This I believe
While I’m on this whole ‘god’ kick, here’s a lesson in contrasts. While again searching the seemingly omniscient Google for “Why believe in God?” I came across an NPR “This I believe” story by Penn Jillette. I wish I were this articulate:
“This I believe: I believe there is no God.”
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
There are many who argue that the truly Christian Heaven is a metaphor for the lives we lead, not some after-life recreational park. With those people, I agree. The only Heaven we can be sure of is the one we make, to the best of our abilities, right here, right now.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Forgiveness (much like punishment) is much more powerful in the here and now. If I pray to god for forgiveness, I’ll never really know the answer. If I ask my wife, or friend, or child to forgive me a transgression, I get a meaningful answer now. So I do the right things as often as I can so as to not have to ask the people I love for forgiveness.
“I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,”
Some very religious people like to say that “science is faith just like religion” and that is true to some extent. The difference is that all scientific beliefs are held provisionally. They are always subject to change based on new information. Religious beliefs cannot, by their nature, be falsified, so are held for as long as the believer wants.
Well put Mr. Jillette.
At the bottom of the page was a link to William F. Buckley’s How is it possible to Believe in God? I have not generally been a fan of Mr. Buckley’s ultraconservative view points, but I thought it was worth a read as I know him to be very articulate. He starts with an apocryphal story:
I’ve always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?” The imperishable answer was, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.” That rhetorical bullet has everything — wit and profundity.
Unfortunately, all the retort has is an admission that believing in God is easier than scientific investigation. Duh. I find it easier to believe in god than to believe that we can split atoms. Well, I don’t, but many people do. The ease of belief doesn’t make it correct.
What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?
There’s a third possibility: that one person wrote a falsehood. I’m no bible scholar, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have sworn affidavits from the witnesses at Lazarus’ revival. So, of the three potential scenarios (resurrection, witnesses to a resurrection, or fiction) I’m gonna have to believe (provisionally) there was no miracle.
This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature.
felicitous: very well suited or expressed; congeries: aggregation, collection
Again with the “intellectually easier”. The whole point of scientific inquiry is not to submit dumbly, but to evaluate, refine, investigate, and provisionally form “felicitous congeries about nature” to be held only until they are replaced by other congeries about nature, no matter how felicitous. “Submit dumbly” indeed.
So, for this round, I think I’ll have to call it comedian 1, conservative commentator 0.
