Belief in No God Is Also Irrational

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Randomness or Purpose In The Universe?

"Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge. One is the trend to seek God outside the church. This has given rise to a kind of spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one's consciousness. . . .

We are conscious beings who live with purpose and meaning. It seems unlikely that these arose form a random, meaningless universe. The final answer to where they came from may shake science to its core. I certainly hope it does." More

Christopher Hitchens with Angel Wings

English-American author, essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) had a career over four decades. In 2005, a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll voted him the world's fifth top public intellectual. He appeared on talk shows and lecture circuits, and was columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, and World Affairs. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was also an atheist.

On learning that Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer, Reverend Rick Warren prayed  that the atheist repent and see that the disease was visited on him by God for disbelief. "I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss," said Warren, then adding, "He knows the truth now."

Despite the prayers of Warren and other Christian evangelists, Hitchens never changed his views. As Art Levine put it, "The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer" on Hitchens "boggles" the mind, especially because Hitchens caused his cancer by a "long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits."

Daniel Dennett, Breaking The Spell. You Think Belief In God Is Irrational? So Is Belief In Atheism

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Dennett takes exception to  this, maintaining that  religion is a fit subject for scientific scrutiny, and in doing so he draws upon evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. He speculates as to how a primitive belief in ghosts later became a belief in wind spirits, rain gods, wood nymphs, and leprechauns. According to Dennett, as hunter-gatherers became farmers, as they aggregated into prehistoric villages, a need to protect one's own arose--property, spouse, children, crops, livestock. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene no longer served the common weal. That is, genetic kinship among tribe members was not enough in itself to insure Darwinian cooperation. Shared beliefs rather than DNA enforced proper behavior. People became commanded by an authoritarian but vengeful god to do their duty to others not genetic kin.

This is a tidy explanation, tying all up in a neat bundle, but there are the Neanderthals who were not fit inside.  At digs of Neanderthal burial sites, something extraordinary was found, something which provides evidence of Neanderthal practices long before ours became the dominantly successful species.  Around the burial site and bones of a beloved individual flowers and trinkets were carefully placed. They are extinct now, the Neanderthals, but could this mean that even they had  a sense of the spiritual, a regard for an after life? I can see no other way to understand the findings. So much for Dennett's religion as emergent from the need for duty in communities. Something there is that cannot be packaged as well as he would have it.  As Yeats put it, "An aging man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap hands, sing, and louder sing for every tatter in his mortal dress." Religion was informed by spiritual as well as moral needs.

Dennett draws upon the concept of memes--scientifically unverifiable and another Dawkins concept--to explain how primitive beliefs evolved into modern religions. "Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards . . . but mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of their hosts." Hosts here is meant to mean the same as an unsuspecting, sometimes insentient host for a virus, a parasite. According to Dennett, people are dumb, unwitting hosts for memes, in this case religious beliefs. I will add, they are also hosts for the vaunted faith in the scientific model as the only true way of understanding the universe.

Sorry, Daniel, but I cannot get there from here. Nor can you. Dennett is playing in a mind-field, one that eventually will explain nothing and sets off duds.

Although I do not have interest or belief in the dogma or doctrine of any religion, I do see all religions as serving a deep, human need. (I think Dennett would agree with me on this while he holds that humankind would be better off without the need.)  The need is not served by a flawed scientific paradigm in which the objects of scientific investigation somehow are supposed to provide meaning. (Else, why are they pursued?) I am reminded of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked, “the more we find out about the universe, the more meaningless it all seems.” Meaningless, because science ignores the other magisterium, which at its core--though not always in tenets--points to what we all are, and teaches that fulfillment-meaning cannot be found in the objects of scientific research. John Gray continues for me.

Defender of Belief and Atheist

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rose to celebrity with the 1976 publication of his brilliant book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is an evangelist and publicist for atheism. He also believes that humanity has morally progressed and that the holocaust was merely a temporary set-back. He has stated that human progress is inevitable. (Scientifically speaking, this is a rather un-testable hypothesis.)

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist and highly regarded literary critic who finds in the agony of Christ on the cross a perpetual reminder of humankind's need to rise to its better, more compassionate, loving self. He finds Dawkins' moral progressivism rather shallow. Human history constantly reminds us of our failures to set the world to rights. Dawkins' view is a naive and easy humanism, according to Eagleton. As to Dawkins' evangelism for godlessness, Eagleton also finds that rather empty and easy.

Why We Believe In God

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Woody Allen

"Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe." Recent research on the minds of infants reveals explanations of why we believe.

"One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die—either slowly and probably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some greater meaning, it is hardly obvious."

". . . sometimes theologians use the foregoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishes for purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God."

Supernatural beliefs can find explanation in infancy: "Six-month-olds understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and then remove the table, and the object just stays there (held by a hidden wire), babies are surprised; they expect the object to fall. They expect objects to be solid, and contrary to what is still being taught in some psychology classes, they understand that objects persist over time even if hidden. (Show a baby an object and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, the baby is surprised.) . . ."

. . . We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them. . . .

. . . This belief system opens the possibility that we ourselves can survive the death of our bodies. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. . . .

" . . . But while it may be true that "theologically correct" Buddhism explicitly rejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterial entities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe in such things."

"The major alternative theory [of religion] is social: religion brings people together, giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue. . . . In this conception religion is a fraternity, and the analogy runs deep. . . . This is clear in the Old Testament, in which 'a jealous God' issues commands such as:

'Should your brother, your mother's son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying Let us go and worship other gods' . . . you shall surely kill him. '

. . . This theory explains almost everything about religion—except the religious part. It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. . . ."

"First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. . . . the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (. . . they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers." More

A Hiccup of Gross Irrationality?

According to Hindu advaita philosophy, or nondualism, your "I am" is a manifestation of the great "I AM," and for that reason you don't die because your apparent self is only an illusion, a manifestation, a projection on the screen of your mind. In Christian doctrine, our immortal souls are sent to either heaven or hell. (Fortunately, Pope Benedict not too long ago saved innocent babies from limbo by decreeing that it does not exist.) Descartes found he could not doubt that he was doubting, and for that reason he existed. Each of these perspectives provides a stratagem for positing some kind of eternal being against the fear of dying.

Of course we knew it would only be a matter of time before neuroscientists and neurophilosophers would take aim at such beliefs as so much nonsense. I am reminded of Tom Wolfe's famous essay about them, titled "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." (See the sidebar on this page.) An argument for the evolution of the brain and from evolutionary psychology provides them with their starting point. Read on.

Some researchers "are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start." More

The Preachments & Preenings of The New Atheists

"I think I am very close to concluding that this whole 'New Atheism' movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current 'marketplace of ideas' particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys. . . .

And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral 'truths,' their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about 'religion' in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?" More

Couples In Love As Particles In Motion

Newspapers will not herald in bold headlines that "Your World View Is Changing," but it will happen to the public, slowly, almost imperceptibly, as research thinking on brain, neuroscience, and the philosophy of consciousness spreads into the public sphere.

Let there be no doubt: the current thinking is revolutionary. Whatever you thought was obvious about yourself is threatened to be undermined by the revolution. Among potential threats, one is that people will come to believe that life is pointless, meaningless.

A young couple in love, walking along the bank of the Seine in Paris become only moving particles. Such is the logical culmination of the revolution in reductionism. Reductionist approaches to brain and consciousness study have the ear of mass media, and that view is trumpeted to the public.

As society and culture absorb the view, there will be no moment when thought shifted, no memory of an earthquake in public perception. It will happen quietly, over many years, seeping into society and culture. It will be a change as powerful as the impact Darwin had on the Victorian world, but without the explosive quality. It will whisper, relentlessly corrosive.

Unless a counter-view becomes ascendant.

Let me be clear. I am not a creationist. I believe in scientific evidence and not superstition. I have one argument, and it is not with reductionism as fruitful science, but with the sweeping claims of reductionism.

In reductionism we already witness an erosion of belief in meaning, value, agency, and a sense of purpose in life. As physicist Steven Weinberg put it, “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” Weinberg also says, “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.” That is the consensus among thorough-going reductionists.

There is an alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism. It is a mouthful, and other terms describe the same concept, but essentially it argues that you can't get there from here--from the top down to a reductionist explanation of everything at the top--because Darwinian evolution is not a simple two-way street. Preadaptations are an example of the dynamic and creative quality of evolution. (As an example, an early fish jaw became tiny parts of the inner ear.) Purpose, agency, meaning, and value are real in their own right precisely because they are at the top and cannot be entirely explained by downward-pointing physics and biology. You and I are not simply a bunch of moving particles.

Mass media unquestioningly presents scientific research to the public. People can be influenced by the loudest reductionist voices for explanations of consciousness and the brain. Your neurons made you do it, according to these experts interviewed by reporters.

Below, a pundit addresses the issue--the effect on the public of brain and consciousness research--but I am not as sanguine as he is about public reaction to the new thinking on the subject. In his New York Times column David Brooks provides window dressing, but does not explore the field in depth. I wish he had given even some attention to the alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism, a top-down, dynamic systems approach that could well rescue morality, value, purpose, and agency. For Brooks, read on.

"In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,' in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world." More

A Summer Camp For The Kids of Free Thinkers and Atheists

No singing of hymns around the campfire for these children. No Bible Study. The summer camp has come under fierce attack by Christian fundamentalists.

"Campers are not told that there is no God; only that they should weigh the evidence. They learn about the scientific method. An amateur biologist invites them to gather creepy-crawlies from a nearby pond. They are told how sensitive each species is to pollution, and asked to work out from this how polluted the pond is. They find several critters that can survive only in clean water, and conclude that the pond is in good shape. The kids are encouraged to explore ethical questions, too. The more argumentative ones sit in a clearing and debate the nature of justice.

"The kind of people who send their kids to Bible camp are appalled. Answers in Genesis, a Christian fundamentalist group, berates Camp Quest for drumming a 'hopeless' world view into young minds. But a humanist camp is less about indoctrination than reassurance that it is all right not to be religious; that it is possible to be moral without believing in the supernatural. Nearly all the kids at Camp Quest say they find it comforting to be surrounded by others who share their lack of belief. Many attend schools where Christianity is taken for granted. Many keep quiet about their atheism. Those who don’t are sometimes taunted or told they will burn in hell.

Atheists are broadly disliked in America." More

Fashionable To Be Devoutly Undevout

"Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance" More

Atheism Is Also A Faith

“Religion is proving perfectly compatible with modernity in all its forms, high and low.” This conclusion by John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, seems calculated to enrage secular rationalists of all stripes.

Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for religious belief and practice. Never questioned, this is what lies behind the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists: if you want to be modern, say goodbye to God.

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a confession of faith." More

Peter Singer & The New Atheism

Peter Singer is professor of Bioethics at Princeton. Provacateur? Yes, he is. Does he say outrageous things just to get attention? I don't think so.

In Animal Liberation, Singer holds that we discriminate against animals because they don't belong to our species. All beings, he says, are capable of suffering and worthy of our respect in that regard, regardless of their intelligence. Just as discrimination against skin color is wrong, so is what he calls specieism.

As for abortion, he argues that the preferences of the mother should be weighed against the preferences of the fetus. As a fetus is incapable of preferences till about 18 months, the mother's preferences should at least obtain until then.

With regard to poverty, he argues that there is not injustice in that some people live in abundance while others starve.

He forces people to take sides, for or against his views.

As for the new atheism, he is once again taking his own position.

"To understand Singer, it's helpful to contrast him with 'New Atheists' like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. The New Atheists say we can get rid of God but preserve morality." More

Julia Sweeney: Letting Go Of God

Remembered as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, Julia Sweeney developed a monologue after her brother Michael was diagnosed with lymphoma, and she found herself with uterine cancer. She crafted it into a stage show, God Said Ha!, debuting at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 1995. Letting Go of God is her third monologue. In it she makes hilarious remarks on her Catholic upbringing and some Mormon missionary youths whom she invited into her home. The part below covers that segment of the monologue.


This link takes you to the other segments, done when she was younger.

Some other features of her resumé: Sweeney appeared in Pulp Fiction, Clock Stoppers, Whatever It Takes, and Stuart Little. On prime time television she was a series regular on George & Leo and Maybe It's Me. She guest-starred on 3rd Rock from the Sun, Hope & Gloria, Mad About You, and According to Jim. In 2004, Sweeney co-starred in two episodes of Frasier (as Frasier's litigious unwanted house guest, Ann) and had a guest role on Sex and the City.

Student to Richard Dawkins: What if You're Wrong?

A Student Asks Richard Dawkins, "What if you're wrong?" She says hers is "the most simplest question," and poses it to him. Her solecism drew attention to her rather than the empty-minded response Dawkins gave. Once again, he simply proves himself an evangelist for atheism. His campaign against religion has a very emotional element to it. (For somebody who claims to be a rationalist, there is little that is rational about his evangelism.) He begins by presuming that the girl is a Christian, and continues with humor about believing in Flying Spaghetti Monsters. His point is that each believer with her religion and her God is a product of her environment. He doesn't bother with the implicit question--What if Dawkins is wrong about the existence of a higher intelligence regardless of religious belief? Instead, after a minute of his whimsical response he asks her, "What if you're wrong about the Great Ju-Ju Monster at the bottom of the sea?" This fits propaganda though it drew admiring whoops and applause from the student audience at Randolph-Macon College. Although he has one, he provided no reasoned explanation of his own position as an answer to a serious question from a young mind. Somebody not an ideologue could have explained that natural selection can still allow for that intelligence, although it would probably affect her view of the intelligence's attributes. (I make no brief either for or against a higher intelligence (which might be conscious or it might not be) ; I only point out Dawkins' tactics.)

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?

Steven Pinker of Harvard. . .

Yes, if by...

science "we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral? . . .

No and yes . . .

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, O.P., is a Dominican friar, the Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Education of the Roman Catholic Church, and was lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Absolutely not . . .
William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics, is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

No, but it should . . .
Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great and the editor of The Portable Atheist. These and more views can be found by clicking here.

No, as a matter of reason and truth. The knowledge we have gained through modern science makes belief in an Intelligence behind the cosmos more reasonable than ever. Yes, as a matter of mood, sensibility, and sentiment. Not science itself but a reductive "scientific mentality" that often accompanies it, along with the power, control, comfort, and convenience provided by modern technology, has helped to push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism. Superficially it may seem that the advances of science have made God obsolete by providing natural explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the result of direct divine activity—the so-called "God of the gaps." But this advance has been the completion of a program of purification from superstition begun thousands of years ago by Athens and Jerusalem, by a handful of Greek sages and by the people of Israel, who "de-divinized" Nature to a degree unparalleled in the ancient world. Summarizing an established tradition 750 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the wise governor ordinarily governs by delegation to competent subordinates. In the case of Nature, God's ordinary providence governs by means of the regularities ("laws") built into the natures of created things. This theistic outlook has been fully vindicated. As the ancient Greek materialists recognized long ago, if we wish to explain the observed world in terms of Matter without reference to Mind, then it must be explained by things material, ultimate, and very simple all at the same time—by indivisible, notional "atoms" and a chance "swerve" that sets them in random motion. If the things of everyday experience are mere aggregates of these "atoms," and if the cosmos is infinitely old and infinitely large, then chance can do the rest. To be the complete explanation of material reality, these "atoms," and whatever natural regularities they exhibit, must be so simple that their existence as inexplicable "brute facts" is plausible. Fast-forward to the present: Modern science has shown that Nature is ordered, complex, mathematically tractable, and intelligible "all the way down," as far as our instruments and techniques can discern. Instead of notional, perfectly simple "atoms," we have discovered the extraordinarily complex, beautiful, and mathematical "particle zoo" of the Standard Model of physics, hovering on the border of existence and intelligibility (as Aristotle predicted long ago with his doctrine of prime matter). And order, complexity, and intelligibility exist "all the way up" as well. We see a teleological hierarchy and chain of emergence from quantized physics, giving rise to stable chemistry, enabling the nearly miraculous properties of carbon and biochemistry, providing the material basis for the emergence of life with its own ontological hierarchy of metabolic (plant), sensitive (animal), and rational (human) existence. Beyond this astounding and unfailing order and intelligibility, our knowledge of which increases each day as science expands its scope, we now know of the precise fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants that make possible a life-supporting universe. In short, the Nature we know from modern science embodies and reflects immaterial properties and a depth of intelligibility far beyond the wildest imaginings of the Greek philosophers. To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as "brute facts" in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, "an abdication of human intelligence." But the modern mood is an entirely different matter. In terms of modern sensibilities, the intellectual culture of the West is dominated by a scientific mentality that seeks to explain qualitative and holistic realities by quantitative and reductive descriptions of the workings of their parts. Although the scientific program that gives rise to this mentality has been quite successful in explaining the material basis for holistic realities, and in allowing us to manipulate natural things to our advantage by altering the configuration of their parts, it fails to grasp the reality of natural things themselves. The unlimited application of the "scientific mentality" is scientism, the philosophical claim that the scientific method and scientific explanations can grasp all of reality. For many, scientism is accompanied by agnosticism or atheism. In terms of popular sentiment, however, scientism has not carried the day. Most people still intuitively cling to the notion that at least human nature and human experience are not reducible to what is scientifically knowable. But with no rational alternative to scientism, most people live in a “soft,” non-rational, and relativistic world of feelings, opinions, and personal values. The increase in leisure and health brought about by our increasing mastery over Nature has not resulted, as the ancient sages supposed, in an increase in wisdom and the contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Instead, our technology-based leisure is more likely to result in quiet hedonism, consumerism, and mind-numbing mass entertainment. While many still claim belief in God, the course of their lives reflects de facto agnosticism in which the "God hypothesis" is far from everyday experiences and priorities. In all our scientistic "knowledge" of the inner workings of things, and our technology-based comforts and distractions, there seems to be no place for the still, small voice of God. In that practical and existential sense, science and technology seem to have pushed belief in God toward obsolescence. Or have they? In our innermost being, we moderns remain unsatisfied. Sooner or later we face an existential crisis, and recognize in our lives something broken, disordered, in need of redemption. The fact that we can recognize disorder, brokenness, and sin means that they occur within a larger framework of order, beauty, and goodness, or else in principle we could not recognize them as such. Yet brokenness and disorder are painfully present, and the human soul by its nature seeks something more, a deeper happiness, a lasting good. Consideration of the order and beauty in nature can lead us to a Something, the "god of the philosophers," but consideration of our incompleteness leads us beyond, in search of a Someone who is the Good of us all. Science will never make that quest obsolete. Close Essay