I love it when Richard Dawkins comes to town. It’s like Christmas for people who don’t believe in Christmas.
Even though he’s since departed our fair shores, Dawkins’ wake of influence still ripples like the aftermath of an intellectual tsunami, and if anything you have to give him credit for almost single-handedly putting religious debate back on the map.
The debate that follows Dawkins across the globe is largely confined to the mission of getting rid of this pesky notion of a creator once and for all, by using the atheist mantra “celebrate reason” to expose all who entertain the divine as delusional, idiotic disciples of fairies or flying spaghetti monsters or whatever convenient and patronising analogy fits best. Needless to say, there’s a lot of love in the room.
But who needs love when you have science? Love is irrational, fleeting, impossible to measure let alone stuff in a beaker. Science on the other hand is rational, quantitative, and definitive.
And in the eyes of the atheist, God deserves no free pass from enlightened scientific scrutiny. Hear bloody hear. But surely if the big guy isn’t getting handouts, neither should “religious nuts” nor “strident atheists”. The problem with the latter is, the more atheist you are, the more your own logic forces you out of a gig.
In his well-known book The God Delusion, Dawkins postulates that “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other”, and has illustrated the concept with his “spectrum of theistic probability”. It’s a seven-point sliding scale of belief, ranging from strong theist (100% probability of God), to strong atheist (100% probability of no god).
Let’s start by applying reason to the first flank of the scale, religion: “I believe God exists”. Calling for religious people to produce evidence of their belief is by very nature a logically absurd proposition. Religion doesn’t require evidence, it has faith. By definition, faith negates the need to produce tangible evidence, never claims to possess tangible evidence, and therefore stands up to reason.
The only time when reason fails religion is when believers claim to possess earthly evidence of things that are by their own admission not of this earth, not of the physical realm. It is these extremists who Dawkins so logically and effortlessly scalps, and rightly so.
In the middle of the spectrum you have the agnostics: “I don’t know if god exists”. The agnostic makes no claims in either camp. They say, “There is no evidence for or against, so it is impossible to say for sure. Either could be true”. Applying reason, the agnostic’s case holds together.
Then finally we come to the atheist position: “God does not exist”. The atheist will say it is not up to them to prove the non-existence of God, but for those who do believe to substantiate such claims. However reason dictates once you claim a statement as fact, you are then required to provide evidence to support your statement, evidence of which so far does not seem to exist. This does not hold up to the atheist’s own standards of reason.
Atheists will of course see this as an unfair comparison, comparing “moderate” theists with “extreme” atheists. Yet it seems the modus operandi of vocal atheists to place all people of faith into the extreme “God deluded” bucket, and to argue their own position with all the vigour of someone who possesses concrete contrary evidence, of which on Dawkins’ scale one can only be seen as an extreme position.
It is often difficult to figure out where on the scale any atheist sits. Even Dawkins doesn’t call himself a strong atheist, rather “a de-facto atheist” leaning towards the full monty, and has said would be surprised to meet any atheist who was a 100% non-believer. And why? Because being a strong atheist actually goes against reason and starts contradicting its own definition by becoming a belief.
Maybe that’s why those atheist billboards didn’t say, “There’s no God”, but instead, “There’s probably no God”. But surely probability that something isn’t, means that there’s a possibility that something is? I guess the billboard, “There possibly is a God” didn’t quite have the same kick to it.
If you buy a lottery ticket, the odds of winning may be completely fanciful, but they’re still odds. Winning might not be probable, but it is possible. Now only a complete fool would run around town clutching their supplementary numbers telling everyone they’re definitely about to win the big one, but only a liar would tell them that it’s impossible.
So great existential warriors, which do you want to be: the liar or the fool? Without sounding too evangelical, the good news is you don’t have to be either.
We all love facts, so here is the only fact any human being has ever come up with about the meaning of life that makes any lick of sense:
Who bloody knows.
Not one person on this planet knows what happens to us after we die. Not one. No enlightened Buddhist monk, no hyped-up televangelist, no intellectually evolved atheist convention ticket holder. The fact is we don’t know, we’ve never known, and we’re never going to know.
Sure we can have a bit of a stab in the dark, chuck a few assumptions around, use faith and reason to construct belief; but while we inhabit this mortal coil we know just as much about what goes on after the curtains close as did the primordial organisms that slurped their way out of the soup.
Yet even though it’s logically impossible to know what by definition is unknowable, it’s like atheists have embarked upon a mission to prove they can count to infinity, without ever acknowledging the lunacy and futility of the entire endeavour.
“We’re not there just yet, but were getting pretty damn close. Just a few more numbers to go I reckon. Trust me guys, you just gotta have faith”.
Heh, and I thought only creationism was funny.
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