Yay! It’s “A”-week on facebook! And because most of my peers on there don’t know anything about the scarlet “A”, I added a small note:
[Me] is happily participating in A-week! Maybe I should make it P-week next week for pastafarianism?
A reply from a friend and colleague came up in the comments to that status update, and I thought I may as well put it here because I spent some effort on the reply. He disagreed with me about God being contradictory to science. In his opinion, which I respect but don’t agree with, God may be something that merely breathes life into things, therefore science and religion are not necessarily contradictable.
Here’s my reply:
Yes, one could invent a God that does not contradict science (at the moment). This is the so-called “God of the gaps” argument: You just stick God in all the kind of gaps that are not (yet) filled by science, or that you think may not ever be filled by science (but what do we know?). In my opinion, that’s still a very irrational proposal – and I regard science as a discipline of rationality and skeptical inquiry. For me it is therefore also an unscientific proposal. Any God-hypothesis I have ever heard of (including yours) should at least be considered “so highly unlikely that you may as well say it is impossible”. You just have to measure it up to the same standards of skepticism and rational inquiry that you use for any other hypothesis. Doesn’t science favor the most likely hypothesis and regard hypotheses that are not confirmed by evidence with much skepticism? Isn’t there a tendency to accept the least complicated hypothesis that can best explain the evidence? What is a “God concept” worth if all it does is describe something that can be explained by physics, biology and chemistry alone? And the hypothesis causes a huge problem: If there’s a “higher being”, it must necessarily be more complex than anything we have on earth (what a striking ability to breathe life into things!!!). But where does something this complex come from in the first instance, unless that thing itself is product of a process like evolution that moves from simple to complex without much magic at all? Maybe that’s possible, but I doubt that such a very physical, biological thing (an extraterrestrial, basically) is the kind of being everyone talks about when talking about “God”.
As for “breathing life” into things, I disagree. All you need to spark life is a self-replicator (like RNA) that becomes increasingly more complex and refined because that increases its chances of replicating itself. RNA is not very complex and the rest of the process, unless it is disturbed by a giant catastrophe that wipes out absolutely everything, must necessarily continue. It cannot “not continue”, whether it wants to or not. I would suggest reading “The Selfish Gene” on the matter, but I am not sure you’d find the time to read it. 
In short: No, my stark atheism is not just the result of what churches do, which – as we all can agree on – is horrible, disgusting and unprogressive. My stark atheism is a result of my love of science and the way it works and of spending years looking into the subject, hearing all the arguments a million times (including accomodationist arguments like the “breathing life into things” one) and forming an opinion. I’m passionate about this which is not rarely misunderstood as strident or angry. But I am passionate about this because this is a view of the world – the only one I’ve ever come across – that actually makes sense. I couldn’t believe in the “breathing life into things” argument because I find it doesn’t go with logic. It does go with the history of mankind, the wishes and hopes of humanity and with the abilities of our extraordinary minds to create things in our fantasy that do not actually exist. Humanity has always searched for something higher out there to explain the world to them when science couldn’t because not knowing doesn’t satisfy us.
I see no reason, either, to think of God as an entity that breathes life into things more than several entities (Hinduism? Egyptian Gods? Shinto Gods? Aboriginal Gods?) or really, no entities at all. It surely doesn’t make a difference for our world, so I venture the educated guess that something that doesn’t make a difference in our world may as well not bother to exist.
—
EDIT: And if his reply was genuine, I am rather happy because he said my statement was impressive and my argumentation convincing (I mentioned later that the arguments aren’t mine, but arguments I quite agree with). I hope this was genuine and not for the sake of peace and quiet. He alleged that maybe God may really be just an invention of humanity to bridge the fascinating question how a “combination of well defined stereotypic biochemical reactions can form an organism which is far away from a reflex-responding-machinery”. And that were his words, not mine.
Well, I think being so OUT as an atheist already did pay this week, didn’t it? Go scarlet letter!
Recent Comments