The late Robert Jastrow was a highly accomplished astronomer and an agnostic. He was also a materialist, i.e. he maintained that everything that exists can be explained in terms of matter and the laws which govern it. For a strict materialist there are no immaterial substances like minds, souls or God.
In the short video below Jastrow explains how his agnosticism and materialism combine to place him in a hopeless philosophical bind, and yet he refuses to relinquish them.
Here's the video:
If the universe came into existence, which it obviously did, then it must have had a cause. Whatever caused the universe must have not only transcended the universe - which means it must have transcended space, time and matter - but it must also have been incomprehensibly powerful and intelligent.
It's plausible, too, to think that the fine-tuning of the structure of matter on both the very tiny and the extraordinarily large scales, as well as the exquisitely precise values of the forces, parameters and constants of the universe, all suggest that this intelligent agent had a conscious purpose in creating a universe that could sustain life.
If it did have a conscious purpose then it was a personal agent since conscious purposes are attributes of personal beings.
So Jastrow's hopeless bind is that his agnostic materialism prevents him from acknowledging that there are any non-physical agents acting in or on the universe while his science tells him that there must be a transcendent, non-physical, personal cause that brought the universe into being.
One wonders if he carried that bind with him to the grave or if he finally resolved it.
