OT Thread - Atheists [WeirdDave]

I've been thinking about this this week since a lot of the conversation on the blog has been about Neil DeGrasse Tyson's various exploits in creative storytelling, along with the "I F***** LUV science!" crowd. I'm not going to rehash the discussion here, if you missed it, scroll back to one of the numerous posts Ace did this on the subject this past week.

It seems to me that there is a lot of overlap between the "love that science!" people and Atheists, and in a lot of cases the motivation seems to be the same. In the case of Atheists I call it the Yuri Gagarin syndrome (although curiously, Gagarin never said the famous "I flew into space, but didn’t see God" quote, it was Khruschchev: "Why are you clinging to God? Here Gagarin flew into space and didn't see God." By all accounts Gagarin was a believer). It basically boils down to "Look how smrt we is! We is so smrt and haven't found God, he must no exist!"

I find this mind numbingly stupid on a couple of levels. First, let me be clear that I am talking about the Judeo-Christian God, that's always their target. If someone worships Gaia, well, you're praying to a rock, good luck. Try Islam, they go in for that kind of thing too and they have those snazzy burqas to boot. From the standpoint of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the foundation of the whole thing is faith, which is a belief without proof. It always amuses me when I see believers trying to "prove" God's existence, it puts me in the mind of the scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the babel fish is introduced:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

"Proving" God's existence would invalidate the religion that said proof was sought to defend, but some people try anyway (tell me again that God doesn't have a wicked sense of humor).

Secondly, it seems to me that the very nature of God as God is commonly understood logically removes God from being subject to any kind of rational examination scientifically. The simplest definition is the being/entity/force/whatever that created the universe. As such, God MUST exist outside the universe. If God created the universe, then he is outside the universe and exists separately from it, God is thus not subject to the laws of the universe. We humans exist inside the universe and are creatures of it, we are bound by the laws of the universe and our rational, scientific capabilities can never transcend the laws and boundaries of the universe. IOW, we do not share a common frame of reference with God. We are utterly incapable of proving/disproving the existence of God because all of our scientific tools of "proof" are bound by the same limitations as we are. It is impossible to use the scientific method on something outside the physical laws of the universe (all of this is true for the multiverse as well, the scale is just a wee bit larger). I once had someone tell me that God couldn't exist because he couldn't be everywhere at once because * Drum roll * the speed of light is only 186K miles per second. That's a head poundingly stupid argument on so many levels, but let's give it a plausibility that it doesn't deserve for a sec. That's the speed limit inside the universe, suppose where God is from the speed of light is potato? That's nonsense, of course, from our perspective. Maybe it's not from God's. I don't know. I can't know. And I'm OK with that.

And isn't that the crux of it, the commonality between many Atheists and the "I lurv science!" crowd? They are so afraid to admit ignorance of anything, because ignorance diminishes them in their own minds. It's a crushing blow to their ego. That's what this is all about, protecting the ego. If they truly understood the science they claim to revere, or, for that matter, the faith that they deride, they would realize that it is the recognition of ignorance that is the starting point for both of them. It is recognizing how little that one does actually know that is the starting point on the road to knowledge (or faith), and even then it's a road with no end. But traveling that road.....ahh, traveling that road is wondrous.

As it should be.

posted by Open Blogger at 12:58 PM

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