Shane asked:

This is more of a request for an opinion rather than a direct question. I have recently graduated with a
BSc (computer science) and while at uni took a few philosophy (ethics, epistemology & metaphysics)
and biology papers (evolution). I had always considered myself to be an agnostic but now after much
study and contemplation can see no other alternative other than atheism. I am interested in the
personal beliefs of philosophers regarding theism. I note that Geoffrey Klempner has stated he used
to be an atheist. If anyone shares this view, can they please tell me what they believe now and why?

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What immediately sprang to mind on reading this question were some appropriately irreverent items
of philosophical graffiti:

"
God is dead but won't lie down.

On a scale of death, God is mostly dead.

God is not dead merely pining for the fjords ( The Python Defense)."

All of which may seem a facetious response to one of the big puzzles of our century; what is it in our
species that makes us re-invent God as a Central Organising Principal (C.O.P) or makes us
vulnerable to G.O.D Corp. (God On Delivery Corp) in it's many guises?

I once attended a lecture by the physicist Pokinhorn who was talking to the teachers, of whom I was
one, of a school in the village of which he was a famous son. He was advocating the 'God stirs the
mix' conjecture but could not find a response to the Popperian charge of executing a metaphysical
sleight of hand by representing an essentially irrefutable conjecture disguised as a theory of physics. I
enjoyed the debate and felt that I had won the game of philosophical tennis even though I was denied
the authority of institutional truth.

At an intellectual level I cannot justify the concept of 'faith' when it is based purely on the propositional
concept of truth and knowledge. Yet statistically we can see that people move in and out, out and in,
stay in, stay out of religious belief. So a scientific account of the world our species inhabits must take
this fact into account. It also has to consider the feeling we can have at moments of life-threatening
crisis that we wantthere to be a finger stirring up the probabilities or throwing the dice to shake up the
cards in what may seem to be a certain hand expressing extreme prejudice towards us or our loved
ones.

So when you have these experiences how do you reconcile the logically driven intellectual view of
faith with the emotionally driven view? My personal solution is that I do not see these positions as
separately haunting the devil's horns but as indiscernibly conjoined twins dancing on the devils nose,
too close to be seen in focus.

At a deep and purely speculative level I believe there are finite logico-group like mechanisms in cells
that are 'writ large' in the body of complex organisms and which operate on, in and through us of
which we can have knowledge through their emergent works, i.e. what we do, what we know and
what we want.

More specifically, I believe that humans have a high level cognitive system the products of which are
what we call 'thought' of which the objects are vehicles for disjunctively joined propositional and value
content. Education, experience, situations and disposition may dilate or inhibit either of the two
passengers so that thought becomes mostly propositional or mostly value based but there is still,
even in polarized individuals a residual channel in which the two are still twinned. Within this system
there are two distinct units, one of which takes the world as it is as its objects and the second which
acts on the objects in the world wantsto change or maintain our world. This second unit is also a part
of our world and so is subject to its own dynamic.

Within this highly personal and idiosyncratic view, 'faith' and 'hope' can be seen as the emergence of
the deep and permanent working of our organism which in normal times may be skewed towards the
opposite poles of rationalism and emotivism but in situations involving personal catastrophic crisis
almost certainly will default to an unpolarised position in which both propositional and value channels
of thought merge, mix and churn turbulently but within which there are created islands of calm from
inside which we can reconstruct our world.

From a logical point of view I think our world is perceived within the flow control logic of a three valued
classification system consisting of satisfaction, non-satisfaction and indifference the deep constituents
of which are propositional and value channels carried in an expectation nucleus. In a crisis or when
searching, our thoughts wander across all three states but we can default to an attitude of
indifference towards a situation or consciously choose this position above satisfaction, dissatisfaction
or frustration. Though most of us I believe default to the latter and become satisfied with
non-satisfaction, a self-locking state of affairs.

As you can probably tell there is a theory about to jump up and bite you. While it is mostly developed I
haven't as yet worked it through enough situations to offer you a well founded critical method that
allows you to think about and retain your beliefs while systematically doubting them while at the same
time offering you a vehicle sound enough to replace them.

But I am working on it.

Neil Buckland

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