Why do we exist? The answer, according to the major monotheistic religions, including the Catholic faith in which I was raised, is that an all-powerful, supernatural entity created us. When considering alleged answers to these three riddles, we should be as picky as my old friend Gallagher. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire said, “but certainty is an absurd one.” Doubt protects us from dogmatism, which can easily morph into fanaticism and what William James calls a “premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Below I defend agnosticism as a stance toward the existence of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness. Wright once asked me in exasperation, “Don’t you believe anything?” Actually, I believe lots of things, for example, that war is bad and should be abolished.īut when it comes to theories about ultimate reality, I’m with Voltaire. One is the late religious philosopher Huston Smith, who called me “convictionally impaired.” Another is megapundit Robert Wright, an old friend, with whom I’ve often argued about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. People I admire fault me for being too skeptical. I’m not convinced by any scientific creation stories, either, such as those that depict our cosmos as a bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.” “I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence.” I have examined the evidence for Christianity, and I find it unconvincing. “That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer,” he said. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”Ĭollins apologized. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune.
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