Friday, November 23, 2007

An Honest Atheist

By Living Waters quotes atheist Thomas Nagel...

"In speaking of the fear of religion…I am talking about…the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, natural, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God’ I don’t want the universe to be like that… My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind."

This comes from Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997) 130-1.