An ontological sense of comfort

It���s funny how the reactive human thought process generally works. You have a person who, say, spends his whole life debunking paranormal occurrences, exposing miracle working charlatans, pooh-poohing UFOs, demystifying scientific mysteries and generally rubbishing everything from faith healing to flower therapy and almost everybody automatically assumes that he���s got to be an atheist. As if every deeply religious person, on the other hand, is a complete idiot who has nothing better to do than to believe in alien abduction, astral projection and ectoplasm or that Uri Geller can bend a tablespoon by just thinking about it.

Martin Gardner, popular American mathematics and science writer specialising in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing stage magic, literature and religion and who was an outspoken critic of pseudoscience, ran across this same problem. He writes that when he disclosed in his Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener that he was, in fact, a philosophical theist ��� one who believes in God but is outside any traditional religion ��� it profoundly shocked readers who knew him only as a hardnosed sceptic of psychic phenomenon and flying saucers.

Here���s how this simplistic reasoning works in some of our minds: we equate a supreme being with everything that goes bump in the night and all that we believe is unexplained. And that since science cannot ��� and indeed doesn���t even try to ��� prove the existence of God and that, since science cannot ��� and, again, doesn���t even try to ��� prove the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden, they must both have the same basis for existing. We don���t consider that some people may believe in God simply because of the sense of ontological wonder they get at finding themselves alive and don���t question further.

Or as Gardner puts it: ���I am not in the least annoyed because I do not understand time and space, or consciousness, or free will, or evil, or why the universe is made the way it is. I am relieved beyond measure that I do not need to comprehend more than dimly the nature of God or an afterlife. I do not want to be blinded by truths beyond the capacity of my eyes and brain and heart. I (am content) with the absence of rational methods for penetrating ultimate mysteries.���
Now there���s a comfort level most atheists and agnostics can���t live with. Unfortunately, nor can the majority of believers.