at a few areas of prime interest. This is not inserting God into gaps in our knowledge—quite the opposite. The more we know the more puzzling it gets.

We have no idea how the big bang was initiated, and most cosmologists now say that the universe began from nothing—a long held Judaeo-Christian doctrine.

As to why there is ‘something rather than nothing’, we should agree with Leibniz, that there must be a ‘sufficient reason’ for everything, that is not itself part of the physical universe.

The exquisite fine-tuning of the early conditions and constants of the cosmos, which was essential for life to appear, is a complete mystery that points to a designer.

We have no idea how the first life came about and research in the last decades has made no progress in this area. Even the simplest bacterium has a stunning, irreducible complexity that frankly baffles us.

We struggle to find the gradualism in the fossil record that is essential for the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

We have relied too long on the creative ability of mutations plus natural selection. We now have sound evidence that mutations are extremely limited in their ability to create novelty.

Systems and structures in biology are replete with irreducibly complexity—impossible to achieve in gradual steps.

No one knows what consciousness is. And there is no evidence in neuroscience for a causal mechanism. Much of our thought is non-physical—not the stuff of neuronal interactions.

And what about free-will—something that defies the laws of physics? We have real autonomy in our wills that could not be from a material object, however complex.

C.S.Lewis wrote with his usual insight: “How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself.”

There is more to reality than mere matter and energy.

The atheist insists that our moral rules, our guiding conscience, is just genetic hard-wiring for survival. In this scenario there is no objective right or wrong—just DNA programming, with a bit of social conditioning.

But hold on. Was the holocaust not simply wrong? Is child torture objectively just neutral? If we ditch objective morality, which requires a moral rule giver, we descend into a relativism that is not just dark, but quite irrational.

Our universe is stunningly beautiful. The atheist says that such beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder—another evolutionary survival mechanism. But our telescopes find amazing beauty everywhere in the cosmos, hardly something we evolved to appreciate on the African savannah. Beauty is a value that we give to physical objects, but values are not physical things. They are personal. Beauty as an objective value inevitably leads to a personal author of beauty.

The latest science, along with philosophy, reinforces the truth that there is more to reality than mere matter and energy.