S eventy years of the atheistic Soviet system could not snuff out religion. Instead it produced a Solzhenitsyn, who found God in the Gulag and lived to tell the world the truth. China could not dissolve religion into the Marxist-Maoist state. Instead the underground church, though persecuted, is exploding. Many claim that Darwin forever rid the universe of divine design and purpose.
Nature can explain nature without any supernatural assistance.
But a growing number of thinkers are finding signs of decay in the Darwinian fortress, and predict a further crumbling of the edifice in the decades to come. If so, creation-oriented religions will gain more intellectual credibility. C ommon to all religions are social practices, institutions, and world views that lay claim to objective truths concerning the sacred, which is viewed as somehow transcendent. Religions prescribe how people ought to be oriented toward the sacred, personally and socially. As the plurality of religious options continues to expand in the next century, many will yield to the temptation to create their own religions by mixing and matching elements from several religions according to their own preferences, however logically inconsistent the result may be.