A fascinating article on the intellectual battle of belief and unbelief. A sample:
…Harris is not aiming his barbs at Islam in this book, but at the Christians of his own nation — not the mushy ones, the amorphous silt swirling in mainstream denominations, but those who actually believe. His challenge is simple and accurate and hence refreshing: “If one of us is right, the other is wrong. The Bible is either the word of God, or it isn’t. Either Jesus offers humanity the one, true path to salvation (John 14:6), or he does not . . . . If Christianity is correct, and I persist in my unbelief, I should expect to suffer the torments of hell.”
Ah!, a breath of fresh air indeed. Harris is eminently disagreeable, and that is a true virtue. Here is a person with whom it is worth disagreeing, someone who takes Christianity more seriously than most Christians. Far better to spar with a clear-headed atheist who agrees that we disagree than a muddle-headed Neville Chamberlain type who declares sharp disagreements impossible because sharpness itself is an illusion. On to battle!…
Very much worth the reading.
As for me, I don’t think there are any real atheists out there – it just doesn’t make any sense…and the effort required would be just too bothersome. You’d have to be continually on guard against even the least bit of the supernatural…just allow one bump in the night, and that whole atheism thing is out the window.
But even outside of that, it is plain as a pikestaff that our mind – as differentiated from the physical organ we call our brain – just doesn’t fit neatly in to the natural world. It is an invader from outside – it is supernatural. In theory, you can trace back the chain of causation from that pebble you see in your yard right back to the beginning…but you can’t ever figure out how a mind will choose between mowing the lawn and heading out for a game of golf – neither of which actions logically follow from any other action, and neither of which are required in a Darwinian sense for survival.
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