Maddenation
The theology of horseshoes
While reading a review of J. A. Paulos’s new book, Irreligion I enjoyed this anecdote about Niels Bohr. Apparently the famous physicist nailed a horseshoe above his office door for good luck. “You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?” a colleague asked him one day. To which Bohr responded, “No, but I’ve heard it works even for people who don’t believe.”
Paulos’s new book has a title reminiscent of his previous book, Innumeracy from which I took my previous entry on “Caesar’s Breath”. His new book may be an attempt to get in on the recent “atheist” bandwagon driven by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al. Paulos takes a mathematical/logical view from which he “proves” that proofs for the existence of God are illogical. Well, duh! Of course God’s existence can’t be proven rationally. That’s why He invented “Faith.” To his credit, however, Paulos also concedes that proving God does not exist is equally futile.
Dad • Quotes • 01/13/08 • 1 comments
Comments
David • 01/20/08 • 5:48 PM:No way only 5.5% of biologists believe in God. No way. Maybe Nobel Prize winning biologists or super-fancy-conceited biologists. But that stat cannot be representative. I mean, does it include graduate student marine biologists? Or epidemiologists? I’d like to see the source of that stat.
Carrying on. I’ve looked at and been fascinated by some of these anti-religion books. I saw a long interview with Dawkins on cspan2 once. It was good and compelling. Here’s what I’ve come to think about the whole thing (mostly after talking to my friends in the religion department, and echoed in the review on NYT linked in Dad’s post) - these anti-religion people don’t know what they’re talking about. Meaning, they attack religion and yet don’t understand the theology involved. This would be both the academic part, and obviously the faith part. In a sense, it reminds me of the crazy creationist and intelligent design folks who attack evolution, in large part because they don’t understand it. Looks like these crazy atheists are doing the same to religion.
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