John Horgan's agnostic viewpoint. (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, February 23, 2015, 21:01 (3342 days ago)

Sounds like someone I know:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2015/02/23/can-faith-and-science-coexist/-I disagree with his view of theodicy. The problem of evil is due to giving God pure loving attributes per religions. We do not know if that is true. It is a human attribute to assume God loves us. Horgan notes that below in his comment in the second paragraph.-"WHY I'M NOT RELIGIOUS-"*My main objection to Christianity and other monotheistic faiths is the problem of evil, which the religious scholar Huston Smith has called “the shoal on which all theologies founder. ” If God is all-powerful, just and loving, why then is existence so painful and unfair for so many people? Why do kids get cancer? Why do earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters kill so many people? I have never encountered a satisfying solution to the problem of evil (although a psychedelic trip more than 30 years ago briefly convinced me that I had solved it).-"*Our belief in a personal God stems from our innate narcissism and anthropomorphism. In spite of all the blows dealt to our egos by science—beginning with the demonstration that the Sun and not the Earth is the center of the Solar System—many of us remain convinced that this universe was created for us, and that our destiny is unfolding according to a pre-ordained divine plan. Perhaps because our theory-of-mind modules are so powerful, we are also prone to projecting human qualities, emotions and intentions onto nature.-"*Belief in an afterlife and supernatural moral order—in a God who created us and wants the best for us—may be consoling, but it is also infantilizing. Accepting that we are on our own, with no God to save us, can be scary, but it is also exhilarating. And it forces us to take complete responsibility for making this world less painful and more just.-"*Each religion insists that there is one supreme meaning to existence, which the religion represents. Unfortunately, different religions present different meanings, so adherents fight over which religion is right. Human history would have been much less violent if we had figured out long ago that there is no universal meaning of life. Unlike scientific truth, which is objective and universal, meaning is personal and subjective, like taste in music or literature or food. Each person should discover his or her own meaning and not insist that others embrace it.-"*Without God, Lennox said, there can be no ultimate hope. I vehemently disagree. I am more hopeful than most people I know, whether believers or atheists, and my optimism is based not on wishful thinking but on the enormous progress we have achieved overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war. I don't have faith in God, but I do have faith in humanity."-And I have faith in both.