Looking out at my feeder, swarmed by a family of little brown birds, I recall my then six year old son saying, "Isn't it amazing how everything has just exactly what it needs?" He was watching ants and potato bugs under the lilacs. It puts me in mind of my ongoing internal dialog with the Richard Dawkins of this world who see the fact that human reason can potentially make sense of everything as confirmation that the language of math and science are alone sufficient and necessary (without stopping to ask how this apparent fact itself came to be) to describe the world, the universe, and everything in it. In its most stark form this materialist philosophy states that God is an illusion, that life is a chemical fact that sprang from mud with a little help from lightning, and that our cherished dream of meaning is a pipe dream: an epiphenomenon our DNA has dreamed up while it goes about the all important business of assuring its continuation through trial and error and reproduction without anymore or less complexity than a reiterating computer program. And if that program should come to an end, why then, "Pace, Turing." But I say, "render unto logic, science and ongoing inquiry the things that are logic's.... * * The Times reported a conference amongst scientific unbelievers, believing non-scientists, agnostic scientists and every possible permutation. It apparently broke up like Babel amidst calumny, recrimination, futile attempts at rapprochement, and derision. So much for the life of the mind. The mind, indeed. En arche hain logos, no? Yet we tend to use our minds like the drunk who uses the light under the street lamp to search there for the money he lost down the block in a darkened alley. Why? Because he can see there. It may be that the lost money is Kant's "thing in itself," and that our minds will remain tethered to the lamppost for all eternity. And yet we will seek. But perhaps only to find at the end that it is our mind that is the darkness. And then the light will dawn.