This I Believe: Penn Jillette's Wisdom

[elfs]

On NPR last week, Penn Jillette was asked to write on their series, "This I Believe." And he chose to toss a grenade into the blogosphere with his essay This I Believe: There Is No God. And I have to agree with him when he writes:

I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven.

Looking through technorati, I find both strong support for Jillette's essay, and lots of backlash. The backlash is saddening because it's so malinformed; one author goes into the adhominem fallacy that "the largest avowedly atheistic endeavors were calamaties," citing Stalin and Mao, and then asking, "Do we really want people who believe like Penn Jillette running things?" and then argues from authority by quoting Einstein's theism as if somehow that closes down all debate.

Another says she's "saddened" by Jillette's article because her faith is the only thing that gives her hope: that this is all for a purpose. AIDS, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, drought, famine all begging the question, "Couldn't this have happened some other way?" A third called Jillette "nothing more than a modern-day socialist"; funny, the man seems thoroughly capitalistic to me.

But more than that, over and over there's the smarmy "I feel sorry for Jillette because he can't see it." Well, y'know, I don't see it either, and if there is a God, that's His moral failing and not mine. If there are consequences for not believing, and God dictates who gets sufficient evidence and who doesn't, then the consequences are arbitrary. We have a word for someone with responsibility who doles out punishment from whim: evil.

When it comes down to it, which, really, is harder: to believe that a super-simple universe, emergent from nothing, iterating simple physical properties billions and billions of times, brought about all the wonderful complexity you see around you, or that a super-complicated and mightily all-powerful God built a simple and undignified little universe of pain and sorrow, leaving behind no coherent explanation whatsoever?

Comments

[tagryn]

More or less equivalent, in terms of what little we factually know about the origins of the universe. It comes back to the problem of explaining how energy and matter can come into existence where they previously did not exist, I think.

There was an interesting article in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly by a child psychologist which touched on why humans feel the need to find intentionality even when there is none, I put a few excerpts up on my LJ. I think that may be part of the answer to your question about why people find the proposition "there is no God" more threatening than denying llamavinity, because it goes against the tendency in human nature to believe in a non-material reality. At least in our culture, that tends to be translated into some kind of belief in God, gods, etc.