Science gets some people into a bad habit of thinking that something is only true if you can prove it and if you can’t prove it then it can’t be true.  But science itself tells us this isn’t the case.  The further science probes into nature the more its speculations escape the verifiable.  You can’t verify the existence of an infinity of universes or observe what happens the other side of black holes or see beyond the furthest that our telescopes can at present reach, and since we live in an expanding universe that is likely to be always the case.   At its margins reality dissolves in mystery.  That is also true of religion.  Even the  most intense and joyful and personally meaningful of religious experiences must always be accompanied by the possibility that it might all be unusual levels of activity in the temporal lobe of the brain or imbalances in blood sugar levels.   But what sense would it make to abandon an intensely joyful and personally meaningful experience because there must always be doubt?   People believe in religion, not because they think they have  logically proved the existence of God as atheists seem to imagine – ha ha you’ve overlooked Hume’s fallacy of composition got you there – but because they find it personally meaningful.    After all,  if you cannot prove that religious experiences  truly  are encounters with God, you can’t prove that they aren’t either.  Ah yes, will say the atheists putting on their square glasses,  they’re only doing it because they’re frightened of going to hell.   The capacity of atheists to pontificate in tones of  invulnerable certainty about these things constantly amazes me.   The God Delusion  is my favourite comic read.

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