Don't get all nervous, but this new "discovery" of a God gene that finally gives us a scientific explanation for those whacked-out believers in God started me thinking about the sin of pride.

Romans 1:20 says: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

 In other words, human beings have to reject what their senses and intellects tell them in order to arrive at any other conclusion than that God created them and the universe.

 Many learned scientists reject this idea, preferring to believe just the opposite: that a belief in the Divine Creator is counterintuitive, devoid of reason, blind to the facts and insufficiently deferential to science. You wouldn't believe the condescending e-mails I received from self-described scientists following my column on the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be an Atheist," telling me, essentially, what a moron I am.

I wonder what these smug critics would tell Britisher Anthony Flew, one of the world's leading proponents of atheism, who has now abandoned his disbelief in God. Flew observed, quite rightly, that the latest biological research "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved."

 When anticipating the inevitable shock of some of his co-atheists to his transformation, Flew said, "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

 That's precisely the point. Contrary to the position of many atheists, especially those who believe that Christians are reality-challenged and science-averse, theism -- particularly Christianity -- is supported by reliable evidence.

 Which gets us back to the subject of pride. I have always believed that among the obstacles to belief, human pride is the leading culprit. Pride is responsible for the notion that no God was necessary to have created life from no life, the material world from the immaterial world, something out of nothing.

 Instructively, "Humanist Manifesto II" bears this out, declaring, "As nonthesists, we begin with humans, not God, nature, not deity. ? But we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves."

 It's hard not to conclude that such pride is responsible for the above-mentioned bizarre theory of American molecular geneticist Dr. Dean Hamer ("The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes"), that a person's capacity for believing in God is genetically determined. Continued...