I wrote a letter in response to Ross Douthat’s recent column on religion. It'll run, says Peter Catapano, but it's been trimmed down to the last paragraph. So here's my edit:
To the Editor:
Re: Ross Douthat, Feb.7--
Ross Douthat's convergent arguments for a god based on "Fine Tuning" (aka the "anthropic principle") and human consciousness, while impressive coming from a "precocious undergraduate," do not finally compel assent. As Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
And as Rebecca Goldstein has said of "intelligibility" arguments alleged to prove the divine probity of human consciousness (Argument #35 in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, from the intelligibility of the world), they point (if anywhere) to something like Spinoza's pantheistic impersonal god, aka the universe itself, and not an object of personal worship.
Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting that they should make us all religious flirts insensibly, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.
Phil Oliver
Nashville
The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.
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