The story of Alister McGrath has become increasingly fascinating to me, and chp 7 of his book The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind tells his story. In essence he tells an insider's story of how he shifted from seeing a war between science and faith to see them as friends. Perhaps they don't always see eye to eye, but they are not at war. As a precocious youngster he took the plunge into the dismal world of radical atheism, a world that lacked meaning and purpose. He was smug and knew he was superior, and what happened was that he learned about the philosophy and history of scientific study. What he learned was that explanation is what science offers but it cannot explain everything, and that it operates on certain bases that cannot be surrendered -- and neither can they tell the whole story. I hope you can read this chp someday; the first half is simply a wonderful story. What he learned was that science, at its best, is neutral and makes no claims outside of what it can speak about -- testable empirical realities. He learned that atheism itself was a belief system. His conversion entailed an understanding of natural theology, one that did not ...deduce the existence of God from a cold, detached observation of nature, but rather as the enterprise of seeing nature from the standpoint of faith, emphasizing the importance of belief in God in explaining the "big picture" (108). He pondered the intelligibility issue and the anthropic phenomena, but what's best in this chp is a powerful sketch of the challenges he gives to typical atheistic observations about faith: Read more