Who orderest all things mightily...

An interesting piece in The Age about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's belief in an ordered creation:

"As you know I'm a believer and I've never pretended not to be and I respect those who have no religious belief - it's a free country," Mr Rudd said.

"For me, it's ultimately the order of the cosmos or what I describe as the creation.

"You can't simply have, in my own judgment, creation simply being a random event because it is so inherently ordered, and the fact that the natural environment is being ordered where it can properly coexist over time.

"If you were simply reducing that to mathematically probabilities I've got to say it probably wouldn't have happened.

"So I think there is an intelligent mind at work."

He's not a silly boy, our PM.

On the science and religion question, have a listen to this podcast of Philip Jenkins. Two good quotes from this lecture are:

1) "There are three kinds of wash in the study history: eye-wash, white-wash and hog-wash" (by which he meant: ways in which the historian helps you see an issue more clearly and exactly, ways in which an historian might cover up or exclude facts that don't fit their version of "history", and stuff that is just plain nonsense.)

and:

2) "I wouldn't have seen it with my own two eyes, if I hadn't believed it first."

Perhaps faith in the Creator behind the order in the Cosmos is largely a matter of the latter.