I. THE NOTION OF AN ORDER OF THINGS from which we are never free, to which we owe obedience and respect--the idea of a created order--divides people more and more into different communities, depending on whether or not they can make sense of idea. For believers, idea of creation probably seems obvious; there is a sense of fundamental dependence, that we are brought into existence and held in existence by something beyond ourselves. This doctrine delivers hope and confidence in worst of times, assuring us that there is an original identity of goodness in things that persists to end because it expresses way things finally are. Believers can miss, however, strangeness of doctrine, a strangeness that reveals itself in different ways. It is more or less impossible to imagine event of creation. We think we can do it, of course, picturing a great darkness with God hovering over abyss and then action by which God brings creation out of nothing. But act of envisioning hides problem that before creation there was no space and therefore no vantage point from which to observe an event in any way. This imaginative attempt shows difficulty of trying to describe something that upholds everything, including our attempts to express what it is. epistemological problems of notion become acute with advent of modernity and adoption of new approaches to ontology and Locke proposes principle that strength of beliefs should never be stronger than strength of that supports them. (1) Religious belief fails test, in that it invariably has strength of hundred percent, exceeding any evidence it can provide. Therefore, according to Locke, we cannot consider it intellectually respectable. A British judge said in a famous 2 [omicron] I [omicron] case, In eye of everyone save believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. (2) Believers might feel that discussion has missed point and insist that religious belief is not like belief in an additional planet or cosmological process, as if God and act of creation were simply placed alongside other entities or happenings. Aquinas quotes Dionysius to effect that God is not this and not that; he is not an item that fits into a longer list. (3) unbeliever will make no sense of this, however, and might well retort that difference must come down to side's believing in one more thing than other. How else could it be? These difficulties can lead to a redefinition of what religious belief ultimately means, perhaps in a pragmatist direction, as with proposal of William James that religion comes down to the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine. (4) Charles Taylor defines a secular society along these lines, as where religious belief has become choice among many: The shift to secularity in sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to in which it is understood to be option among others. (5) Such a development meets a cautious welcome among believers who likely feel that it is good to move from operating out of an unreflective background to a conscious choice. It does not occur to them that move, which largely sums up thrust of Western Enlightenment, might in fact be source of problem. For enlightened Westerner, doctrine of creation also presents a striking moral problem. Something seems to have been imposed on us, for without our consent someone decreed that we are to be in a certain way and that we are not to stray from identity with which we were first provided. We are tied forever to intentions of who brought us into existence, appearing as if we are denied any fundamental creativity. âŠ