Is there a fundamental difference between a religious believer and a follower of the principles of logic?
A religious believer nearly always believes in an external force – in several religions called God, who is ultimately in control of events, our lives, and our destiny. As such the best path to salvation is to believe in this ultimate power – the creator. If there are ways to know what this creator wishes, the best path to life is to follow those wishes.
A follower of the principles of logic usually sees no substantial evidence for a creator. There may be cases of people claiming to be followers of logic who also believe in a divine creator, using the “watchmaker analogy” as a way of explaining how the complex universe must have a creator. This is the analogy that a clock is an organised complex thing whereby everything works and exists because its creator, Man, made it. In a similar vein the world and its surrounds is a complex seemingly organised and functional thing, and surely can only be so because a creator made it.
The 18th century philosopher Dave Hume had various good reasons why this logic fails, one of which would discount a person following such reasoning as being logical. Later Darwin did find a logical explanation to how the complexity of our natural surroundings came about – his Theory of Evolution.
If you arrive at reasons allowing you to discount Hume’s reasoning and Darwin’s theory, this still leads you nowhere to explaining why there must be a creator. If a creator is necessary to explain the complexity of things, then who created the creator? Surely it is even more reasonable to accept that there may be other natural forces that result in creation, and which do not require a creator to allow complex things to exist in the first place? If you argue that the whole concept of the ultimate creator or “god” is that he/she is the creator of all things and therefore does not have or need a creator, then by the same argument you surmise that if no creator is required for the ultimate creation – the Creator or God – why does there need to be one for the beginning of all things? Surely it is only our animal minds, trapped by our animal needs, and our experience of our meagre short lives that have only ever seen Life exist in a complex fully evolved state, and that only have experience of things being created or born?
This argument can volte face and be the very reason why there must therefore be an ultimate creator. So we go round in circles, arguing based on our own beliefs. We ask ourselves why should there be Life? But if we examine all the scientific arguments, whose explanation of the beginning of all things – the Big Bang -is so fantastical to most of us, that it verges on a fairy tale, a philosophical retort to the “why” question is surely “why not?”
Having come this far you must have deduced several things from my ramble – firstly that I am not a believer in gods, and secondly that I am not a physicist or scientist to whom explanations of the Big Bang, quantum physics, the theory of relativity or much else makes sense to me.
Yes, I am one of those simple folk who have become a believer in the scientific method and like the religious I will stop at nothing and make any argument support what I have decided to believe.
Why do I choose to believe in the scientific method and not what most people on our planet believe – in an ultimate and overall omnipotent creator?