A photo of the aurora borealis - also known as the northern lights - represents a glimpse of the divine in a new book written by a former University of Newcastle academic.
The aurora image graces the front cover of David Frost's new book, Blind Evolution? The Nature of Humanity and the Origin of Life, which takes aim at Richard Dawkins and his best-seller, The God Delusion.
In his 21 years at the university, Professor Frost was an English literature professor and chairman of religious studies.
His wife Christine Mangala suggested the cover photo. She believed it was an example of "the extraordinary value we give to the world we live in, which has an astonishing beauty and inspires a sense of value that neo-Darwinism cannot explain".
"We don't really find our world 'blind, pitiless and devoid of meaning' as Richard Dawkins maintains [in his book The God Delusion]," Professor Frost said.
The battle between Darwinism and religion takes centre stage in the book, amid a backdrop of the old Oxford-Cambridge rivalry.
Dawkins was an Oxford professor, while Frost was a Cambridge lecturer before moving to Newcastle.
Professor Frost, a Shakespearean scholar and Christian theologian, challenges the idea that "life is totally meaningless, that everything evolved by a series of accidents".
"My counter argument is from an explicitly Christian position, believing in a good and loving creator," he said.
"My book appeals to basic human experiences of life, the joys of the natural world and the essential pleasure of human relationships."
It also acknowledges the "reality of evil as something that has to be accounted for".
In The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins states that god "almost certainly does not exist".
He asserts that belief in god is irrational and delusional. People hold this "false belief", despite evidence to the contrary.
Marriage Made in Heaven
Professor Frost, now aged in his 80s, has been married to Christine Mangala for almost 50 years.
One of her books is called The Human Icon, which relates to her family background of Hindu believers and scholars and "what she experienced as a Christian convert".
"She was my research student in Cambridge for a thesis entitled The Problem of Evil in Jacobean Drama," he said.
"Propriety required that I declare we had developed a more than academic interest in one another and she should be directed to another supervisor."
The young daughter of her new supervisor was "killed by a passing motorist as she was crossing the road".
This brought everything they had believed about their "very existence" into question.
"I as a colleague and Mangala as a pupil found ourselves bound to call and express our condolences, yet could find little or nothing to say of comfort," he said.
They were unable to do more than "sit on the ground with him and weep".
"My book is explicitly about my lifelong concern with finding what I should have said."
A large part of the book is "devoted to scientific observations that contradict neo-Darwinian tenets".
Professor Frost insisted he was not anti-science, just critical of what he believes to be "bad science".
"For instance, there is in neo-Darwinism a reliance on blind chance for everything that develops," he said.
"I produce many examples, some of them highly amusing observations, of animal behaviour that cannot be explained by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest."
Frost details the complex machinery inside cells to describe the concept of intelligent design.
Professor Dawkins has said that the designer hypothesis raises the larger problem of "who designed the designer".
Which is, of course, one of those classic chicken and egg riddles.
As for the aurora, scientists say it's simply charged particles in the solar wind. And, some might say, a light shining in the darkness.
Non-Viral Jokes
Sign spotted at the pearly gates: "Welcome to Heaven. Keep your religion to yourself."
