Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Then again...

Listening to Richard Dawkins troubles me and gives me colic. It troubles me because the man complains and complains that people who believe in God, or a god, are delusional. He keeps hammering the issue year after year, right around the Holidays. He keeps saying that religious people are crazy. To him and others, religion is the root of all evil.

Now, it troubles me to hear atheists scientists giving chats about religion because it troubles me to hear religious authorities give chats about science. It just doesn't make sense to hear someone proclaim themselves the authority on something when are, quite clearly, not such an authority. Richard Dawkins is no one to tell me, or anyone, what not to believe in.

There was a video posted over at Respectful Insolence where a comedian rants in a nine-minute poem about "skepticism". I commented that I was confused by "skepticism" equaling "atheism". Another commented replied:

Pretty much, yeah, unless you can find a signature on a fjord somewhere.

Really? There needs to be a signature from God on a fjord in order to believe in God. Absence of evidence is, in this case, evidence of absence. This also gives me colic.

I'm not troubled because I am a religious kind of guy, or because I believe in the existence of God. (To me, the fjord IS the signature, and so is DNA.) I'm troubled because that kind of thinking where, because you can't see it, touch it, taste it, or feel it, then it must not exist, is troubling. Think about it. It was the same way that so many for so long felt about bacteria, antibiotics, viruses, and even radiation. And it was the scientists' jobs to prove that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Though they did it with evidence.)

I'm not calling for a large-scale exercise whereby we test for the existence of God. It would be a waste of time. (When you do something and no one notices, then you did it right. God is perfect, so...)

I'm calling for an end of the hostilities between the groups who completely disregard the existence of a higher power and preach about it and the groups who believe in a higher power and believe that this higher power couldn't have possibly given us the ability to do things with science. It's getting mean, folks, and nothing good could come of it.

I mean, yes, Richard Dawkins can be troubled by those who disregard science because of some weirdo interpretation of their religion, but to say that people should just outright give it all up? Really?

Personally, the knowledge in my heart that there is a God, that strange things can and will happen, and I am nothing compared to the known universe when it comes to knowledge of all things... All of that is comforting. I like knowing that I'm not in control and that God created a universe that I will never really touch. I like feeling small and limited because, at the very least, my dreams are not limited. And those dreams allow me to dream up things that people on the opposite spectrum don't even imagine because they deem them impossible.

It's good to know that impossible is nothing.

Not a sermon, just a thought.