Fool. Fool. Fool.

One thing I detest about debate is the tendency to attempt to annihilate the opposition with ridicule. Can we not disagree without resorting to that?

 

A case in point came from my reading a cyber friend's blog (a believer in the God hypothesis) and a discussion he has been having with one of his readers. This reader is a very outspoken nonbeliever in the God hypothesis. No problem there. But in the unbeliever's latest comment he made this interesting statement:

 

The ... fact that to date not a single shred of evidence has been produced that can remotely be suggestive of a deity.

 

Wow. A stronger statement of an alleged fact I can hardly imagine.

 

Now when a "fact" is stated that way, why, the simpletons who think otherwise could only be fools. Right?

 

For many of us, the apparent design and fine-tuning of the Cosmos suggests a designer or architect of sorts. That this does present a serious problem for those who disbelieve the God hypothesis is apparent from the efforts to deal with it.

 

This debate alone, I feel, is sufficient to refute that "not a single shred of evidence" has been produced which could "remotely" point to a Creator, or God.

 

For example, I have in my library Michael Shermer's very helpful book How We Believe (The Search for God in an Age of Science. He certainly is no friend of belief in God, even though he once was a believer. 

 

Chapter four of that book is titled Why People Believe In God. Therein is a subsection, "Seeing The Pattern of God" which specifically deals with the human mind's natural inclination to detect order in the universe, and thus reason to a belief in God.

 

He references on page 62 Bart Kosko and his book Fuzzy Thinking, who suggested that

 

...belief in God may be something similar to what we see when we look at the pattern in the Kanizsa-square illusion. The experience, Kosko suggests, is not unlike "our vague glimpses of God or his His Shadow or His Handiwork....

 

Fair enough. Maybe it is all an illusion. Or maybe it is what it seems to be. Either way, there is something to be accounted for and I don't see a slam-dunk either way.

 

I think neither believers in the God hypothesis nor disbelievers in the God hypothesis are fools. It seems to me that when the contrary is implied we are dealing with rhetoric instead of serious examination.