In today's Inquirer, Temple University Math professor John Allen Paulos offers a somewhat utopian proposal to move the world towards "heaven on Earth":

...candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God's existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable and brave outlook, just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on Earth.

What always worries me about religious arguments (and I include atheist arguments asserting there is no God among them) is that they involve disagreements over the unknown. Many atheists assert that they know the unknown, which strikes me as requiring an act of faith essentially similar to the act of faith which is required asserting knowledge that a deity (or deities) exists. Claiming a belief (or a disbelief) is one thing, but claiming to know the unknowable is not logical.

Atheism is often considered synonymous with materialism, and materialists posit that there is nothing out there except matter, because matter is all that we humans have been able to discern. That strikes me as a bit like arguing that there is nothing out there beyond the planets we have discovered because we have not yet been able to see or perceive them. But if you posit infinity, if you really consider the implications, then it makes placing limitations upon it illogical, because by its nature it is unlimited. However, even as I say that, I guess I should recognize that even my belief in infinity might be wrong, because infinity is not truly knowable. I like to think that I try to appreciate it, though. Maybe respect is a better word. It certainly is humbling. I can't make a claim that I "know" that physical matter is all there is, or that what we might call the life force, self awareness is merely a hallucination. Might be, I suppose. My belief in something "out there" that I call spiritual, and the independence of a soul beyond the body, these are my opinions based on my experiences, and maybe they are hallucinations. But I don't know that they are, and more than I know that I am alive. If awareness of a soul or spirit indendendent of the self is a hallucination, then self awareness itself might also be a hallucination. Which would mean I am according to materialist atheists living a hallucinatory life. I'm just skeptical that matter is all there is to it. Why would "matter" cause hallucinations of self awareness? Simply to protect and prolong that meaningless phenomenon we call life? If it is in fact meaningless, if we are all simply accidents of molecules and life is as inconsequential as lifelessness (and I have to allow for that possibility), I fail to see how the universal recognition of such meaninglessness would bring about heaven on earth.

Human nature being what it is, it could be argued that such a universal recognition might have the opposite effect. I mean, some people might find meaninglessness depressing. Or they might use it to rationalize all sorts of anti-social behavior -- including the advancement of arbitrary judgmental ideas about fairness. Like, some people should have the right to control other people because, well, because they just think there are too many people and they've decided that they're endangering the planet! If man is meaningless matter, then by what stretch of logic does the planet become meaningful matter?

Of course, this is not to suggest that all atheists are materialists. In theory, atheism merely means rejecting theism, which is the belief in religious theology. One could in theory be spiritual and still be an atheist. Assuming infinity, assuming an unexplained life force, assuming even the existence of souls does not require the belief in a structure, much less a ruling God or even multiple deities. A vast infinity of floating souls with no deities might not be emotionally appealing, but it's not inconsistent with atheism.

I'm getting off track here, and it is not my purpose to encourage a schism between materialist atheists and spiritualist atheists; only to demonstrate the folly of asserting actual knowledge of the unknowable. I think atheism is a belief, but atheists (at least those of the fundamentalist materialist stripe) are usually unwilling to concede that, for they assert their beliefs are facts.

Professor Paulos, though, does not see the debate as primarily one between atheists and theists (or materialists and spiritualists or deists), but between those who acknowledge no compelling arguments for God, and those who assert certain knowledge that not only is there God, but He is limited to certain texts. He describes these people as vituperative:

...the vituperative e-mail I've received from religious literalists in response to Irreligion has led me to conclude that there is a much more fruitful distinction than the common one between atheists and theists. The real fissure is that between those who acknowledge that there are no compelling logical arguments for God's existence (even if they choose to believe and practice their religion anyway) and those who are certain not only of God's existence but also of the verbatim truth of their particular holy book with all its idiosyncratic inconsistencies and egregiously false pronouncements.

Because, if he were talking of Islam, he might be seen as disrespecting Islam when he says that their book consists of "idiosyncratic inconsistencies and egregiously false pronouncements" and that Muslims should be treated like this:

Yet time and again we indulge fundamentalists from every religion much more than H.L. Mencken suggested is necessary when he wrote, "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

Would the world be a better place if these people recognized that their wives are not beautiful and their children are not smart? Why? What is meant by "indulge"?

He goes on to lodge a remarkable complaint -- that large numbers of Americans refuse to consider that someone who believes the world is only 6,000 years old would be a bad leader:

We aren't so forgiving in other domains. Almost everyone would concede, for example, that a presidential candidate who wanted to outlaw interest on loans and revert to a barter system would be an absurd steward for our troubled economy. So why isn't there a similar consensus that someone who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old and that Noah's Ark is an event in zoological history would be an absurd leader on issues such as stem-cell research, climate change and renewable resources?

Huckabee not only failed to win the Republican primary, but I think that had he actually been foolish enough to actually state "the world is only 6,000 years old," his support would have plummeted to single digits, and he'd have been laughed out of the race.

I've never been even remotely a Huckabee supporter, but is it necessary to put words in his mouth? Why engage in hyperbole? To enlarge the ranks of the alleged ignoramuses said to agree with absurd pronouncements that were not made? How is this going to persuade anyone to be more logical? I share Professor Paulos's skepticism about the supremacy of religious texts, but I don't think the way to reduce irrationality is to exaggerate irrationality. This makes me wonder whether the idea isn't to imply that the Republican Party is full of crackpots who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. (Or that John McCain "shared the stage" with a man who believes that.)

And since when are "stem-cell research, climate change and renewable resources" necessarily of greater interest to atheists? Do atheists have more respect for the planet? If there something about rejecting belief in a deity which translates into concerns about how much petroleum we can extract from the ground, and whether there might be better alternative forms of energy?

Why? Is there somewhere in the Bible that God said "go forth and drill for more oil?"

According to some interpretations, yes:

....suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock" (Deut. 32:13)

And atheists love it.

If that's clear, we're on our way to heaven.