– I’ve been thinking of taking snippets out of various E-mail and posting them. Just bits here and there that have something pithy to say and stand alone fairly well. Sort of like recycling yesterday’s news in a new package? Well, whatever. Here’s one:
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The presence or absence of God cannot be proven. That’s a pretty absolute statement but I think it’s valid. Consider, if everything is an omnipotent God’s doing then the situation is indistinguishable from a universe in which there is no God and nothing is God’s doing. It all goes back to the quandary that to tell the difference between two things – you need at least two, eh? A discussion of light is meaningless to a man profoundly blind from birth since he has always and only ever experienced blackness. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s experiencing blackness because he’s never experienced anything else to differ it against. In one universe, everything is God and so we cannot experience not-God. In the other, nothing is God and therefore, we cannot experience God.
So, for me, it all comes down to making an a-priori choice and admitting full well that I have no basis other than that it is what I want to believe. I choose to live in a world where I think God is everywhere and everything and that this God-force is benevolent. And, for me, since I believe it to be so, it seems to be so. It is all beyond science and I make no quibbles that it is otherwise.
So to me, Dawkins is shrill because he believes there is no God and he can’t seem to recognize that his position is a choice – just an a-priori choice like mine – because he cannot know if there is or there is not a God anymore than I can. He still wants to argue with the same faith-based passion that the religious fanatics enjoy – he’s just on the other side of the argument doing the same thing.