Thankfully, the quote didn’t go: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is only Allah”, or they may have seriously offended someone.
In addition to the ‘fool buses’, a few months after the British Humanist Association’s “no God” bus campaign was set loose on the streets on London, the Christians responded with another ad. At first I felt confused, as I had never before seen religious campaigns directly ‘attacking’ each other, but there was no lack of subletly here (or humility either). The campaign showcases the sentence “there definitely is a God” in the same font, colour and format as the original one. Why?
It’s not the supporting a different faith that is unsettling to the theist; it’s the lack thereof that does. And this makes a lot of sense.
The ‘probability’ of there being no God seems to have shaken Christians to their core. And they’ve responded with an unmatched sense of certainty for there ‘definitely’ being a God, betraying a fear of the godless liberal.
In an age where religious organizations are remarketing themselves as enlightened and welcoming institutions – see the unitarian universalists, who are meant for all those “in search of spiritual growth”, regardless of theological source, beliefs or practice system – the scope of their intolerance is receding; gays are now cool, so are people of different skin colours, and even those who give their gods a different name.
… But you must have some sort of faith. Or as Mike Haubrich puts it on his blog, “just believe in something so we can co-exist”.
Certainty about anything in general leaves me profoundly unsatisfied but mostly it makes me feeling nervous and skeptical. Critical thinking and faith are polar opposites, so much so that despotic rulers often discourage the former from the population they are attempting, sometimes successfully, to control. Propaganda, censorship and fear of the ‘reactionary’, are often employed to numb the general population – one that can grow to up to a billion people, in some cases.
Definiteness is blinding, and I don’t believe in being fed ‘truths’. Excepting as a child, when one needs strict rules and orders from our own biological (or adoptive) rulers in order to survive, thinking for yourself is a much useful and necessary tool; and people, organisms, governments, or fields of study that encourage this behaviour have much to gain from it. Past examples of these gains include the realization of the earth being round, of the planet moving around the sun and that we’ve evolved from monkeys.
I’ve heard many reasons why science is flawed, and I agree with some of them. But I am proud to say that the one thing that it is not, is arrogant. In fact, the first thing I learned in essay writing at university was that I could never, ever, conclude any statement – no matter how many experiments I had run, or how confident I felt about my results – with an absolute certainty, and the words, ‘probably’, ‘it seems’, ‘points to’, ‘indicates’, are nowadays so ingrained in my mind that I fear they might have made their way into this non-academish blog somewhere, somehow. I would also be hard-pressed to find any credible scientific paper where these are not present.
Any sane grown-up (an perhaps most insane ones too) would readily agree that the one thing life cannot provide are certainties. No matter how many promises you make (“’till death due us part”?), or even how much you mean them, life is full or surprises, and all we can do is rejoice in the possibilities and the probabilities it offers, whether they be of fateful endings, or ‘unfaithful’ lives.
… So relax, have a drink, have a smoke, make a little naughty love… and enjoy your life.
I liked your post very much, especially the photos. There is a war going on in the world, a struggle for peoples’ hearts and minds, this I believe. When Richard Dawkins came to our campus to give a book talk, his sermon was a rallying cry for atheists to rise up and take back the streets. I’m not trying to say that this was a good or a bad thing in and of itself… but personally I prefer to find harmony rather than discord.
My question to you is about certainty. Your science teachers should be praised for how well you grasp science’s impossibility to be 100% certain of things. And this is of course something we all take with a grain of salt too (I surely don’t go doubting the results of major science all that often!).
But science isn’t the only route to knowledge in life.
For example, your self-awareness is a result of personal memories and sensory feedback. Do you doubt that you are self-aware?
You know that right now you’re actively choosing to read, not being forced to read my comment (I hope!).
You know you are you.
There are of course, philosophical tangents that would question the validity of some of my above statements, but assuming you’re about as regular as I am, we take these things as facts without too much question.
So I propose that there can be room for certainty in life. I propose that one day I will be certain that I have found the woman to marry and who I will love with all my heart. To me, the idea of rejecting this possibility negates the value of life and existence altogether.
If by any chance you’ve followed me this far… well, thank you. : – )
jewishscientist, I appreciate your outlook, and I agree that science isn’t the only route to knowledge. The corollary I would offer is that it has proven to be the best means of verifying and evolving concepts of fundamental principles, and complex systems. Millennia of faith and religion led to smart people going with their intuition, with their “certainty”, and we as a society were rewarded with such gems as Phrenology, and Sanitariums.
I’ll tell you just what House would about our wife… you’ll find her, you’ll be certain, but until the day you die in each others’ arms; the possibility exists that she’ll cease to be who you want. The odds are against you after all…
None of this matters however, because faith IS, or ISN’T. You can argue close to faith, but it doesn’t have clean margins, and we all have some of it. The best we can hope to do is accept our human condition and move forward on that basis, as philosophical skeptics, trying to enrich the base of human knowledge in the hope that at some point it will allow us to rise above the constraints the faithful would have accept as fate.
I think it was a beautiful post
And I’ve always liked this quote from House (it’s sort of related, I swear):
“Dr. Gregory House: Personally, I choose to believe that the white-light people sometimes see, visions this patient saw. They’re all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down.
Dr. Eric Foreman: You choose to believe that?
Dr. Gregory House: There’s no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting.
Dr. Allison Cameron: You find it more comforting to believe that this is it?
Dr. Gregory House: I find it more comforting to believe that all *this* isn’t simply a test.”
Amazing!
I’m such a House fan.. did you see the last episode?.. I wrote this post while it was in the background. How appropriate it ended up being
Hmm, very cognitive post.
Is this theme good unough for the Digg?
I would like to start by saying that i found your blog very interesting and i like the passion behind your writing.
I think the reason that the ‘There’s probably no God’ advert provoked a response from Christians is that, unlike the ‘Islam is peace’ advert, it made a direct statement of ‘probable fact’ which attacks what they believe. I don’t agree with the response (coming back with a ‘There definitely is a God’ advert), as i don’t think attacking back was the right approach, but I can see why they wanted to respond.
I agree with your statement that life is full of surprises and that we should rejoice in that, but i do believe that there are certainties in life, even if not all of them can be proven or explained. At the risk of sounding provocative, how can we be certain that there are no certainties? Aren’t life and death (and taxes!) certainties?
I am a Christian and personally I don’t feel that the ‘probability’ of there being no God shakes my faith at all. For me the fact that i cannot prove it actually strengthens my faith as it says in the Bible that accepting God requires a step of faith, which means that it cannot be proven beforehand.
However, having made that step i feel i can now talk about the existence of God with certainty because i have experienced him. Obviously I can’t prove to anyone else that I have experienced him, but i can encourage them to seek this experience themselves.
If you’ve already made up your mind then fair enough, but if you are genuinely exploring these matters and looking for the truth then i would recommend a book called ‘The Case for Christ’ by Lee Strobel.
Thanks again for the blog and i hope you found my thoughts helpful or at least interesting – I’m no theologian, professor, lecturer or even blogger, just a 19-year-old guy who has experienced the God who changes lives.
All the best,
Jamie
That was well said and well explained. I agree with you on many levels.
While I do have my grievances with organized forms of religion and the loss of the individual self to forms of communautarism (which I see as dangerous and potentially leading to all sorts of evil), a personal quest of god (or whatever you want to call it) seems quite reasonable and nice even. In fact, humans have been searching for this experience for many millennia, since even before Jesus and the Bible.