I suspect it was inevitable, but as a response to rising religious fundamentalism there is a rise in radical atheism at the present time.

Over the last few years, atheists have felt compelled to respond to the excesses of organized religion. The result has been a spate of books and articles, interviews and such. Books such as Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion, David Mills’ Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have appeared and created a stir. There have been interviews with these and other authors, renewed TV program development on science and its explanations of the universe and articles aplenty.

This is perhaps a natural response to the excesses and stupidities of many organized religions and their woolly and self-referential thinking. Yet I can’t help wondering if these authors are not trying to just replace a particular orthodoxy with another, just as bad. On the surface science appears to be logical and rational. But it is not.

Like religion, science operates from imperfect knowledge. No matter what scientists may say, they are so far from having a real understanding of so many core issues. To compensate for this our scientific progress is based on many assumptions. Now the very positive aspect that science brings, and something that religions could well learn from, is the idea of a working hypothesis that is accepted until something better comes along or until evidence one way or the other pushes a conclusion. The problem lies in the expectations of scientists about what constitutes evidence. The scientific method demands repeatable, independently verifiable experimental evidence. This works extremely well in some domains, as witnessed by the amazing progress science has made in the last 400 years or so. Yet the radical atheists are harnessing science to a new horse, the proving that God does not exist and thus religion is evil.

Atheists get into trouble when trying to prove that God does not exist. For how can you prove such a thing? You can’t, at least not yet, do an experiment and get a result that proves it one way or another. So they fall on Occam’s Razor as a way of dealing with this. It postulates that when considering several possible explanations that with all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. They will argue that with one explanation for the universe being the existence of an all-powerful God, and the other of the universe evolving from following some simple laws, that the second is the simplest. Is this defensible?

What is simple about a universe governed by mathematical equations? I admit to it being quite appealing and, in all probability, is the way the universe operates in general. Yet there are still origin questions that cannot be answered, such as what was before the big bang, what triggered it and why the laws that we have? Science has presented no simple answers or mechanisms for these, at least yet. By the same token what is simple about an all-powerful God?
Not satisfied with attacking religion alone, they also deny any room for the spiritual. The issue with the spiritual is that, in the most part, it is a personal affair. How can one conduct a repeatable experiment, to be conducted by someone else, of personal revelation, of a sublime esoteric experience? Since you generally cannot (there are some spiritual matters where suitable experiments might be constructed) then the scientific approach would deny them, no matter the quality of the reporter of the experience.

It appears that both the scientific and the religious offer quite complex solutions, so why should Occam’s Razor prefer the scientific? In reality we are simply dealing with two types of belief, neither more valid, or less so, than the other.

So why is all this a concern? Both the radical atheist and fundamentalist religious positions are extreme. Both profess to have the only true position. Both deny a middle ground, which is something I find of great interest. The middle ground finds room for both a scientific approach and a personal revelation one, and allows room for uncertainty. It allows for the value of personal experience by the observer (participant) of good character and clear thinking. It also allows room for the edge phenomenon, the events that happen but rarely, and therefore are very hard for science to cope with.