SEE RELATED ENTRY AT THE FLATLAND ALMANACK.
In one of the five volumes of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, a prominent philosopher (I forget his name) writes books proving the nonexistence of God. (My favorite title: Who is this God Person, Anyway?) His arguments are so flawlessly reasoned that God ends up saying "Oh, dear" and "vanishing in a puff of logic."
But the reality is that the perceptions on which faith is based are not subject to reason or reasoned analysis. I have to laugh out loud when scientists announce that they've got reality all figured out. They need to read Edward Abbot's Flatland.
Look, I like Richard Dawkins. I enjoyed The Blind Watchmaker. I believe that most of what he says is true. For example, this:
[quote begins from Richard Dawkins, The Huffington Post, Why There is Almost Certainly No God]
America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming....
My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.
[quote ends]
Yes, yes, and yes. All true. All just as terrifying to this Christian as to anyone in the scientific community and for exactly the reasons that Dawkins cites.
But he's wrong that one cannot reject the argument of creation by design and believe in a personal God. I reject Genesis (and most of the Bible), so I'm hardly a typical Christian. Furthermore, my notion of reality is less fixed than his. I'd say this: in the reality that Richard Dawkins perceives, there is almost no room for God (interesting that he left that little loophole). In the reality that my husband Nick perceives, the same is true.
But scientists are in their way as credulous as evangelicals are in theirs. They trust profoundly in their instruments and in their perceptions. They also believe in the existence of facts.
But my own training in another profession has convinced me that there is no such thing in the universe as a fact. There are only the shifting perceptions of observers, some of whom are scientists. I love science because every advance into understanding the universe and the stuff of which the universe is made shows that it is always altogether stranger than one can quite conceive. Are you a human being composed of flesh and bone or are you a loosely organized mass of particles whirling at high speed in mostly empty space? Isn't it amazing that the answer is both? And isn't amazing that you can say "I" and tell that part of reality apart from the rest of it that isn't?
I certainly agree that religion should have no place in American politics. The incursion of the so-called Christian Right is a development that the Founding Fathers would have deplored. Separation of church and state ought to ensure that no religious agenda could achieve a sufficient foothold in the government to impose its will on the rest of us. But the fact that there are people whose identity is so tied up in their beliefs about the nature of reality that they can't tell the difference doesn't prove a thing about religion in the abstract or God in the concrete.
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