Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for NPR, reported in a recent USA Today article, "The God Choice," of an interesting exchange a few years ago in at Cambridge University in England. She, along with nine other journalists, were attending a Templeton fellowship meeting where the guest speaker was John Barrow, a Cambridge mathematician. She reports that almost as an aside to his lecture, Barrow make mention that the astonishing precision of the universe was evidence for "divine action." At that moment, Hagerty reports, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and one of the leaders in the vanguard of the new atheist movement, nearly leapt from his seat and objected: "But why would you want to look for evidence of divine action?" chided Dawkins. "For the same reason someone might not want to," Barrow responded with a wry grin.

In was at that moment that Hagerty confesses, "In that instant, I thought,…