Did Sherlock Holmes believe in God?

I’ve become, belatedly, a Sherlock Holmes groupie. I dig the BBC series Sherlock, starring the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as its American counterpart Elementary (I prefer the latter, in part because of Lucy Liu, the best Watson ever).

I’ve also been plowing through “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” on my Kindle. The stories get a little formulaic, but Arthur Conan Doyle has a knack for sticking oddities into his narratives to keep us on our toes. Take, for example, “The Naval Treaty,” about diplomatic hugger-mugger. Interviewing a young diplomat, Holmes suddenly spots a rose decorating the man’s apartment and exclaims, “What a lovely thing a rose is!”

Holmes, whose gargantuan intelligence focuses obsessively on solving crimes (he is interested in science only insofar as it furthers this goal), has never evinced “any keen interest in natural objects,” Watson notes. Watson is even more startled when Holmes, after picking up the rose, delivers the following monologue:

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from flowers.”

Holmes is alluding to what I call the problem of beauty. The problem of evil—that is, undeserved suffering–prevents me from believing in God, or at least an all-powerful God who gives a damn about us. But the problem of beauty keeps me from being an adamant atheist. If reality results from sheer coincidence, why is it so heartbreakingly lovely? As the great physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, an atheist if ever there was one, once wrote, sometimes nature “seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.”

My guess is that the hyper-empirical Holmes, if pressed, would say that he is an agnostic, because there is insufficient evidence for either belief or disbelief in a Creator. Holmes is far more rational than his own creator, Conan Doyle. After the death of his wife and other loved ones, Doyle consoled himself by believing in ghosts.

Toward the end of his life he even insisted on the existence of fairies—you know, tiny winged humanoids, like Peter Pan’s pal Tinker Bell. How could an obviously brilliant man fall prey to such a delusion? Now that’s a mystery.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”