Here's a more general question, and one of substantial recent interest: Does the fact that there are other people who disagree with me, by itself, give me reason to doubt my own beliefs? The interest of the question, to me, derives from the fact that there are arguments, founded upon very general and widely held epistemological premises, that would lead to the conclusion that it should. However, that conclusion, it seems to me, is pretty clearly untenable: There is very little I believe with which someone, somewhere, does not disagree, and many of my most deeply held beliefs (the fundamental equality of all people, for example) are ones with which many people vehemently disagree. As regards religion, I am generally in agreement with Oliver's remarks. I would add that one's attitude towards this question also depends upon how one regards religion itself, in particular, the extent to which one thinks cognitive attitudes, like belief, are fundamental to a religious life---the point being, of course,...

Let me start by thanking Louise for her contribution, and especially for mentioning Hume's Dialogues ,which remains my single favorite philosophy book. Hume's dismantling ofthe argument from design probably should be cited as often as possiblein the current climate. Having said something nice, I'll now proceed todisagree with Louise on one point. But I'll then agree with her aboutanother. It is not entirely obvious that there is any such thing as the 'Judeo-Christian' conception of God. The various Problems of Evil,logical and "evidential" (as I've seen the one Louise emphasizescalled), attack a particular combination of claims---omnipotence,omniscience, and benevolence, typically---that, to be sure, has figuredsignificantly in Christian theology but whose relation to Jewishthought is really quite unclear. Moreover, even within Christianthought, there are many conceptions of the divine, and not all of themwould subscribe to those three claims. Nonetheless, it probably is truethat most...

If you are just wondering why people respond in such different ways,then perhaps your question is just psychological. But there are deeperissues here, too. Natural disasters raise, in a very impressive way,the so-called Problem of Evil. It goes like this. Suppose that God isomnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. Then it would seem that Godwould had to have known what sort of suffering Katrina would cause,want to prevent that suffering, and be able to do so. But God didn't,so God must not be all those things. And if you think that, if Godexists at all, then God has to be all those things, then you get theconclusion that God does not exist. It will not surprise you thatthe Problem of Evil has been much discussed. There is a very nicecollection edited by Marilyn Adams on it. Ican't end this note,however, without saying one more thing, namely, that there are manydifferent ways "believers" respond to such events. It is true that thereactions you mention are commonly encountered, but they are not...

I'm not sure I fully understand that question being asked here, and I should say, straight off, that I'm not familiar with Paley's particular version of the argument from design. (The argument goes back, in one form or another, a very long way.) But it's certainly true that, if the argument shows anything, it shows only something very abstract: The universe was created by some form of "intelligence". Indeed, part of Hume's criticism of the argument from design is precisely that it can show so little: The argument gives us no reason whatsoever to suppose that the intelligence that created the universe, if such there be, has any of the attributes traditionally associated with divinity. (In fact, Hume goes farther and argues that, if one is really proceeding by analogy here, one should conclude that the intelligence has few, if any, of those attributes.)

I don't see how one could reasonably suppose there was an argument here for the existence of God. But belief in God need not be based upon any sort of argument or even be something for which one has reasons in the usual sense in which one has reasons for beliefs. A belief in God might have more in common with aesthetic judgements than with theoretical ones. If so, then perhaps the suggestion would be that such mathematical patterns are part of what constitutes the basis for the aesthetic response in question. Whether that would be "sound" is hard to say. Aesthetic judgements are not beyond criticism (unless you regard aesthetic judgements as not really judgements at all but on a par with mere expressions), but the criticism of aesthetic judgements is slippery territory. The foregoing may well require that belief in God be something very different from belief that God exists. This suggestion—or, rather, a generalization of it—is the subject of an exceptionally interesting paper...

There are a couple different issues here that need to be disentangled. One concerns what philosophers call "testimony". It's clear that one way of knowing something is being told: If you can't know that the earth is round because you were told, then, as you note, very few people know that the earth is round. Now, as always in philosophy, there is much disagreement about how why one can come to know something by being told. But most people would agree that testimony is only a means by which knowledge may be transmitted : If you tell me that p , and I now know that p , you must already have known that p . Maybe you were told that p by someone else. But the chain has to bottom out somewhere, with someone who knows that p "of h'er own knowledge", as a lawyer might say, that is, not because s'he was told. Testimony therefore seems a distraction here. The problem of religious knowledge concerns how one might know (say) that God exists otherwise than by being told. If...

It's really too bad that there is this common image of religious peopleas simply swallowing what someone else has told them. I don't know manysuch folks myself, though I am sure they do exist. And if the people at your son's church are telling him to stop asking questions, that's even worse: Questioning is not opposed to faith but an integral part of it, and a faith based upon just not questioning is not a faith that will survive very long. Maybe you and your wife should find a different church if this one is not serving your son well. But whatever you decide on that score, there is no reason you can't engage your son's questions. The three you report are very different. (And, not to torpedo your pride, not uncommon: Children are amazing.) The first concerns the second creation story in Genesis. (If you don't know, there are two such stories, drawn from two different traditions.) Assuming your wife isn't committed to literalism here, then the first thing to tell your son is that this is a story ...

No, there's no reason whatsoever that being religious should make someone less successful as a scientist. Whether one is a "person of faith" has nothing to do with whether one is capable of reason and the like. Any suggestion to the contrary is, frankly, not just insulting but ignorant. Moreover, the question contains several other assumptions that are simply false. First, a religious scientist need have no "need to prove his faith true" by scientific means. She may simply think that science and faith don't really intersect all that much, not because she "partitions" or "compartmentalizes", but for much the same reason she might think science and poetry don't intersect all that much. Second, a non-religious scientist may well have some irrational investment in, say, the truth of some hypothesis that she formulated as a graduate student and interpret all her data in terms of it. Being non-religious doesn't insulate one from bias. Third, it is simply a myth that scientists rely upon "reason and...

There are a lot of questions here. First, I think your assumption that "all religions claim they are right and all others wrong" is false. I am a Christian, and neither I nor, I think, anyone else at my church would make any such claim. I believe there is profound truth in Christianity, and it is the right form of faith for me. But that is not to say that there is no profound truth in other faiths nor that they are not the right forms of faith for others. Second, Pascal's wager, as I recall it, wasn't really specific to any one religion. Though if you did suppose that, in order to gain salvation, you had to follow one of the following five faiths, all of which were mutually exclusive, then you would be in a bit of a bind. But perhaps the conclusion should be that you should follow one of them. Which? Flip a five-sided coin. That said, I think the going view is that Pascal's wager had other problems, anyway. See the discussion of it at the Stanford Encyclopedia.

I'm not sure why that should be possible. Indeed, suppose we accept that it is not possible for an omnipotent being to make some contradiction true. Then—if we assume that anything possibly possible is possible (this is the modal axiom known as "4")—it follows immediately that such a being cannot make it possible for a contradiction to be true, either. If s'he could, then it would be possible that it was possible for a contradiction to be true, in which case it would be possible for a contradiction to be true, which it is not. That said, there are some philosophers who think that some contradictions are true, and they would have an easier time, I take it, with this kind of question.

I'm not quite sure I understand what his has to do with performance-enhancing drugs. But, as I in effect said in response to a different question , if it turned out that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 only because God had intervened, I don't think I'd feel quite the same about it. The nuns at Sunday School always taught me that it is wrong to pray for that kind of help. One may pray that one does one's best, that no-one is injured, and the like. But one may not pray for one's opponent's to do badly, nor for victory. God does not play favorites, and to ask God to do so is the height of arrogance. That God does not play favorites is something with which it is difficult to come to terms, if one really considers its full implications. And, as a result, this viewpoint is, clearly enough, not universally shared. That is a tragic fact, one that is at the root of many of history's most regrettable episodes, not to mention a good number of the present's.