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But let’s take Dietrich at his words, however vague, just for now. If you unravel the argumentative thread of Excellent Beauty, it reads as follows: A) All religions require belief in some transcendent reality; B) Since science can’t prove the existence of a “transcendent reality” this is really no reality; C) Therefore, the religious should embrace a strict materialism, the reality that science reveals there to be; D) However, since the material world still contains some inexplicable mysteries—the “excellent beauties”—we must acknowledge that even science has limits; E) Accepting these limits and unknowns will temper both science and religion, ushering in a utopian new science (religion?) that will give all the wonder and worship and community of traditional religion without all the nasty genocide and bigotry and hubris.

One can’t help but imagine that Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Descartes, Pascal, Rowan Williams, and a host of orthodox Christians would pronounce a collective “amen” at Dietrich’s assertion that the mysteries of the natural world all “point” to (at a minimum) some supernatural “something” responsible for it all, even as they noted that he was thereby contradicting his own premises. As if he were half-aware of the contradiction, Dietrich adds that these “mysteries” reveal something rather chilling: “The excellent beauties challenge the idea that the universe in which we live is a place for humans”—that is, a place designed for us. And while it seems that perhaps Dietrich’s “new” science is opening up pathways to a much older “religion” or, as he frames it, a less divisive and violent religion, there is almost nothing in his account of these natural mysteries that will form us into better people, provide a grounding of morality, give us hope in a broken world, and turn us away from the nihilistic reality a strict physicalism entails. If the final knowledge these mysteries usher us into is a reminder that this earth is not our home, we no longer have a religion we would die for; we don’t even have one we could live for.