Two mountains

Four decades ago, with a friend and a notebook, I looked across quiet waters to an awe-inspiring peak. While my friend read Jane Eyre, I thought of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the uniformity of natural law, and the vastness of geological time. I noted that eons of uplift and erosion had patiently manufactured this present panorama.

I wrote in my journal. The view of this mountain, it seemed to me, demonstrated that cataclysmic and creationist views of Earth’s origin were untenable. Natural processes such as wind, rain, and earthquakes were adequate to explain geological features even as great as this mountain. The hypothesis of God as creator was superfluous.

At precisely this moment in a previous age, as I misspelled the word superfluous, my friend turned to me and said, “It’s at times like these I am most sure that God exists.” This casual remark impressed me enough that I remember it twenty years later; not his confession of faith per se, but rather the undeniable fact that we both perceived the same mountain, but interpreted it differently.

I was stunned by our contrasting interpretations of the meaning of the mountain. How could this magnificent view simultaneously confirm his theism and my atheism? I interpreted this event as evidence that my friend and I were somehow divergent. As he continued to read and I continued to journal, I wondered what the difference might be.