By Design: Science of God

For the past twent years, new curiosity has arisen about an age-old question: Does nature point to something beyond itself-toward a God, perhaps, or a transcendent order? Since the demise of natural theology in the 1800s, there have been strong taboos against using science-the measuring of physical matter-as a gauge of God or a higher reality. But in our time we have seen that stigma slowly fall away, allowing a renewed interest in what used to be called "reading the Book of Nature," a metaphor suggesting that there is either an Author or, at the least, a text imbued with meaning.