George,

Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it not only because you’d put so much thought into your response, but because you’ve put your belief, and your reason for believing out there and open to criticism - and all because of my subtle challenge.

Having once been a literalist believer in the Bible, I’ve always been genuinely curious as to what exactly it was that you believed (if not a simplistic literal interpretation of the Bible), and how you reconciled it with science.

In regards to your presuppositions, I would consider myself to be 1a, and Occam’s Razor is a big reason for that.

Thanks again for the explanation.

TR,
>>Dawkins would call this a "God Delusion".<<
That is his and your good right, the same as others’ good right is to call Dawkins’ ideas - on what other people necessarily believe about God - his “delusion”. However, I do not think name calling helps us to understand each other.

Of course, if you opt for Sagan’s alternative in Step 1, then what I believe in Step 2 must come to you as a delusion. Perhaps not unlike marvelling at the beauty of a sunset - and its poetic description that goes beyond the physical explanation of the phenomenon - must come to a blind man as nothing but expressions of a “delusion”.

Of course, there is also the deist approach, accepting my option in Step 1 but not Steps 2&3.

socratease,
There are positions in between the extremes of being a “literalist believer in the Bible” and “not talking about religion or any theistic god”. See John Polkinghorne in http://www.crosscurrents.org/polkinghorne.htm on process theology. However, when he says

“Whitehead's event-dominated picture of reality ... (because) most of the time there is, in fact, a continuous process (and so) Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world”,

he does not take into account Carlo Rovelli’s and Lee Smolin’s loop quantum gravity in which space-time is supposed to be quantized, i.e. discrete rather than continuous (quantised geometry).

Well, in 1998 when that interview took place, this theory was only a couple of years old. I do not know whether Polkinghorne since changed his mind about process theology “not fitting on to physics”. See also http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9423&page=0#150700.

AJ Philips,
Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate the strength of the Occam’s razor argument, especially when combined with negative “religious” experience.