'A creator is certainly a god if he brings the universe into existence from nothing'

This memorable sentence was uttered by renowned theologian Langdon Gilkey (above) at the historic 1981 Arkansas trial that struck down the required teaching of creationism in that state's schools.

All well and good - but today the great majority of cosmologists, astronomers and theoretical physicists studying the origin of our universe do indeed believe that it came "into existence from nothing."

To quote Stephen Hawking, from the final sentences of his memorable 1988 lecture, "Origin of the Universe": "Although Science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it can not answer the question: why does the universe bother to exist? Maybe only God can answer that."

So does this mean that Hawking and Davies and the rest are creationists who believe in God?

Call them what you will - if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, well....

Here's Margalit Fox's obituary from Friday's New York Times of Gilkey, who died on November 19 right here in Charlottesville.

Langdon Gilkey, 85, Theorist on Nexus of Faith and Science, Dies

Langdon Gilkey, a prominent Protestant theologian who argued for a rational, even satisfying, coexistence between science and faith in the modern, secular age, died on Nov. 19 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He was 85.

The cause was meningitis, according to the University of Chicago, where Dr. Gilkey taught at the divinity school from 1963 until his retirement in 1989.

The author of more than a dozen books, Dr. Gilkey was considered a pre-eminent interpreter of the work of the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.

In his own writing, his concerns were ecumenical, ranging from interpretations of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism to explorations of Protestant belief through the lens of autobiography.

Throughout his career, Dr. Gilkey explored the often slippery terrain where religion, technology and culture converge.

A Protestant of liberal social conscience, he often argued publicly against the initiatives of Christian fundamentalists, including school prayer and creationism.

As an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union, he testified in a highly publicized 1981 case in which an Arkansas law requiring the teaching of creationism in public schools was struck down.

"He was a leader in the generation that followed the 20th-century titans: Reinhold Niebuhr; H. Richard Niebuhr, his brother; and Paul Tillich," said Martin E. Marty, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

"The generation after them had a good, heavy dose of realism. They were the first American Protestant generation that could be really at home with Catholicism, and they had a more open embrace of popular culture."

While some theologians approached faith as a rarefied abstraction, Dr. Gilkey tried to situate it in a going world that also contained science, secularism and an abundance of other faiths.

Christian thought, he maintained, could profitably inform, and be informed by, all of the above.

"The scientific community is as vulnerable as any other community to a spiritual takeover," he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986.

"The history of science getting taken over and transformed by ideology in the 20th century is appalling. They've ended up as the handmaiden of every damn ideology around."

Langdon Brown Gilkey was born on Feb. 9, 1919, in Chicago, where his father was the University of Chicago chaplain.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1940, and a Ph.D., in 1954, from Union Theological Seminary, where he was a student of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Dr. Gilkey's first marriage ended in divorce.

He is survived by his wife, the former Sonja Weber, whom he married in 1963; their son, Amos Welcome Gilkey, and daughter, Frouwkje Gilkey Pagani; a grandson; and a son from his first marriage, Mark Whitney Gilkey.

After graduating from Harvard, Dr. Gilkey traveled to China to teach English at Yenching University.

China was then under Japanese occupation, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was interned with other Allied civilians in a camp at Shantung, where he remained until the end of the war.

In his memoir "Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure" (1966), Dr. Gilkey discussed the effect of his captivity, during which he was crowded in with almost 2,000 other prisoners, on his later beliefs.

"This internment camp reduced society, ordinarily large and complex, to viewable sizes," he wrote, "and by subjecting life to greatly increased tension laid bare its essential structures."

It was a view of the human condition that would shape much of his later work, as he tried to root Christian belief in a deeply flawed, even barbarous world.

His other books include "Naming the Whirlwind" (1969), "Reaping the Whirlwind" (1976), "Message and Existence" (1979), "On Niebuhr" (2001) and "Catholicism Confronts Modernity" (1975).

In "Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock" (1985), Dr. Gilkey recounted his experience in the Arkansas case, which successfully challenged a state law requiring schools that taught evolution to give "creation science" equal time.

The authors of the law had been careful not to couch their intent in religious terms, but Dr. Gilkey remained unpersuaded.

"A creator is certainly a god," he said in court, "if he brings the universe into existence from nothing."

When he was asked to testify, Dr. Gilkey, whose interests by this time took in tantric yoga, Sikhism and Buddhism, did not quite look the part of the distinguished academic theologian.

This concerned his colleagues.

"Before he left, we made him cut his hair, put on a tie and get rid of the beads and earrings," Dr. Marty said.

"Because there was no way he could have survived in an Arkansas courtroom."