One of the characteristic features of our time is the angry atheist, the person who, having read the works of Darwin and his successors, comes to the conclusion that you can't prove the existence of G-d and that, therefore, faith is irrational.

Whoever thought you could prove the existence of G-d? None of the most fundamental approaches to life are provable. You can prove mathematical formulae. You can prove theorems in logic. But that is only because logic and mathematics are theoretical systems that tell us something about symbols but nothing about empirical reality: life as we live and experience it.

You cannot prove that right is sovereign over might, that it is better to be loved than feared, that every human being however poor or powerless is worthy of respect, that peace is nobler than war, forgiveness greater than revenge, and hope a higher virtue than resignation to blind fate.
There is no proof that love transfigures life, that compassion is preferable to cruelty, that it is better to give than to receive, or that trust is more rewarding than a mindset of fear and suspicion.  None of these is demonstrable. Lives have been lived and civilizations built in defiance of these truths, yet they remain true. The most interesting truths are the ones we cannot prove.

Most interestingly, the same is true of science. It was David Hume in the eighteenth century who formulated the Problem of Induction. Simply put, this says that the fact that an event has happened a thousand or a million times before does not entail that it will happen next time.

Bertrand Russell gave a simple example. Consider a chicken. For a hundred days, it is fed grain by the farmer. A rational chicken would conclude that this will continue long into the future. When the day comes for it to be turned into someone's meal, the chicken discovers the limits of the law of predictability.

What is true of all these beliefs is that they are framing principles. They define ways of looking at the world. So science is framed by the expectation of regularity, art by the idea of beauty, morality by the idea of goodness, economics by the ideas of wealth creation and exchange, politics by the use of power and so on. Neither rational nor irrational in themselves, they frame different forms of rationality.

So, looking at the same landscape, the botanist classifies, the poet rhapsodizes, the artist paints, the cartographer maps, the musician composes and the religious believer gives thanks. Each is a rational response within a given frame of reference. Each is a way of seeing the world, and the religious way is to sense the Creator in creation.

The Psalm does not say, 'The heavens prove the existence of God.' It says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God.' Small truths can be proved; great truths can only be lived. The greater the truth, the wider the window it opens to the wonders of the world, and the greatest of all truths is faith.