Of course the beauty and goodness we discern are not (to say the least) all pervasive features of the cosmos; there is much that is amiss-and the problem of evil and suffering turns out, in a brief sentence at the close of his book, to be Nagel's final reason for setting his face against a "benign" theistic teleology. But religious believers have never tried to maintain we live in a comfy world. The Judaeo-Christian tradition puts suffering at the centre of religious understanding: it recognises the fact that our nature is conflicted, we often turn away from the good, and that, as Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, "the whole creation groans in travail". A teleological framework is certainly not supposed to mean things have arrived at perfection; on the contrary, it typically points to an end-state that is not yet fully realised.

But the atheist may ask why we should bring in God at all. If Darwinian theory does the explanatory work in accounting for how we got here, doesn't this make God redundant for all practical purposes? To answer this, we need to go back to the other strand in Nagel's argument, not his worries about the likelihood of intelligent life emerging in the available time, but his insistence on the remarkable nature of our human capacity to grasp the objective truths of logic and morality. Perhaps Darwinian naturalism might possibly be able to explain how, building on capacities initially shaped in a purely functional way by the struggle for survival, we could develop the ability to undertake "free-floating" types of mental activity (for example, mathematical and moral inquiry) which transcend the empirical demands of feeding, shelter and reproduction; but it does not seem able to accommodate the idea that the objects of such inquiry transcend the empirical world, and reflect a timeless objective truth whose authority we are constrained to acknowledge whether we like it or not.

The cosmos revealed by science is an astonishingly beautiful and unified whole, seemingly able to generate, over billions of years, the intricately ordered processes of life and, eventually, the amazing human capacities for rationality and reflective thought and responsiveness to beauty and goodness. All this will strike the believer as strongly compatible with a religious worldview. The beautiful and intricate world disclosed by science certainly doesn't prove God's existence; and we know, moreover, that we are conflicted creatures who are still very far from reaching our true goal. But for all that, our grasp, however imperfect, of an objective domain of truth and beauty and goodness tells us that we inhabit a cosmos in which the religious believer can still feel at home.