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I'm a geek. And... wait for it... a Christian! How is this possible?

I'm amazed that the answer is so inscrutable to people. Faith and reason are not, and never have been, mutually exclusive. Both are necessary aspects of life - and one without the other is crippled.

The philosophers of old understood this completely, even those without any specific religion or monotheistic mindset. There was always some element of the undefinable present in their evaluations of the way the universe works, lives, and breathes. Granted - these days we know plenty more about the "how" of the world than they did. But do we really know any more or less about the "why" of it? And if we did, what would be the purpose of the countless philosophical and theological debates that still rage on - in the written word, in public, on the individual level... everywhere?

C.S. Lewis put the matter quite well when he said:

"Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such - and such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science-and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes-something of a different kind-this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make."

For yet another point of view, I'd steer the reader to Plato. Most people are familiar with his famous allegory of the cave, but in case the reader isn't, I'll break it down thusly:

A group of prisoners who have spent their entire lives inside of a cave, chained so that their faces can only look at the wall. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and behind the fire are raised walkways - where people carry statues of animals, plants, etc. These cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners' gaze is fixed upon. Whenever one

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