Below are some quotes from a couple of UK's well known atheists; Alice Roberts and Brian Cox (*1). From their media appearances alone both come over as nice people. Although they are unlikely to have a great deal of respect for my own working faith they strike me as polite people who would not be rude about it. But whatever! Let me now look at those quotes:
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ALICE ROBERTS:
MY COMMENT: I assume that by "non-religious people" Alice means people who don't kowtow to deities of any form and in any case have no proactive or practical belief in them. I don't know the history of non-belief myself but I'll take Alice's word for it that such people have always existed. I would nevertheless want to comment that my feel for history suggests that non-religious people of this ilk were usually in a minority, although this may not be true of modern Western societies. Moreover, it does seem that even in this modern age belief in deities or at the very least a mystical feeling that "there is something out there" is still very widespread; this fragment of observational evidence could be bundled together with other evidences to help build a case for theism.
Where I get a bit stuck with Alice's statement is with the meaning of her "natural phenomenon vs. supernatural side" distinction. If we are working with the assumption that natural phenomenon refers to the patterns of our observations which conform to those highly organised and succinct principles we call "laws" then the natural phenomenon category is simply a construct of our definitions. Given this definition it is then very tempting to rule out the far less tractable world of exceptions to the rule, phenomenal erratics, the bizarre and the unique as mistaken anomalies because their unmanageable infrequency compromises their sense of reality. So called natural phenomenon is then not just a passive category but a way of proactively sorting out the observational sheep from the goats.
But in any case the so called natural world with its remarkable and irreducible organization is in a very real sense highly supernatural. See in particular evolutionary theory. Crass attempts to trivialize this irreducibility by abusing probability theory or via multiverse concepts don't work for me.
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BRIAN COX:
MY COMMENT: I wasn't aware this checking principle Brian refers to works as a catch-all principle even for natural phenomenon. Some objects subject to scientific checking such as sociological, economic and historical theories where the intervening mists of time and other epistemic distance factors start to take effect make fact testing problematic. (See here).
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BRIAN:
MY COMMENT: Well, yes Brian that is not only a very interesting question, but I would rate it as the most significant question of all. But I think Brian is going to have great difficulty answering such a question; for if as I think he has opined the only source of the meaning of life comes from what we personally invest in it then such subjectivity will ensure that life means different things to different people with the inevitable clashes of interest this will imply.
Brian believes that the universe itself has no objective meaning of anthropic interest because all patterns and objects of interest are destined to die in the inevitable heat death of the universe. This cosmic destiny makes the elegant laws of physics as anthropically absurd as they are pointless.
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MEANWHILE ON PZ MYERS' BLOG:
PZ Myers is a really grumpy atheist; that may be because he's got various health issues. I can wish him better health although I won't pray for him as he probably hates the idea of prayer. But then who wouldn't be grumpy if you had to live in a country with a strong mix of Christian dominionists, quasi-fascists in powerful positions and which is the source of much Christian fundamentalist thinking (like Ken Ham *2). Grumpy ole' git PZ is a contrast to Alice Roberts and Brian Cox! On his blog post here PZ quotes a certain Mano Singham and then adds his own indorsing comment: See below (my emphases):
MANO SINGHAM: I left religion for purely logical reasons. not emotional ones. I found that however hard I tried, I just could not reconcile the scientific view that everything occurs according to natural laws with the traditional religious view that seemed to require an entity that could bypass those laws to act in the world to change the course of events. It took me a long time to overcome the emotional attachment to the religious beliefs (and now he's emotionally attached to science! - ed) that I had. So while I can understand how logical reasoning can make one leave religion, (speak for yourself Mano!) I cannot see how it can drive the reverse process.... (Yes I agree it doesn't; but see below - ed)
PZ MYERS: Same here, except that my family faith tradition didn’t have much of an emotional attachment to Christianity, so shedding it was relatively trivial. I agree, though, that there are no good rational reasons to compel return to a faith, which is why I reject any attempts to rationalize it. It feels good to you, it connects you to friends and family, you have fond memories of your time in church (and makes sense of life? - ed) …that’s fine. I believe you. Go ahead, I’m not going to deny your feelings. But if you try to tell me you have compelling, logical, scientific reasons to believe in a god, I’m going to tell you you’re full of sh*t.
MY COMMENT: Well, yes I'd agree; if you are expecting the verification of theism to be a simple case of testing as one might test accessible physical theories like Hooke's law or theories testable by test-tube then you won't find that kind of compelling "logical" scientific reason to believe in God. In fact testing for the existence of God, a totalizing personality in whose immanent being we are immersed, (Acts 17:27-28) is even more of an epistemic challenge than testing social, economic and historical theories. Much of the evidence for God revolves round personal anecdote, patchy historical documents, and above all a motivation to bring sense, meaning and purpose to both personal and community life. Perhaps that's what PZ is trying to express in his sentence above that I have emboldened. "God seeking" is an existential reaction whereby the individual seeks to find an all-embracing world view which provides meaning and purpose in life.
But here is the ironic twist: Just as the simple logic of a scientific kind isn't sufficient to argue that theism is a logical truism, conversely neither is the elementary observational sampling which reveals very general laws a sufficient logical basis to argue one out of theism as Mano is proposing. If anything the strange & ultimately logically unjustifiable high organization which facilitates our expression of that order as those elegant mathematical laws of physics has a strange way of compelling us (at least myself) to start speculating about a logically true creating and sustaining context beyond them: After all, descriptive science cannot get round the impenetrable logical barrier of contingency; if we are looking for the underlying logic which supports the astounding & startling cosmic order we must look beyond that cosmos; at this point it is a very natural human instinct, in fact a very compelling intuition, to evoke the concept of God as Designer, Creator and Sustainer. But such a conclusion is a proprietary one, one which belongs to the individual. for example I myself cannot reconstruct those "purely logical reasons" (sic) which drove Mano Singham away from theism.
Mano's insistence that the existence of physical laws logically bar the existence of a creating and sustaining entity at whose pleasure the course of events may change capriciously betrays an obvious prejudice in his thinking. After all, few of us bulk at the idea that an otherwise fairly sound theoretical framework (like Newtons laws) may well under certain circumstance be bypassed in favour of a more general theoretical framework (like relativity or quantum mechanics), a framework which is the outer context in which less general patterns of behavior are immersed. So I take that Mano will only accepts exceptions to rule if they are the outcome of higher level laws. That is, he has an a priori prejudice which means he cannot accept a theistic outer framework. For him it is physical laws all the way down. For me, of course, the existence of those remarkable general laws governing a highly ordered cosmos has exactly the opposite effect; it drives me to theistic conclusions.
For Mano the unalterable natural laws cannot be bypassed and therefore he elevates them to a kind natural-law deism. So, conversely if PZ is going to accuse those who "try to tell me you have compelling, logical, scientific reasons to believe in a god, I’m going to tell you you’re full of sh*t." (and he might be right) then does that means if you try to tell me you have compelling, logical, scientific reasons to reject God, I’m going to tell you you’re full of sh*t? It would however be more polite and true to say that Mano's argument is based on innate gut reaction rather than logic.
Footnotes
*1 Brian Cox appears to be in a mixed state of atheism and agnosticism: According Brian's Wiki page....
Brian Cox has stated he lacks a belief in deities and is a humanist, but he has sometimes rejected the label "atheist" in favor of saying he has "no personal faith". He has indicated he cannot be sure a God does not exist and that science cannot answer every question
*2 Young earthism is of course an ugly manifestation of Ken's fundamentalism. In young earthism God's created objects are sending out false messages about their non-history. But even if God downloads created objects "as is" straight into creation, they each presumably are first assembled in the mind of God implying that even Ken's "as is" creation objects have a history in the sense of a history in the divine mind.
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