The irony of your statement, Wanstronian, is that most of the greatest discoveries of science have come from men and women for whom their faith was as real to them as your atheism is to you. In fact, the more studied you are in science the less likely you are to believe that there isn’t a God.
In an earlier post you and Touchstone both took me to task for saying that atheists substitute nothing for God, when you claim that you don’t say that God doesn’t exist just that it’s extremely unlikely. Yet you are narrow-mindedly eliminating Him as a possibility from every calculation you make. You never calculate on the “what if it’s true” side of the equation - isn’t that, by very definition, narrowing the mind by refusing to see a possibility or to acknowledge it because your own dogma - that God does not exist - will not allow it to be true?
You just acknowledged that atheists allow for the existence of God, even if it’s highly unlikely. This not a dogmatic view, but a practical, corrigible one, that accepts the limitations of the view that God does not exist as always something short of certainty, and liable to overturning if, perchance, a god
did deign to make itself manifest to man in some way that could be verified and tested in an objective way.
And yet, two sentences later, now it
is dogma – that God does not exist. The contradiction is clear, and just like “atheists worship science”, is explainable as a kind of reflexive polemic – if unbelievers criticize Christians for deifying God, then
they must in turn be similarly guilty of deifying something else (science, reason are common choices to plug in there); if unbelievers criticize Christians for being dogmatic, then by golly the
unbelievers are going to be found to be just as dogmatic about something, too! Fair’s fair, and all that.
Look, the ‘what if it’s true’ path gets one
nowhere without a healthy application of skepticism to the idea. Without that,
anything is justifiable. This is especially problematic when the object of belief is a god that is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and possessed of an impassible will. On those terms, “what if it’s true” means anything and everything is likely to be true if we just suppose it might be, because that god can make it so. There is no evidence that goes against it, even in principle, there is no universe we can imagine ourselves in where we can say “nah, god cannot obtain in that case”.
So God hasn’t been eliminated as a possibility in my view. He may exist – it’s a possibility that can’t be ruled out. But no reasonable basis to think so, and I
do commend the “narrowing of the mind” to constraints of reasoning for those that are interested in pursuing real knowledge, and justifiable claim. Without that narrowing, the mind is adrift, a leaf blown by the winds, susceptible any and all forms of fancy and full, ruled by passions uninformed by principle.
I’d be interested in how you advise entertaining “it might be true” in a way that you can conclude “it’s not true” at the end of that process. What would the world have to look like to say “it might be true, but it looks quite likely it actually isn’t”?
-TS
