Do You Have Enough Faith to Not Believe in God?

I used to be an atheist. But intellectually, that approach to the data of life became untenable for me. It became impossible for me to believe that the universe simply came into being. I didn't have enough faith to not believe in God.

Joe Carter has an interesting post on "six impossible things" that one might believe as an atheist. His list:

1. Emergent properties ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities (i.e., matter) and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. Consciousness, for example, is an emergent property of the brain, arising – like magic – from a specific arrangement of molecules. This magical property which is created by the physical can also turn around and affect the physical matter from which it came.

2. Everything that is real is, in some sense, really physical. Therefore, mental states such as beliefs, desires, and sensations do not exist. Mental states such as the belief that mental states do not exist, do not actually exist but are merely physical states in the brain.

3. Our cognitive faculties have resulted from blind mechanisms like natural selection, working on sources of genetic variation such as random genetic mutation, yet are reliable for distinguishing between truth and false aspects of reality, such as the claim that our cognitive faculties have resulted from blind mechanisms.

4. Evolution is a blind process that has no teleology; whatever behavior works is the behavior that survives. Yet ethical norms of behavior should not be based on what works or what will lead to survival but should be based on concepts not found in nature (even though nature is all that exists).

5. The brain is nothing more than a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. Nevertheless, a person’s beliefs (i.e., about the purported existence of deities) are not determined by random fluctuations in the natural laws but are chosen by the individual and should be considered “rational.”

6. A human being has a finite ability to know yet should be taken seriously when making claims that no infinite beings exist.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Andrew Jackson for pointing out Joe's article.