For most of my life I considered myself to be a agnostic. I was never an atheist; it was clear to me at a very young age that atheism was a dogmatic view, as dogmatic as an religion could be. I never expected to find an argument that would get me off of that fence. It seemed to me that it could never be answered because our minds were limited by what we saw and heard. If God could not be seen by any sense, how could we know the least thing about him?
Then, after leaving university no closer to any answers, and with a diminished view of what a university is and does, I began to read. Libertarian books, such as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and books on evolution, such as Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen. I was still plagued by what I call the "yes, but" syndrome. These theories sounded fine, but... I was always finding people who read them in ways that to me were too much (or too little, depending on your approach).
How could I explain my resistance to things like abortion, euthanasia, promiscuity and so on? How could I say that yes, the state has no right to force you to do (or not do) that, but that you ought to find the reasons yourself. My first attempts involved arguments from utility and from biology. These things seemed destructive to me, in the long term. Couldn't people see that? They certainly told me that they didn't. Reason this and reason that, people came up with the darndest and most clever reasons for the most horrible things.
Very interestingly to me, none of these people I was reading had positions that other people rallied around in large numbers. The results they were getting almost began to appear to be the result of how they defined things. The definition lead to the conclusion, but it began to seem that it could just as easily be the other way around.
The more evolution I read, the less impressed I was with human reason, and the ethics people were putting forward on the basis of evolution reinforced it. So what was this thing, reason, and why did we put such faith in it, if evolution said we shouldn't? And wasn't evolutionary theory itself a product of reason? Yet there had to be something to evolution. Microbes, which have a much faster evolutionary speed than humans do, were clearly mutating and causing doctors to worry about finding new ways to combat the newly evolved "superbugs." So our minds are not completely shot after all. And yet, if our minds are the product of evolution, why is this so? Why should we have a hazy grip on ontological reality? Evolutionary utility did not seem to be enough to account for it.
Here is the best answer I have seen. I think it is good enough to say that Monotheism is true, and that atheism and the naturalism it often springs from, are wrong. I have seen it in a few places, but I'll use C.S. Lewis since he is so approachable:
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our minds really 'must' be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them - if it merely represents the way our minds work - then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. ... A theory that explained everything else in the whole universe but which made ut impossible to believe our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory itself would have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument that no argument was sound - proof that there are no such things as proofs - which is nonsense. ... Naturalism... discredits our process of reasoning... to such a humble level that it can no longer support naturalism itself.From C.S. Lewis, Miracles. Obviously, this argument does not prove that any particular monotheistic religion is true. It did make agnosticism untenable. Evolution is true and despite this we are capable of knowing about evolution and a lot more. This suggests to me that God is at a minimum somewhat kind, because we could have had minds that were merely the result of what Lewis calls the "interlocking system of nature," which would be cruel or indifferent. From my point of view a religion that denied evolution (fundamentalism) or our ability to know (naturalism) would be fatally flawed; it would be too self enclosed to pass as reasonable. The best fit that I know if is Catholicism, which 1) has a doctrine of grace, that allows us to know through God's grace, 2) the doctrine of original sin, which explains why mankind has such difficulty knowing things, including our own nature, and 3) does not not deny that evolution could be true, and is not threatened if it is true. After doing this work, I have very little time or respect for university folk who argue for the following 1) naturalism, 2) athiesm 3) decontruction. All of them cut the floor out from under themselves and it's not that hard to see once you familiarize yourself with this particular delimma. Why this problem underlies so much of modern thought and study is a whole other subject.
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