After completing nineteen years of Adventist education, I was now at a state university, a doctoral candidate awash in theories of kin selection, selfish genes, allopatric speciation, island biogeography, defense stratetgies, and so forth—the brick and mortar of contemporary life science. How God was involved with all this seemed less and less clear to me.

One summer day my roommate, a fellow bibliophile, asked if I had read The Stranger, by Albert Camus. No, I said. I knew of the French existentialist, but had never read him. The Stranger was an exceptionally powerful book, said my roommate. He loaned me his copy.

Monsieur Meursault, the protagonist, was an odd, soulless character—an intelligent, devout believer in nothing, really. He rationalized life to the point that it had no meaning. He attended his mother’s funeral but felt no remorse, responded sexually to his girlfriend but offered no love, murdered a stranger but sensed no guilt. Condemned to die at the guillotine, he opened his heart "to the benign indifference of the universe," his only hope—to elicit maximum disgust at his public execution.

The story gnawed at my psyche. But soon, as a beginning college professor, I had little time to ponder the questions raised by Camus’s book. I wondered, though, how much like the rationalist, Monsieur Meursault, I had become. His story haunted me, as did my own struggles over meaning. I had developed serious doubts about my faith. What I once thought to be faith had turned out to be an elaborate, cardboard belief structure now crumbling beneath a burden of empirical evidence.

The school year rushed by and soon it was summer again. By happenstance, I began reading C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the quirky, but delightful adventure of children searching for the lion, Aslan. I am by nature a quiet, introspective person, but oddly enough I identified with Reepicheep, a pugnacious, troublesome, talking mouse, always eager to avenge the honor of his friends.

As I read Lewis’s story, something happened inside me. The very fact that such a story could be imagined said something to me about a reality beyond, one I could not measure, analyze, or codify, but nonetheless entirely real. Lewis’s fanciful fable—written for children—filled me with hope. It entered a void excavated by a lifetime of cold rationalism, both scientific and religious.

Toward the end of the story Reepicheep, "quivering with happiness," discarded his sword, left his friends, and —by faith—crossed the lilied sea to the "very end of the world" and to Aslan.

And the eyes of a newly credentialed Ph.D., awash in a sea of discovery, shone like those of a child.

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