I’m not really linking you off (sounds vaguely profane, don’t it?) to this disheartening article on Salon’s front page today about Francis Collins — head of the Human Genome Project — discussing why “scientists do not need to be atheists”… and falling back on that pedestrian fool C.S. Lewis to justify his own conversion to stupidity. Instead, I bring your attention to the first comment from a reader on the article (thank goodness Salon has embraced citizen media more): Turtles All The Way Down? C.S. Lewis may have used fancy arguments to justify his conversion, but at bottom he did so because of a non-logical reason: His lifelong friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, a committed Catholic who worked very hard to get Lewis to renounce his atheism. And really, most of the “logic” Lewis uses is nothing more than warmed-over witticisms cribbed from Chesterton’s Father Brown character. Francis Collins has traded his logically-inspired “schoolboy atheism” for copying the non-logically-inspired religiosity borne of friendship, not clear thinking. The problem with positing the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator is simply this: How did the Creator come to be? (Or even better: “Who Created the Creator?” which if done right leads to a variation of the “it’s turtles all the way down” argument.) The usual answer one gets from Christians is that he “just came to be”. Well, atheists believe in the coming-to-be bit: They just leave out the middle man. (And I say this as someone who is irritated by many militant atheists, though not nearly as irritated by them as I am by the frothing Fundies among us.) – Phoenix Woman Right on, Phoenix Woman. Keep on keepin’ on, baby!