I want to begin this post by saying that I see no contradiction between the two. It puzzles me that so many people on both sides do, but then I was raised by a church-going physicist. The acceptance of God as being beyond man's understanding and science as a tool to enrich man's understanding seems natural to me.
Anyway. Last night I was lambasted by a baffled friend for being both smart and religious. To him, the two don't go together. To me, intelligence and faith are by no means mutually exclusive.
We started out discussing things calmly enough; we talked of Von Neumann probes and Turing machines and other thought experiments. But when I started trying to get around to answering his question about belief, he started using words and phrases like "delusional" and "invisible friend with super-powers".
I was surprised and a little saddened that a brilliant man (an electrical engineer with an impressive number of patents to his name) could be reduced to name-calling like a five-year-old so quickly.
I guessed that he'd been reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and it happened that I was right - I suggested Modern Physics and Ancient Faith or The Faith of a Physicist for different viewpoints, but he wasn't having any. A book he didn't like (not one of the two I had recommended) had turned him off the entire genre, he said.
Then something else hit me.
Are you angry because you think I'm wrong, I asked, or are you afraid that I might be right?
...I've got more to say on this subject, but that's enough for one post.
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3 comments:
I haven't read Dawkins' book on religion. I did like The Selfish Gene - but from what I've read about this one, it sounds like Dawkins should stick to genetics.
There's something so sad about strident atheism. I'm not talking about people who are seriously agnostic, who really don't know, or who out of despondency just can't beleive there's "anything behind all this." I mean the kind of bitter, public atheism (like Dawkins's) that won't even consider the idea, and the only way they can engage the idea is to mock it.
I liked The Selfish Gene, too. I haven't read The God Delusion, but the New York Times review apparently took Dawkins to task for "shirking the intellectual hard work," which sounds disappointing.
I want to read it eventually so that I can see what I think, but I didn't like my friend's interpretation of it much.
Drats! I posted a comment, tried to edit it, couldn't, tried to delete it in order to re-post - and I'm doing that, but it still shows me that my earlier comment was removed.
I guess Blogger takes some getting used to.
I would think that science would provide you with agnosticism at best - because God, being metaphysical, is *beyond* scientific detection or measure. But much of modern atheism seems to me to be highly "faith-based."
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