On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Chris Zell <chrisz...@wetmtv.com> wrote:
** > However, that still allows for a transcendent impersonal God who operates > as a system - and might even answer prayers. > This sounds a lot like deism. Many of the philosophers, scientists and public intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were deists. Atheism wasn't even much of a possibility back then. By that I mean that people didn't entertain it as a serious possibility, if they could even imagine it. There is a great book by Charles Taylor, the philosopher, called "A Secular Age," which tries to explain how over two or so centuries atheism became a respectable choice, and, in today's age, it is becoming more and more a predominant view in some areas such as science. Personally, I note that with regard to the question of whether there is a creator there is an epistemological dimension, a philosophical/aesthetic one and a social one. In the epistemological dimension, I doubt there is any way whatsoever to distinguish using empirical means between a world in which there is a creator and any variety of scenarios where there isn't one. This conclusion for me takes the subject wholly out of the realm science; any strong claims to the contrary, either on the creationist side or on the evangelical atheist side, seem to me to be fundamentally ill-conceived. There is also an aesthetic and philosophical dimension to the question of whether there is a creator. People find beauty in mathematics, in art, and in any number of other things, and they also often find beauty in different ways of making sense of the human situation. Perhaps they conceive of a clockwork universe that God wound up at the beginning of time and let go on its way, like the deists did. Perhaps they perceive a design and purpose in everyday life which either lends itself to some larger intent or, alternatively, specifically does not. Perhaps they see ugliness and war and see no possibility of any kind of higher purpose or rhyme or reason. Here we're in the realm of aesthetics, and there is the latin saying, *de gustibus non est disputandum* -- there's no disputing taste. But people do in fact argue about religion and God and fight over it in the public sphere, which takes us into the realm of society. It seems to me that in a world where people are expected to justify their actions with reasons, especially when we're talking about things like public policy and law, you have to use a language that everyone can agree on. Not everyone can agree on a justification that involves religion, so unless a decision is being made that narrowly affects a specific community, there's not much place for religion in working out general arrangements. For general decisions, it seems to me that you need a secular language that does not make reference to religion. Eric
