Lewontin and most scientists are true believers in materialism, possessing an absolute faith that matter and its workings will eventually explain everything in the universe. But such a faith has already failed at the most basic level; brain function alone cannot account for the simple experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling. All human beings, scientists and laypersons, live in the nonmaterial world of the smell of lavender, the deep resonance of a cello, the beauty of a sunset over an ocean, the wonder evoked by the night sky, the elegance of Euclid’s demonstration of the infinitude of prime numbers, the very world that materialism cannot explain. If only matter existed, then we would have no interior life; we would be mindless things like rocks and volcanoes.

Like every ideology—political, religious, or intellectual—materialism at some point is closed to reason, so that eminently intelligent adherents must make exceedingly idiotic pronouncements: “All of us human beings and all the objects with which we deal are essentially bundles of simple quarks and electrons;” “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons;” and “You’re a gigantic lumbering robot manipulated by genes.”

For me, materialism is far from absolute because it has failed again and again. No one can doubt we live in a bio-friendly universe. The multiverse strategy to avoid the existence of God borders on the absurd and furthermore declares the core of the physical world is irrational and thus unknowable. Giving up the ideology of my youth and following reason, I had no choice but to “allow a Divine Foot in the door.”