Penn Jillette: "I believe there is no god."

[sarahmichigan]

NPR is running a weekly series called "This I Believe." The current incarnation of This I Believe is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by Edward R. Murrow. I was listening to NPR in the car this morning and caught this week's guest opinion from Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). I LOVED how succinctly he summed up the atheist, rationalist viewpoint on belief and why life isn't hopeless and dreary if you don't believe in a higher power.

excerpt:

"Having taken that step [of rejecting a belief in god], it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

Read the full text here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

Comments

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

Not if God walks up to him and gives him a firm handshake. "There is no god at all." is a statement of faith as well. The only scientifically valid statement is, "There are ways of explaining the universe without relying on an assumption of God, and methods of simplicity would therefore suggest that God most probably doesn't exist."

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

I can't make sense of your first two sentences, sorry.

As for the rest, yes, science isn't going to get you beyond "there probably isn't a god". That usually requires something personal about how much the world sucks.

[lefthand.livejournal.com]

It's a bastardization of the scientific method using god as the null hypothesis: If you can't prove otherwise, it must be because of god. This isn't science, it's just a smokescreen.

The actual null hypothesis is: Nothing happened / There is no effect. The scientist must disprove that nothing happened or simply that it is statistically unlikely that nothing happened. In the case of the existence of god, the null hypothesis must be: There is no god. The believer must then endeavor to disprove by the preponderance of evidence that there is no god /designer. This is the same rule for all of science.

In addition, correlation is not causality. Even if one could disprove the non-existence of god, they would still not be able to attribute causality.

Given the complete absence of disproof of this null hypothesis, the idea that there is a god cannot be scientifically entertained.