House of Eratosthenes

The grant to the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion will bring anthropologists, theologians, philosophers and other academics together for three years to study whether belief in a divine being is a basic part of mankind’s makeup.

“There are a lot of issues. What is it that is innate in human nature to believe in God, whether it is gods or something superhuman or supernatural?” said Roger Trigg, acting director of the center.

Four large, huh? I wonder how much of that goes to the guy who simply thought of doing this. Five percent?

Because at 200k a pop, seems to me what follows are bullets flowing from solid gold keystrokes.

Why do people take the words “increase in minimum wage” literally, when with just a little tiny bit of thinking they could see what really happens is that jobs are outlawed unless the jobs meet a specific criteria. It’s easy to explain how nice folks could fall for this once or twice. How does it continue to happen for the better part of a century?

Why do people like to do things lots of other people are doing at the same time those other people are doing them, even when, because so many other people are doing them, the activity becomes an exercise in misery and little more? We do we have this inclination to believe orbiting endlessly around a sweltering parking lot at the state fair or a rock concert searching for a parking spot in vain, will be “fun,” and driving out to a deserted beach watching a sunset in solitude, won’t be?

How come a young available lady is so attracted to bad boys and rebels, and once she manages to snag one of ’em, works so hard to get him to be just like everybody else, eventually hittin’-the-road if he doesn’t shape up?

We were kids. We had chores. If we mouthed off we got a smack across the mouth, and if we kept doing it we got spanked. Kids today don’t have as many chores and you can’t spank ’em. We all know this. So when they can’t pay attention to a goddamned thing, how come we’re so quick to rivet them into the “autistic spectrum”?

Why do people want stoicism and cool-headedness in their presidents, and pulse-pounding excitement and charisma from the people who are looking to become the next president?

More from whence those came. Much more. And I have the answers to some of them…that doesn’t mean the questions aren’t fertile grounds for study, and they’re worth at least as much grant money as the faith thing.

The faith thing actually seems pretty easy to me. I think the egghead strayed pretty close to the truth when he said,

“One implication that comes from this is that religion is the default position, and atheism is perhaps more in need of explanation,” he said.

It all comes from appreciating things. If/when we do something required for our survival, like planting and harvesting a crop, there’s an understandable impulse to look back and contemplate what was done. Why on earth wouldn’t there be? You’ll probably have to do it again. And when you do that, you have to think about the stuff that was necessary, that was already done before you got started. And to naturally be thankful for it.

So yeah, atheism is more in need of an explanation. Atheism says the reason fertile soil causes plants to grow in the ground is…process of elimination. If the plants didn’t grow in the ground, they would not be here, so if they’re here, of course they grow in the ground and we can use them to feed us. And if we couldn’t then we would not be here.

Just like the sculptor who explains that he simply starts with a block of marble and carves away everything that doesn’t look like a horse. Niiiiiice and simple…with a “you idiot” tacked on to the end, and the sculptor is explained-away.

But with the sculptor and with the deity, common sense says things aren’t quite so simple. I think the egghead’s second-thought is the right one. We need to study our atheists. I’d be particularly interested in the following conundrum: If rational, cool-headed thinking nods approvingly toward secularism, what has that to do with the last three or four years? How come atheism waited until the twenty-first century to really bask in the limelight? Wouldn’t it be more fitting if it came to popularity half a century ago, when we were launching satellites and smashing atoms? This is the age of fifty gazillion wonderful new inventions, all of which are dedicated to finding new ways to play personal music collections and carry dogs around in purses.

And this is the era in which the atheist’s view of the cosmos, is most popularly thought to be the correct one. If I were an atheist, that would be sufficient to make me seriously question my atheism. I’m glad I’m not one.

“This is the age of fifty gazillion wonderful new inventions, all of which are dedicated to finding new ways to play personal music collections and carry dogs around in purses.”

Another case in point:

http://americandigest.org/sidelines/archives/2008/02/both_ends_now_m.html
- vanderleun | 02/20/2008 @ 13:08
Atheism in some form or another started at the beginning of the Enlightment period with the increase in pursuit of the “natural philosophies.” If someone’s been raised to believe in something, wiht the penalty being strict ostracisation from the familial group, even if they eventually come to believe that all observable effect is a result of natural processes they’ll continue to profess a belief in a deity or struggle endlessly to reconcile their scientific worldview with their religious worldview. Ultimately, it comes down to relegating the bulk of religious texts to the realm of myth and reducing the religious philosophy to its bare essentials, mostly the Golden Rule.

Personally, I see no reason why the ultimate causative factor of a divine creator is in direct opposition to scientific inquiry as to the source of reality. There’s potentially no specific reason why humanity couldn’t create a Big Bang event, but the instantiation of the infinite 4-D spacetime itself (and all of the background of reality) will probably be left to the divine. The problem I have is that even when the natural philosophies have a working, testable theory as to the operation of reality in direct opposition to scripture, the more religious among us insist that the scripture is the truth. The latest Catholic catechism has a base philosophy that goes something like, “to imagine that the Truth of the heavens as they may be seen and the Truth of Scripture as it may be read would disagree,” with the implication that it is the scripture as written by the hand of man that finds itself in fallacy, even with divine inspiration behind it.

This is what I find most distressing, that even with mountains of circumstantial evidence that divine influence is unnecessary to describe the vast bulk of cause-and-effect in nature, there are those that would close their eyes to the “Truth of the Heavens as it may be seen” and push for obviously incorrect literal interpretations of a two-thousand-year-old document written from positions of ignorance.
- dcshiderly | 02/20/2008 @ 15:55

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