Yesterday’s NY Times had an interesting piece on some the different things that 14 scientists believe but can’t prove. The contributions include a few that relate to belief, or disbelief, in God.
I particularly liked a contribution by David Myers, a psychology professor and author of Intuition:
As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:
1. There is a God.
2. It’s not me (and it’s also not you).
Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.
And that is why I further believe that we should
a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),
b) assess others’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and
c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.
This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing.
The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse.
(Paragraphing slightly edited.) It’s worth reading it all.
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