By David Warren

It is an understatement to say that almost everyone was born with a nose. Everyone was. There are few people who would deny this, or are unaware of it. But if they are unaware, they are not, therefore, among our most brilliant skeptics.

To compare God to a nose is not what I am doing. More precisely, my similitude is to the DESIGN (controversial term) of the human face, on which the nose is a convenience for breathing.

Should it grow over, as Jonathan Swift used to say, then "there's an end; the man is dead."

Whether God is, or is not, is no part of my argument. As a human, I can only answer, "Of course!" But it is the universe that will have to answer for Him, as to whether He exists. And it is too large for skeptical scientists.

But to those who have noticed, God is as plain as the nose on our face, indeed somewhat plainer. That we use different words for Him, in different languages and dialects, does not challenge the fact that he exists in all languages, for He is "built in" to the human organism and thus, perception.

There are, for instance - according to the late Mary Douglas - primitive tribes who are remarkably unobsessed with God or gods, and who come across as atheists to visiting anthropologists. But this is another question: of whether people worship or not, and what they worship.

Only modern man has made the existence of God the subject of controversy. To the "primitive," there is no controversy. What is, is.

The Buddhists, we've been told by Western "experts" (sociologists and psychologists) have a religion in which God is unnecessary. And Richard Dawkins has suggested replacing God with a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

These very exotic beliefs hold up until they are investigated. My own experience, with educated Buddhists, gave me a radically different view. Far from denying God, serious Buddhists wish to avoid becoming entangled in theological disputes about Him. They adhere to the simpler, more primitive view.

Perhaps they don't believe in Maha Brahma, who comes and goes in the cycles of birth and rebirth, and merely thinks of himself as God-the-Creator. He is the closest I have found to a Buddhist god who, like Nietzsche, "doesn't really exist."

The idea that Siddartha Gautama preached against the fear that drives people up sacred mountains, to sacred groves, trees, and shrines, and away from thunder, lightning, volcanoes, and wild animals, is, however, more or less self-refuting.

The Buddha denies the efficacy of that kind of religion.

It would be more encyclopedic to say, people fear things that are scary. And that the Buddha had no comment on the hundreds or millions of Devas who turn up conveniently while people are seeking Enlightenment.

When they are terrified, Buddhists reach instinctively for God, the same way that Christians do. It is, as it were, part of their metabolism, like the nose on the human face. But faithful Christian and Buddhist alike propose calm in the face of unfolding disaster, and catastrophic disorder, not hysteria and panic.

Since, let us say, the XVIth century, the Western world and its imitators have subscribed to an increasingly mechanized picture of the world, from which God has receded except as a "ghost in the machine." Everything, including all that is researched by science, has proceeded down this black hole - led by the nose into the spiritual vacuum.

Even our noses are mechanical now. They are essentially identical, unlike even identical twins. In the machine reality, everything we know is stamped out. "Intelligent design" is done on drafting tables.

But there is no creature in nature that I have seen or red about that is not complexly integrated from a thousand billion living cellular parts, all of them self-correcting.

On whose instructions? We could not guess at what sustains everything, had we not been previously told.

For instance, why did the Human Genome Project, which promised to map all our genes, and produce fine schematic diagrams, fail so utterl...