Both belief and non-belief are tantalisingly out of reach
Re: “Atheism requires just as much faith as religious belief”, Have Your Say, March 26.
Eric Bahrt maintains that religious folks don’t owe us a scientific explanation of their beliefs because they believe in a supernatural force. That’s pretty slick, but it doesn’t get the religgies off the hook. If they expect us to accept their worldview, they owe us an explanation of why they believe in a supernatural force and provide some evidence of both its existence and its nature.
Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”) notes that we can’t PROVE the non-existence of God, because it’s impossible to prove a negative proposition. It’s a big universe, and somewhere out there we might find a talking microbe who could say, “Hi, there! I’m God!” It is also possible that on our very own planet there might be a dog lover somewhere who has named his pooch God. That would give us incontrovertible evidence that there is a God. His motto would be “I bark, therefore I am.”
Dawkins is a scientist dealing with probabilities, and he argues that the probabilities suggest that there is no God. Certainly they suggest that there is no Big Guy in the Sky – an anthropomorphic, bearded, muscular old guy with white hair like the deity portrayed in Michelangelo’s painting of God creating Adam. That is a somewhat outdated concept of deity.
There may be a subtle force functioning in our universe that is worthy of worship, but we need to see some evidence even of that. From what I can see, the most sensible stance for people to take is a hopeful agnosticism. Hopeful agnostics are too modest to claim, as theists and atheists do, that they know whether God exists or not. They say, “I don’t know if there’s a supreme being/force/principle or not, but I hope there’s something out there.” Of course, their main weakness is that they’re wishy-washy.
Wishy-washy and loving it,
Ye Olde Theologian
