Our family was gathered on the deck on a hot summer evening to listen to the coyotes. Nearly every evening at dusk, one pack would begin howling from the top of a hill to the west, to be answered by another pack from the east.

 

As the sky darkened, the top of a full moon began to edge over the horizon. It was a moment as wonderful and fragile as dust on butterfly wings. The rest of the moon slowly appeared, with the music of the coyotes as a haunting background symphony, until the silvery disk hung above the hills, so bright that the shadows of the lunar mountains were visible from a quarter million miles across a void, yet seemingly so close that Savannah, who was 3, reached toward it and whispered, “Daddy, who made the moon?”

 

What an instinctive and profound question, embedded in our DNA; even when we are mere toddlers, the night sky leads us to search for a Creator.

 

Indeed, whomade the moon?

 

When I listen to the beat of my daughter’s heart, a great, quiet love fills me. I do not say this because this sense of love is unique to me. What is incredible is that each of us is given a unique sense of it.

 

Of all the human loves, I believe this parent-child love can be the purest. I do not love my daughters because of what I can gain but because of what I can give.

 

How is it that something so invisible is so strong?

 

Why are we able to share love?

 

And where does this love come from?

 

There is no denying that the night skies speak to us.

 

Away from the city, away from all that is made by man, surrounding us and dulling our senses, when we stand beneath a clear, dark sky and behold the vastness of the stars, our souls respond like a harp string plucked by an invisible hand. We yearn with a homesickness to be somewhere else, an unknown place as difficult to define as the yearning itself.

 

Sometimes, in the dark with my head leaning softly against my daughter’s chest, a haunting sadness would overcome me. I hope that she will love me as much as I love her. I hope, too, that I will live until I am old. That I will watch her become a woman. That I will one day hold her son or daughter the way I once held her.

 

Listening to that heartbeat, I often think of how growing old takes me toward my death. Neither my love for my daughters nor their love for me will be able to turn away that certainty. So will come the day when, perhaps, one of my daughters will lay her head against my chest to listen to the frail thumping of a heart close to its final beat.

 

This is the human condition. Great sadness along with great joy. The more we love, the more death takes when it inevitably arrives.

 

How do we deal with this? Why is life so beautiful yet so cruel? Is there a purpose to this?

 

The Genesis account of Creation resonates so strongly with our souls because it simply and elegantly helps us understand the night sky and the longing that comes with it, giving us the answers to the questions embedded within us.

 

When Savannah is old enough to read Genesis, it will tell her that God made the moon. As she reads on, she will learn that her sister, her parents and her future children are more than complicated packages of protein, carbohydrates, fat and water, doomed to become dust when their life forces are extinguished. Because of the bedrock of Genesis, she, like me, will be able to embrace emotions that are uniquely human. Peace. Hope. Purpose. And from that foundation, the Bible will proceed to answer all of the other major questions of human existence that she will someday have.

 

But also awaiting Savannah are answers that disagree with Genesis. Scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins would tell Savannah that God did not make the moon—or anything else. That the universe is random and meaningless. That we are merely assembled stardust. That our lives have no purpose—or hope.

 

In the introduction to his best-selling and highly publicized book The God Delusion, Dawkins states, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” I was not. The book does make strong points against the flaws of religious institutions, and it demolishes poor and obviously cherry-picked arguments for the existence of God. But believers could, and perhaps should, do the same.

 

One of my goals as a parent is to ensure that by the time Savannah faces books like this, she will also be able to see that Dawkins does not have the intellectual honesty to fairly and squarely face the 21^st century’s most compelling argument for the existence of God: science.

 

Antony Flew, perhaps the world’s most famous atheistic philosopher, would once have also given Savannah an answer similar to Dawkins’.

 

No longer.

 

Flew made global headlines when, at age 81, he publicly renounced his atheism, having concluded that despite what he had taught, argued and published for all of his adult life, God does exist. What would cause a man with so much vested in an atheistic worldview to make that stunning reversal?

 

Science.

 

Who made the moon? That summer evening on the deck, as the last of the chorus of coyotes faded, it was easy enough to pick up Savannah and whisper back the answer. “God did.”

 

It was an answer that she accepted and trusted because it was Daddy’s answer.

 

But almost certainly the day will come when she’ll wonder if Daddy’s answer is enough.