Stepping back from these technical considerations, why do some people believe and others don’t? Why do some people (but not others) have what philosopher Thomas Nagel terms the sensus divinitatis, meaning a sense of the divine? For his part, Nagel admits to lacking this, but he observes others around him who “… see in the world the expression of divine purpose”.[1] If we are no more than a collection of atoms, governed ultimately by the laws of chemistry and physics, why don’t all people have the same response to faith, the response of automata? Why did the late public intellectual Christopher Hitchens gravitate to atheism, while his brother Peter is a devout Christian?
To illustrate these intriguing questions, we consider two on-the-record examples of people from similar religious backgrounds (Catholic) who, by their mid to late twenties, had lived in a state of lapsed faith for some time. Both were involved with calamitous descents from high places which could easily have killed them. In their hour of extremity, did they reach out to God?
The first example is British mountaineer Joe Simpson, whose 1988 book Touching the Void was subsequently made into a docudrama of the same name (2003). Simpson was descending from the summit of the Siula Grande, one of the tallest peaks in Peru’s section of the Andean Mountains, after his ascent in 1985. Early in the descent, Simpson fell and broke his right leg, seriously hindering his ability to move. His climbing partner, Simon Yates, used a rope and belay system to lower Simpson in stages. For a while this method worked well, but the situation became untenable when, unknown to Yates, Simpson was lowered over the edge of a cliff and found himself hanging in midair, too far away to alert Yates to his predicament, and unable to climb back to the cliff edge. Yates’ own position was beginning to slip; eventually he had no choice but to cut the rope to prevent himself from being pulled over the edge. This sent Simpson into free fall. He landed on a small ledge within a deep crevasse, some 60 meters below.
With his broken leg, Simpson could not climb out of the crevasse. He had no food to sustain him, nor any help from Yates, who was now necessarily focused on his own survival. In this extremely vulnerable position, Simpson used the remaining resources at his disposal—the part of the rope that Yates had cut, and his considerable mountaineering experience—to abseil deeper into the crevasse. From this new location, Simpson found a way out of the crevasse and, over the next 72 hours, somehow managed to make his way back to base camp. He was just in time; Yates, who had reached camp days earlier, was only hours from departing when Simpson arrived.
Brought up in a devout Catholic home, Simpson later stopped believing in God. Nevertheless, he had long wondered if, in a crisis, he would instinctively reach out to God for help. In the docudrama film, Simpson recounts the point at which he realized he might die:
[Crying out to God] never once occurred to me. It meant that I really don’t believe and I really do think that when you die you die, that’s it, there’s no afterlife; there’s nothing.[2]
In his hour of need, Simpson did not turn to God. He relied on his own resources, meagre as they were, and these proved sufficient to survive.
Our second example, Genelle Guzman-McMillan, was the last person to be taken alive from the rubble of the World Trade Centre after the 9/11 terror attacks. Originally from Trinidad, Guzman-McMillan moved to the United States in early 2000 with dreams of making it big in the entertainment industry. But instead of the glamorous life, Guzman-McMillan found herself working a variety of odd jobs to get by. Eventually she took up a role as an administrative assistant at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, based in the World Trade Centre complex.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Guzman-McMillan was seated at her desk on the 64th floor of the 110-storey North Tower, when, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building some 30 floors above. Amid the confusion that followed, including baffling advice from officials to wait in the office until police arrived, Guzman-McMillan and several of her colleagues did not attempt to leave the building until shortly after 10 a.m. By this stage the only route available to them was the fire escape stairwell. Over the following twenty-something minutes, Guzman-McMillan’s group descended as far as the 13th floor. Then, at 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed.
When everything came to rest, Guzman-McMillan was alive, trapped in a narrow space between concrete beams. She was almost completely immobilized; other than some movement of her left arm, her head was wedged tightly in place and her legs were “smashed flat”.[3] “‘How far down was I buried?’ Guzman-McMillan asked herself. ‘I just stared at the darkness, fading into despair. Nobody was coming to get me, and there was nothing more I could do.’”.[4]
Alone and trapped, Guzman faced her mortality, eventually concluding that only a miracle of God could save her. She began to pray, with an increasing sense of urgency as time passed. She mixed in Bible verses that she remembered from her Catholic schooling. Her prayers paused as she napped, probably over the night of September 11/12, then continued even more frantically in her wakeful hours. As she banged with her left fist for emphasis, her hand broke through something above her head. Amidst more impassioned prayer, she felt a hand clasping hers, and listened as a voice spoke
… the four sweetest words I had ever heard. “I’ve got you, Genelle,” a calm, confident male voice said to me. “… They’re going to get you out soon.”[5]
By 1:30 p.m. on September 12, rescue workers had cut away the concrete beams and lifted Guzman-McMillan to safety.
Prayer came naturally to Genelle Guzman-McMillan, but it never occurred to Joe Simpson. What causes this difference? Whatever it is, our understanding of the Bible shows that a mix of believers and non-believers is part and parcel of the human condition. These two different types will always be with us and will bring two different approaches to origins science. A Christian origins scientist seeks to harmonize scientific data with his or her interpretation of the biblical account. They take the existence of the biblical Creator-God as a given (a presupposition), and their task is to harmonize the increasing stock of scientifically derived data with the unchanging and infallible biblical origins account.
Secular origins science, on the other hand, seeks to explain the world in purely naturalistic terms. Any invocation of God is generally seen as a cop-out, intellectual laziness of the sort that strangles the investigative process. The notion of a higher power is to be avoided at all costs. In fact, there’s a phrase for that: etsi Deus non daretur[6]—Latin for “as if God does not exist.” That’s how secular science, including origins science, is conducted.
[1] Nagel, 2012, p. 12.
[2] The relevant part of the docudrama can be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=nWhmOwGqcMQ (from 3:17–3:50). Accessed September 8, 2025.
[3] Guzman-McMillan, 2011, p. 49.
[4] Ibid, p. 51.
[5] Ibid., p. 97.
[6] This phrase was used by Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625.