Si Fractus Fortis

I don’t know why I’ve got the bit between my teeth about the atheistic belief system when I’m supposed to be packing for my imminent departure on holiday, but here goes again.

I remember quite a number of years ago watching a lecture on TV by none other than Richard Dawkins. He was speaking to an audience of young people about the nature of belief v. scientific knowledge. During the course of the lecture he produced a most impressive demonstration about what he meant by knowledge. There was a a large metal ball suspended from the ceiling to form a pendulum. Dawkins pulled the pendulum over to one side until he was holding the ball against his forehead. Then he let it go and stood standing rigidly to attention waiting for the pendulum to swing back in his direction. The pendulum accelerated away from him, got to the end of its swing, stopped and then accelerated back towards him. As it shot past the central point, it was aiming straight for his head. The whole audience (including me) gasped and flinched, but Dawkins just stood there. The ball stopped just an inch from his head and swung back the other way. He didn’t even blink. “That is what I mean by scientific knowledge”, he said, “That’s what one can trust, knowledge not faith”.

Even though I was an atheist myself at the time I remember thinking “I hope he doesn’t apply that sort of logic to his wife!” (I hasten to add that I have no knowledge whatever of Professor Dawkins’ family circumstances).

The fact is of course that Dawkins and all the rest of us have to spend our lives taking an awful lot of things on faith. I believe certains things about the way my wife is likely to behave, but I have absolutely no proof of it - and sometimes I get it completely wrong. I believe that my car will start in the morning, but sometimes it doesn’t. If we demanded absolute proof of everything we would never be able to do anything.

Basically we believe something because our experience leads us to predict that reality will act in a certain way in the future. Scientific knowledge is only an extension of that - it is not a completely different way of looking at the world. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. But in normal circumstances, most of the time we get it right. My wife usually does behave the way I expect her to, my car does usually start in the morning. We are, in short, pretty good interpreters of reality, living our lives on the basis of faith derived from experience.

What I am saying is that the atheist has to live his or her life on the basis of faith, just as much as the rest of us do. Faith is not believing something without any evidence. Faith is seeing the future in the light of what we have experienced in the past. I believe in God not because someone has provided a logical proof of God’s existence (though I think such proofs exist) but because of my experience of what life is like when I believe in God and act accordingly, versus what it is like when I do not believe in God and act accordingly.