I am bored with scientific atheism

April 17, 2008

Ali, normally a deep and cautious thinker when it comes to religious and spiritual issues, blows her top over scientific atheism.

Hell, they’re still teaching elementary schoolers that atoms look like a group of sticky beach balls orbited by dustspecks, and then you get to high school chemistry class and find out it’s all about “clouds of probability” and the like. If such theories regarding the fundamental building blocks of material reality can be so vastly different (and yet both pragmatic and workable, depending on differing contexts), surely there’s no such thing as “proven Scientific facts” that we can take on faith as unquestionably constant and unchanging. Surely questioning is at a very basic level what science is supposed to be all about, right? But apparently, the work of questioning and exploring these complexities is only for our beloved and holy Scientists to pursue, and not for us mere laymen to worry our silly heads over. [ Exhibit #A ]

What I’ve discovered over the far too many years I’ve spent arguing with many aggressive atheists is that they apparently do not have a critical view of their own thinking. They mock and insult great swaths of people about whom they have no information at all. Push them hard enough and they’ll eventually back down to the “soft atheist” position (”there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God”), which is a perfectly acceptable position but one which would, I would think, inspire a little bit of humility. After all, “Black Holes” were an eighteenth century notion but one wasn’t dentified until the 1970s.

But no. Turn your back, and — in almost every case — they start up with the insults and sneering again.

I’ve said over and over again: I do not care if people believe in God (or gods). I do not think belief affects reality and I do not believe that atheists are damned for all eternity so I don’t think atheists put themselves at any particular risk.

I do, however, resent being treated and talked to like I’m an idiot by someone who thinks he or she knows what science is (but doesn’t) or who had a bad childhood in Sunday school and therefore thinks he or she is qualified to make sweeping sneering judgments on the intellectual and cultural value of six thousand-odd years of global cultural experience.

I’m also officially bored with the argument. I haven’t heard anything new in years. The discussions all have a familiar pattern to me. Perhaps it is time for me to do what many wiser people have encouraged me to do all along and just leave these arguments alone. I have persuaded a handful of people that not all religious folk are nutjobs, and that’s a good thing.

But I’m sick of going over the same ground with every know-it-all upstart who mistakes knee-jerk bigotry for rational thought. Ali can have them. Me: I’m going to find something more interesting to talk about.

Posted in Religion