Preposterous Beliefs

Just read the following article:

Atheists who bring logic to the Easter story are missing the point


The author, Julian Baggini, is conflating one's degree of education with intelligence. The belief in the resurrection might indeed be preposterous, but so are many things that highly educated people believe e.g. colours, sounds and smells don't actually exist out there in the world, they are pure creations of the mind. Or Parallel Universes exist where everything I could do is played out slightly differently in another Universe, hence there are a squintillion differing versions of me! Or animals are not actually conscious (since they lack language).

Julian Baggini's Heathen Manifesto

Reading atheists, please read my heathen manifesto.


In section 2 (Heathens are naturalists) the author Julian Baggini says:

[W]e believe in naturalism: the natural world is all there is and there is no purposive, conscious agency that created or guides it.

I imagine this also applies to any sub-section of the natural world too. So that my body as well as the entire physical realm as a whole, is not guided by a purposive, conscious agency either -- including these very words I write now!

Or if sub-sections of the natural realm can be conscious -- i.e organisms and perhaps computers -- what makes it reasonable to suppose the totality of the natural world is not guided by a purposive conscious agency?

The problem is that many self-professed naturalists don't think through what they believe, and even if they do they tend to be poor at philosophical reasoning. And they don't realise that the widening of the eyes and interest people display when they tell them they are naturalists is because people think that they're being told that they are a naturist! (NB a naturist is not a naturalist!)

I wonder why people are unable to understand that atheism and organised religion do not exhaust all options. Most curious.