Letters: Readers Respond

Readers respond to last Sunday's Currents essay "Hoping and believing don't prove God exists" by Temple University math professor John Allen Paulos.

Matthew E. Lieff

Audubon

Of course there is no logical reason to believe in God. Believers cannot logically prove the axiom of religion - existence of God - any more than John Allen Paulos can logically prove the axioms of mathematics.

Logic is not an infallible arbiter of behavior. Is it logical to love? Or to die for your country?

Atheists always point to the undeniable horrors of religious fanaticism. But they ignore the countless acts of mercy inspired by faith in God every day - in hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, missions and ordinary lives, all over the world.

The only societies ever based on atheism were Nazism and Communism. Is it not logical, therefore, to consider the possibility that religion may provide something necessary, but not sufficient, for the success of humane civilization?

Current research suggests that belief in a higher power is hardwired in us. Maybe that's why so many irreligious people cherish illogical belief in space aliens, vampires, Elvis, etc.

Paulos appears to harbor an illogical belief that irrationality can be banished from humanity by the application of reason. But history has shown that people are almost always more powerfully influenced by appeals to irrational emotion than to rational logic.

Religion is valuable because it co-opts the ineradicable force of irrationality in support of a wholly rational doctrine centered on the Golden Rule. If we have to believe in something, what better than a God who demands charity, forgiveness and mercy in a cruel, intolerant world?

Anthony P. Schiavo

Lafayette Hill

» READ MORE: ant31415@aol.com

Religion is founded in an observable fact that John Allen Paulos can't logically explain away - existence.

The most basic form of religion is not dogmatic but rational and doesn't involve God at all. We are faced with two possibilities of existence, that the universe stretches back endlessly in time or that it appeared out of nothing before time existed. These offer little problem to a mathematical model of reality, but to the human mind, these are not possibilities but impossibilities.

Once we see our very existence as impossible, supernatural, a kind of miracle, we have religion. And once we accept this one miracle, we concede the possibility of other miracles.

But why God? Because the unanswerable questions of when, where and how of our impossible existence lead naturally to why and then who. In their zeal to reject God, most atheists also reject any possibility of the supernatural. The universe refutes them.

Kile Smith

Philadelphia

I must admire John Allen Paulos' confidence. His essay was to have been a debunking of reasons for believing in God, but he never actually debunks anything. He just tells us he has, in his books.

Yet in all the history of science, a thing has never been observed to come into being other than through a combination of other things. That means - if there is no God, yet things exist - that the universe must be eternal. It has to be, as it's the only other option. But while the universe is old (15 billion years, they say), no scientist declares it to be eternal. Scientifically, then, it's not an option.

So the universe is here, and its existence cannot be explained by itself. That leads many people to the only other option: the prime mover, God.

Maybe Paulos disproves this somewhere; I don't know. His article avoids it, so all we have to go on is his confidence. Ironic, isn't it, for someone wishing to debunk faith?

Ralph Flood

Philadelphia

I grew up as a pious Catholic boy in Philadelphia. About age 12, I began to question the idea of God. All of the old paradoxes - about God's foreknowledge and man's free will, about why there is evil in a world created by a good God, which the great theologians have never satisfactorily resolved, began to perplex me, along with the even greater conundrum of how an "uncaused cause" could have created the vast cosmos.

I soon concluded that either this all-powerful spirit was commensurate with human (i.e., my) intelligence, in which case it could not have done these things; or it was totally incommensurate with human intelligence, in which case it had nothing to do with me - that is, it was not a personal god. (Let's leave "God became man" out of it; that's for another essay.) In either case it made no sense. The answer "it's all a mystery" was obviously useless.

So while people of faith mystify me, I don't have quite as detached a view of the matter as Paulos. Rather than humor them about their belief in Santa Claus, I see them as just differently constituted from me.