how is it possible to believe in God?

William F. Buckley, Jr. writes an essay featured today in National Public Radio expouding on his core belief in the existence of God saying that "it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature."

In one paragraph in his short essay he observes that "The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable...by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible."

I have a few scientist friends who certainly argue with me along those lines: all are explained away with science, with evolution, with natural causes. Then I just sit there and shake my head.

Buckley adds, "But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?"

Or, the notion of God? Is the idea of the existence of God a product of evolution? Here's my take on this from a previous post:

Where does this attribute in human nature come from [this sense of the transcendent]? Some today would theorize that this is an extrusion from evolution. It may be overstepping the competence of physical science to explain through evolution an inquiry that more fittingly belongs to philosophy and metaphysics. Any attempt to explain this through evolution should address the philosophical and metaphysical axiom that nothing in the material realm can bring about something that is ethereal. Just as only that which is alive can beget another living being, so only that which is spiritual can engender something of the spirit. According to Plato, "We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which would have us believe that we can have a great love, perpetuate our own seed, and contemplate the divine."

Listen to Buckley deliver his essay at NPR.