Moorad,
I've had a lot of discussions with atheists and the one thing that is both a
hallmark of religion and a non-refutable aspect is religious experience. By
religious experience I don't mean just some rare dramatic event. What I am
referring to is the underlying sense of the sacred that is universal to all
peoples and is talked about all through scripture and characterized in
ritual and piety. Atheists must always deny any objective validity to those
types of experiences because they point beyond the material world. Also,
even though religious experience is not empirical evidence, per se, as a
universal phenomenon it also cannot be dismissed out of hand. Atheists
often try to explain it away as a strictly psychological aberration or
phenomenon with no objective truth, but if so, they should be obliged to
provide convincing arguments to support that position. They cannot,
however, do that because just as God cannot be the object of empirical
proof, God can also not be disproved by that means or even by reason. Even
parsimony is not a valid final argument against theism because of its
universality. In the final analysis the belief or disbelief in God is a
matter of faith. For those who are open to the sacred in life, they may
without hard proof choose to believe in God or not.
As an aside, I view many atheists as having a similar psychological makeup
as fundamentalists. They require a high degree of certainty for belief(
must have empirical evidence ) and they view their revelatory resource(
typically science ) as absolute and sufficient. Both those features
can sometimes make for a rigid, dogmatic, militancy with a strong aversion
to anything contrary to their view.
All the Best,
Steve Petermann
>
> I was asked by the Philosophy and Religion student organization on campus
if
> I wanted to "debate" a professor of their department who is an atheist---I
> am supposed to represent the theistic point of view. I have accepted.
Any
> comments or suggestions would be appreciated. Moorad
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Sep 13 2000 - 11:47:56 EDT