A struggling atheist

Hi all,

I am currently in the process of developing a blog for the first time (exciting!).

My own atheism is fairly central to my life - many of my ideas are responsive to idea of a godless universe. As a result, my blog has taken on a distinctly atheist theme!

If anyone would be happy to provide me with some feedback/constructive criticism then I would certainly appreciate this! Or if anyone would like to debate any of the issues raised here then that would be fantastic (as the blog doesn't have a comments sections).

I sometimes suspect that my own writing may appear persuasive to me only because, as the writer, I am so close to the content - any feedback/debate would certainly provide me with some way to gauge how effective my presentation of these ideas is.

My atheist blog is at: deathofrealitytv.tumblr.com

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards.

Lord Emsworth - thoughts? Criticisms? Compliments?

The Engineer,

Fantastic - thank you very much, mate! All advice much appreciated and taken note of.

Do you have a blog of your own at all? Still trying to get my head around the 'blogosphere' (i.e. which site has the most exposure - the options are a tad overwhelming!).

Thanks again.

AlexBP said:

Hi JazzTrance. I'm an orthodox Christian, so not surprisingly I disagree with much of what you write and do not find your arguments persuasive. Not long ago in this very forum I said that "Most of the arguments that atheists toss at me are so absurd and illogical that they tend to strengthen my conviction that Christianity is true." Your posts are fine examples of that phenomenon, for reasons that I'll state below.

First let me note a few things that I do appreciate about your blog. I like the title. I like the fact that you mentioned Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language. That's one of my favorite essays and I think people should pay more attention to the way that language is used to undermine and circumvent logical thought. And I do take an economic position similar to yours, preferring a market-oriented approach but acknowledging the need for some regulation. Now on to the criticisms.

First of all, you present no argument at all for why I shouldn't believe the claims of Christianity. You write things such as "a religious view (the meaning of which herein should be understood as an assertion in the truth of a God as per the world’s major, and minor, religious scriptures) is easily dismissed philosophically, scientifically, historically and sociologically/economically". That, of course, is begging the question of why religion can be so dismissed. I've met countless atheists who claim that they have arguments against religion. but only a couple who are actually willing to tell me what those arguments are. (Needless to say, in those couple cases I did not find their arguments persuasive.) If most atheists can't tell me their reasons for rejecting religion, I think I can be forgiven for suspecting that they don't have any reasons.

Regarding the simple question that your post refers to, I will be happy to answer. I was raised by atheist parents and was an atheist until age 23. At that point I was sinking into a morass of depression, alienation, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts. I knew that it was impossible for me to save myself. Then Jesus Christ saved me. Because He Saved me, I now believe in Him. That is why I believe in God.

You say that "religion conservative". This is untrue, obviously. Some religious believers and movements are conservative, others liberal, and others don't fit well in either category. You say that religion is "the antithesis of scientific enlightenment". If so, then why were the earliest scientists such as Jean Buriden, Nicole d'Orisme, Nico da Cusa, and Nicolaus Copernicus all clergymen? Why were so many prominent scientists from Galileo to Kepler to Newton to Faraday deeply religious? Why is it that a country like the USA, which is well known for having a very religious population, produces so much scientific research, while countries where religion is banned such as Cuba and North Korea produce exactly none?

You say "Religion is truly irrelevant". If so, why do you write so much about it? If we judge by the space devoted to it on your blog, it would seem that you think that religion is not only relevant but the most important thing.

You also say this: "I understand that the natural response of the relatively uneducated will be to draw attention to the ‘vast array’ of god-fearing scholars at respected universities and colleges. ... The sheer minority into which these experts fit should provide further contextualisation." I'm unable to make any sense out of this. An educated person such as yourself certainly knows that on average, religious people in our society are better educated that the non-religious. (But just in case anyone wants to dispute the point, I've included below two links to posts on my blog where I've collected sixteen studies supporting that conclusion.) Since the religious are better-educated than the non-religious, how exactly do you conclude from that that the facts point against religion being relevant in academia? Logic would seem to point in the exact opposite direction of what you claim.

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Hi AlexBP,

Do you not find my arguments persuasive in light of your Christianity? It seems suspect that you happen to have adopted the only philosophical position, of the thousands available, which run contrary to my arguments, broadly speaking (i.e. it seems unlikely that you should disagree objectively with my reasoning if you weren’t already predisposed to a rejection of my premises).

When you say that my posts are absurd, do you mean absurd in the everyday use of the word, or in the post-War French ‘existentialist’ sense of the absurd? I can’t respond fully unless you re-phrase that slightly, as I don’t want to misrepresent your argument. Illogical, on the other hand, I fully understand – your issue with my lack of presentation of logical arguments against God’s existence is correct, however I specifically stated that I believe arguments for God’s existence are an extremely soft target for logical critique – rather than lowering myself to that level, I contend that should the mad-made nature of religion be articulated more specifically, then ‘nitty-gritty’ arguments become superfluous.

Please let me know whether you would be interested in debating the existence of god – I’m more than happy to do so, using formal logic trees, showing proper deductive technique from a foundationalist viewpoint to show not that god does not exist, but that there is no justified reason for believing that ‘he’ does. Alternatively, should you subscribe to a more systems-theory type view of epistemic justification, i.e. the total coherency of a metaphysical model being either strengthened or weakened by the insertion of a particular belief, then I’m happy to debate along those lines, whereby the belief in question carries a burden of proof (i.e. it is your position which requires justification, not the absence of your position, or an argument against the existence of God as you put it) and our model is represented by both knowable physical laws, the laws of causality based upon these natural laws, as well as potential a priori knowledge. Having said this, perhaps an email thread would be best suited to such an argument (happy to give you my email address).

It strikes me as surprising (not really, but for the sake of elucidation of my blog posts!) that you were ‘saved’ by Christ during a period of depression, alienation, hopelessness, etc. Do you believe you would have been ‘saved’ had you not been in such a state? Most adult religious converts I meet are of such a nature/emotional state. They need something. It would appear that their own state predisposes them to buying into a firm, easy-to-understand world view. I understand that ignorance is indeed bliss for a select few people, unable to confront the absurd (in my sense of the word). Incidentally, how indeed did said salvation occur? Was this a transcendent experience? Does it not bother you slightly that adherents to all world religions, both those that you and I have heard of and those that we haven’t, claim to have similar experiences? I think one should suspect their own motives to such an extent that if I was to undergo such an experience I would look very closely at my own disposition and needs before building my life around a suspension of the laws of nature in my own favour.

Regarding enlightenment versus conservatism – liberal (in a non-politicised sense) is not the opposite of conservative, progressive is. Religion is absolutely not progressive, and if any of its proponents are then this speaks volumes for their own deviation from their scriptures. Religion requires blind-faith in a bronze-age book/s and is, by definition, static at its core. Moral enlightenment has progressed in light of this; clergymen you mentioned (and others like William of Occam) existed in a time of more widespread religiosity, achieving their greatest work in spite of said religiosity, not because of it (incidentally Galileo was placed under house-arrest for proposing theories which ran contrary to the church’s teachings of the time, only recently receiving a formal ‘apology’ from the Vatican). Today, not historically, but today, religion certainly stands in opposition to progress of all kinds (look at the gay marriage debate, the proposed teaching of creationism in the classroom, a misrepresentation of the implications of scientific theory beyond the comprehension of non-academics, to name a few examples). If you are indeed also a student of economics, then the idea that research in the Western world and research in failed states like North Korea is most accurately delineated by their respective rates of religion is truly bizarre. Incidentally, ‘religion’ in the broadest sense as per my recent post, is well and truly alive in both of those countries in the form of strong personality cults.

My own blog does indeed state that religion is irrelevant, and I stand by this. Believe you me, my blog is not my primary occupation; any religious comments therein represent more of a ‘pet-hate’ rather than an all-important grievance. I am a postgraduate law student, with undergraduate degrees in both economics and engineering. I have studied both analytic and continental philosophy. I travel to the US once a year to play on the New York jazz scene, travelling also to Cambodia frequently to engineer houses in remote villages (devastated by a US-induced Khmer Rouge tyranny in the ‘70s), Ghana as part of a microfinance initiative aimed at empowering women (where the church driven inquisition against “witches” is alive and well), and country Australia working native-title in order to establish self governance in indigenous communities. I also work professionally part-time. My own reading deals with religion very rarely (I have just finished Bob Dylan's autobiography 'Chronicles', highly recommended from even a literary point of view). Religion is very much irrelevant in both my own life, and the lives of the intellectuals I surround myself with.

The suspension of one’s critical faculties is the antithesis of progress – ‘progress’ under a false guise is completely superficial. Suspension of one’s critical faculties runs completely contrary to the enlightenment ideals, which you alluded to in my written pieces (Renaissance ideals on the other hand, represented a period of enhanced ornamentation in the arts and architecture intended to inspire awe and fear in religious constituencies, harshly condemned by great Viennese architect Adolf Loos in his book ‘Why a Man Should Be Well Dressed&#8217. Intentional and premeditated subservience runs contrary not to enlightenment ideals but to fundamental humanistic values. The articles to which you draw my attention regarding academic performance in children show either a) a causal link between religious belief and ‘academic’ performance, which one should not endorse if it is indeed predicated upon ignorance, or b) a false causal link, more correctly attributed to quality of teachings in more religious regions, greater social welfare in said regions, etc. Academic performance here has been equated almost entirely with performance in adolescence, hardly a tertiary level achievement (or a post-graduate tertiary level achievement, the true litmus test for quality research and progress). I cannot pass up this opportunity again to state that the idea of the ‘religious child’ makes me feel sick in the gut; while I disagree flatly with Professor Dawkins’ foray into philosophy (his science is, obviously, ground-breaking) I completely endorse his labelling of adolescent religiosity as child abuse (your blog indicates you are all too familiar with the God Delusion, the atheist movement’s own soft target, but an important publication in principle).

By the way, religious people in my society are not usually the better educated – I am not from the United States, the most religious country in the Western world (discounting that statement for tiny states, like my mother’s homeland of Malta). Western Europe (the seat of most great scientific paradigm shifts), Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are testament to first-world progression's detachment from religion (American progress on the other-hand is testament to your own countrymen’s progress in spite of religion).

Anyway, should you wish to discuss atheism at an analytic level (re. order of argument, epistemic justification of religious experience, a priori justified true beliefs, etc. or at the level of metaphysics re. causality and its idiosyncrasy to our universe/conception of time), do shoot me your email address and I’ll be in touch. Apologies in advance for any ill-founded assumptions regarding your personal circumstances – metacognitive considerations aside, I am truly glad that you are doing well and appreciate your comments/critique.

Kind regards,

Scott

AlexBP said:

Let me take these questions slightly out of order. How did my salvation occur? First I became aware of the reality of my own sin and of the sinfulness in all humanity. Then I spent quite awhile running around, trying to find salvation in the wrong places, such as politics, academia, the business world, the art world, and so forth. Then I realized that salvation could not be found in any of those places, and started to feel that there was no hope of escape. Then Jesus Christ sought me out, gave me the gift of faith and hope and understanding, and lifted the burden of sin off of me. That is how my salvation occurred. Some people think that the Christian concept of salvation is only a statement about vaguely-defined feelings. I've responded to that notion as best I can on my blog here:

URL REMOVED AS I AM UNABLE TO RE-POST OTHERWISE

"Does it not bother you slightly that adherents to all world religions claim to have similar experiences?" Countless atheists have asked me this. I always respond by doubting that the premise is true. Show me some evidence that adherents to all world religions claim to have similar experiences, and then we can discuss whether it bothers me. The only other religion I know of where adherents claim to experience salvation is Mormonism. I'd think that reading any primer on comparative religion, such as Huston Smith's The World's Religions, is enough to show that adherents to all world religions do not claim to have similar experiences.

As for your focus that on the fact that I was in a particular emotional state at the time when Jesus Christ first sought me out, what of it? All human beings are in some emotional state whenever they're conscious. There is no state of mental purity unsullied by emotions, though many people have convinced themselves that there is. Plenty of great thinkers have been depressed or alienated. I will grant that if a person is hysterical, that casts some doubt on the soundness of their thought and memory during the period when it occurs; I have never been hysterical.

As a side note, if I wanted to find someone who was very good at understanding and controlling his or her own emotions, I would certainly look in a monastery or some other community of deeply religious people, not in a secular academy. The modern, secular world knows almost nothing about that topic.

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I think your dismissal of philosophy’s conclusions (i.e. ‘reason’ when applied to areas of study like knowledge and ethics) is perhaps slightly confused. Firstly regarding Russell; certainly one of the greatest philosophers of the modern era, however not central to contemporary epistemology (taking prima facie, perhaps too generously, your summation of Russell’s arguments from scepticism). Modern epistemology has a variety of possible responses to the question of whether or not your belief in the existence of a table is ‘justified’ epistemically (I’m not sure that Russell argued that the scepticism which you appeal to is universal in its ‘degree’, i.e. that scepticism regarding a table’s existense is perfectly analogous to scepticism regarding Zeus’ existence).

One possible line of reasoning would be foundationalist, i.e. the setting of premises and a deductive output along the lines of i) sensory perception is reliable, ii) I have sensory perception of the table and iii) therefore I am justified in believing in the existence of the table (which, assuming that the table’s existence is indeed true, means that I ‘know’ that the table exists). Premise ii), my perception of the table, is commonly considered a justified base belief (not the truth of the perception, but the perception itself). Premise i), the reliability of sensory perception has been justified by a second degree (etcetera) of deduction in a plethora of ways. A contemporary example of this is a model of naturalised epistemology, built around Quine’s metaphysical model of ‘natural kinds’. Quine argues that genuine divisions in an ontological continuum exist for various reasons (predicated on the idea that composite entities may possess a an abstract essence absent from all of its components). If an ontological continuum representing all that exists were to be represented in three dimensions, then what we would see is a highly contoured plain, rather than a flat plain, wherein vertical ‘points’ represented distinguishable ‘kinds’ of things. Kornblith then argues from a Darwinian basis that survival probability would be enhanced dramatically according to the degree of correct perceptions of aforementioned natural kinds (evolutionary theory knowable both a priori and empirically, although it should be noted that this exciting development in analytic philosophy is still a work in progress, albeit a serious sign-positing of a potential naturalising of epistemic justification). Whether or not you take issue with my deduction (i.e. step iii), I am unsure of, and will be happy to respond to.

Alternatively, the belief that a table exists is perfectly coherent with all of our previously justified (i.e. certainly not supernatural) beliefs, lending credence to the idea that our entire way of knowing, our entire model of the universe, would not be weakened by the belief that the table does exist (incidentally I find this gross over simplification slightly weaker than a foundationalist argument, however equally powerful in its juxtaposition with any sort of ridiculous argument for a ‘personal’ god, not a deist god which requires a more metaphysical type argument to refute, probably a simpler argument, but a separate argument nonetheless). The important thing to take away from this is that philosophy can indeed be enlightening in the context of human endeavour taken holistically, filling in the blanks, not presenting gaps as you seem to have interpreted the discipline as, and then passively inviting an obviously man-made superstitious solution.

An almost analogous argument could be made regarding your analogy invoking your wife. Again, you perceive your wife visually, I could perceive your wife visually and we could agree that she exists, and we could agree on the nature of her existence. To cantilever this line of reasoning out so that it may encompass the supernatural (which by the way, is a constantly evolving and meaningless designation of that which ‘appears’ unnatural according to our current level of understanding of the laws of nature), is completely misleading. The idea that your wife exists does not run contrary to your entire system of justified beliefs (I emphasise the word ‘justified’, this does not include faith-based beliefs); on the other hand, the idea of a personal creator god undermines your entire system of beliefs in ways you probably don’t even realise until you stop to consider the implications of such a belief (all areas of academia as we know them would be rendered redundant). As a side note, creationists always misunderstand this idea; an argument from incredulity regarding the probability of generation of life simply does not hold water. No matter how improbable an event is, as long as that event is ‘possible’ in a given world according to the natural laws of that world, then this explanation is ‘always’ more probable than a suspension of those laws.

Logic trees by the way are simply diagrammatic representations of deductive logic as per my above argument – all mathematical proofs for example could (inelegantly) be presented in this way, as could all court-room decisions, the list is profound. I’m sure I need not list man’s achievements based upon formal logic, deductive (in this instance) or inductive (predictive power incidentally, is also a good measure of the truth of a statement, indeed the scientific method is based upon this idea; the religious man’s willingness to stake his claim against its predictive power, presumably considered quite strong considering the level of prophesy in most holy books, is non-trivially lacking). Regarding your dismissal of systems theory, you’ll need to be slightly more specific; philosophical systems? If so, you should know that much of epistemology requires systems theory. Thermodynamic systems? Our entire cosmological model is based upon systems theory in this regard (as are all entropic models). The centrality of systems theory in cognitive psychology and computer science surely are self evident?

Could you please clarify for me exactly how Christ ‘sought you out’? Was this via sensory perception? Again, the likelihood that the entire natural order as we know it should be suspended in your favour temporarily is so miniscule that it is far outweighed by the likelihood of delusion (or, in rarer cases thankfully, hallucination). Unfortunately, there would be no way for you to objectively verify the validity of your experiences even to yourself; being a thinking man as I’m sure you are, you would need to consider said probabilities yourself. Surely you realise also that such claims could never serve in logical discourse as a justification for the existence of god. Regarding similar experiences in other religions, I concede that the experience of salvation may be peculiar to Christianity, the experience of god certainly isn’t; I have Islamic friends who have attested (usually more emphatically than any Christian apologist I have met) to have directly experienced god. I’m afraid, in summary of this idea of personal testament, that I just don’t buy it (nor would I base my life around such a questionable idea should I have such an experience myself and assume, in light of man’s cosmological insignificance, and in light of the idea that the laws of time and space as we know them are peculiar to our universe, that I had stumbled upon some sort of ultimate truth). In addition to that, if I had been searching for ‘salvation’, an obviously man-made sentiment, during a period of feeling ‘lost’, and then found said salvation via an obviously man-made institution, then I’m afraid I would seriously doubt myself.

Why man feels the need for salvation externally, I am not sure; we have everything we need within ourselves, creatively, morally and emotionally. External awe abounds in nature, which as I alluded to above, becomes more and more fascinating as our knowledge expands (Dawkins incidentally has argued that should we see a world 500 years from today, the technology of that day would look ‘magical’ by today’s standards, indeed the idea that time could be slowed down literally ‘is’ magical by humankind’s primitive approximation). For this reason I don’t feel like the kid in the playground telling all the other kids that Santa doesn’t exist; I know that someone like yourself has the capacity to forge a meaningful and happy life without subservience. I’m sure that life would be far richer without Kirekegaard’s leap of faith.

One last question – should your religiosity be shown to have no reasonable foundation (my arguments aside, the inability of theological reasoning to gain any serious traction throughout the course of human history should point to this reality), would you abandon it or admit that your religiosity was entirely faith based? If the latter were true, why should reason be abandoned in a direction favourable only to your desire or conclusion? Why not abandon reason and adopt a belief that you are god-like yourself and that nobody owns you, and that you need not fear any god? I suspect that people’s wishful thinking tends to manifest itself in the faith that we see because, as I wrote about in my blog, people need that one-degree of separation between themselves and Nietzsche’s abyss.

Kind regards again.

AlexBP said:

Let me begin by addressing the end of your most recent post. If my religiosity could be shown to have no reasonable foundation, I would abandon it. If. As I've said before, I have found reason to support Christian doctrine, and whenever atheists toss me their supposedly logical arguments against Christianity, I usually find them to be so weak that they instead strengthen my convictions.

Now jumping back to the beginning of that post, regarding the epistemological basis for believing that a table exists, you are obviously better read and more knowledgeable in modern philosophy than I am. However, judging from your response to my post, it seems that you missed my point. The point is this. Suppose an academic philosopher were to spend days, months, or years wrangling with the question of whether a table exists. Suppose at the end, after a long and valiant conclusion, he finally struggles to the conclusion that the table does, in fact, exist. In practical terms, what has he accomplished? His behavior, as far as putting his orange juice and breakfast cereal on a table, will be the same throughout the entire process. Moreover, a lesser philosopher who's never even questioned the epistemological basis for table belief will also place his orange juice and breakfast cereal on the table just as readily. From a practical perspective, then, the long investigation into the epistemological basis of table belief has accomplished nothing. That, and many other similar cases, are what make me and many others shake our heads at so much of modern philosophy and other fields as well.

I'm sure you know that philosophy comes from the Greek and originally meant "love of wisdom". As such, it's certainly a good thing, but not everyone who labels himself a philosopher actually loves wisdom, nor is everyone who loves wisdom identified as a philosopher. If wisdom truly consists of plunging at great length into the epistemological foundations of belief in tables, then modern philosophers such as the ones you name may be the truest philosophers. On the other hand, true wisdom may consist of accepting tables and other parts of daily reality without wasting time on endless arguments about whether they exist. Chesterton, when explaining why he leaned towards the medieval Scholastics rather than modern philosophers, made a similar argument about eggs; "A man need not scramble his brains to scramble his eggs." If Chesterton is right, then many modern thinkers are not on the path to wisdom; at best they're moving orthogonal to it.

That is one of the many reasons why I view orthodox Christianity as wisdom rather than any vein of modern thought. Christian doctrine is clear and sensible, while much (thought not all) of modern thought looks a whole lot like gibberish. In your blog, you mentioned Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language and claimed that the "modern public intellectual" spoke clearly by Orwell's standards, while the clergyman was always trying to hide behind confusing language. The reverse is true. Indeed, if I recall correctly, Orwell didn't target any clergymen in his essay, but he needled plenty of modern intellectuals. Clergymen usually speak clearly. "We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth." That sentence follows all of Orwell's rules and is clear as day. Large swaths of modern academia are like what's described in Chip Morningstar's essay How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure. Physics professor Alan Sokal once wrote a paper called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity and got it published in an academic journal. It was meaningless gibberish, thus proving that at least some academic material is nonsense.

(This may come across as anti-intellectual, but that's not what I intend at all. I scoff at certain academics, not at the idea of intellectualism. Just as a true patriot doesn't support everything his country does, a true intellectual doesn't take seriously everything the academic world does. Morningstar himself is a professional engineer. He notes that if a large group of engineers devoted their careers to nonsense, it would eventually become evident when bridges collapsed and planes fell from the sky. Those in the humanities are not subject to any such constraints.)

Whenever I consider this dichotomy, I am most reminded of one individual, Jesus Christ. He never spoke a word about the epistemological foundations of belief in tables or anything else of that sort. He had an urgent message to deliver about loving one's enemies, sharing one's wealth, moral purity, praying hard and working hard. He spoke it as clearly as anyone ever did, since it was too important to bury in an ocean of meaningless verbiage.

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Regarding the first part of your response; do you acknowledge that the burden of proof lies with the theist? And that the atheist's argument (a well-read atheist) is that all of the arguments for the existence of god fail? You need not be presented with an argument FOR atheism per se, in order that your confidence in your position should waver.

I'm struggling a tad to separate your argument above from the anti-intellectualism of your disclaimer. I concur entirely that there is to be much wisdom gained from the old world. Sophocles' 'Antigone' and Euripides' 'Medea' are both great examples of wise writings (in this instance expressed through classical tragedy). Other great playwrights equally have provided us with great wisdom, France's Moliere (the critique of religious piety 'Tartuffe' for example), or Shakespeare himself. Jesus' moral teachings in the bible (at least those which are uncontroversial and which modern Christians selectively choose to preach) do indeed contain wisdom; having said this, biblical wisdom (if I understand your definition of the word correctly) pales in comparison to the ethical teachings preceding it throughout more literate societies in ancient Greece, Rome, China and India. In addition, us making use of said wisdom in our own lives does not require a leap of faith into superstition, in the same way that Socrates' teachings do not require Socrates to have existed separately from the manner in which Plato portrays (based on how much the bible has been changed over the centuries, how long after the events contained therein that it was written and how politicised/mistranslated the book became, this is probably a fairly apt analogy). Existentialism, an idea I refer to frequently (as I've said, often in the form of Camus' absurdism), is not a fantastic academic theory; its models of metaphysics are not taught in the contemporary classroom, it provides inadequate analytic solutions to traditional philosophical problems, and some of its more culturally determined facets are empirically false. Having said that, there is great wisdom in existentialism in terms of the questions it presents, the broad observations about the nature of life which its great literary proponents made, and about how we should consider ourselves in light of a hypothesis supported by modern science only coincidentally. Great poets, European, American, Asian, have much wisdom to offer, as do the great composers and improvisors of music (any life lessons which can be conveyed without words are certainly of the 'wise' nature).

Now we 'must' separate the wisdom you speak of, and which I agree with, from factual statements. You are once again cantilevering an idea, that wisdom need not be analytic and highly convoluted, and may be predicated largely upon human emotions, and inferring (please correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm doing my best to make the connection between your views on academia and your religiosity) that the existence of god, a hypothesis pertaining to truth value, may avert being subject to rigorous analytic scrutiny. I don't necessarily agree that there should be a separation of wisdom and fact, but that is the vibe I'm getting from your own arguments. Looking at philosophers of old and taking broad life lessons from their writings is completely different from engaging with said texts on a factual basis (that category is where religious texts sit, 'religion' broadly speaking being humankind's most primitive attempt at philosophy). Take a parallel field of human understanding like medicine - would you visit a doctor if you believed that that doctor had shunned modern medicine due to its complexity in favour of Leonardo da Vinci's own writings on human physiology?

I'm struggling to separate your idea from anti-intellectualism when we are discussing 'hard' facts. What may indeed 'look like gibberish' to you, is well understood by experts in any given field who write on the topic of said gibberish - unfortunately as man's knowledge base increases, the elitism inherent in education will escalate. As I said though in my last response, I think that the way around this mode of thinking may seem counter-intuitive in the first instance; no matter how complex (or unlikely) an idea may seem, no matter how incomprehensible a mathematical extension of our understanding an idea may be (assuming that it is peer-reviewed in a competitive free-market journal setting), it will 'always' be less complex than the idea that said laws of nature were suspended in our favour by a cosmic intelligence.

Just as a footnote: I didn't mean to say that the 'clergymen's' rhetoric was convoluted and corrupt, but that the dedicated apologist/theologian's rhetoric was convoluted and corrupt. Although, don't take this to be a concession on my part regarding clergymen; I find preachments where no 'attempt' is even made to engage with reason, and where preachments are directed at children, trusting families and the frightened elderly to be almost as sickening. I would say 'more' sickening, however as I argued on my blog, the apologists' attempt to engage in logical dialogue is a charade (no real progress was ever made after Aquinas himself in the 13th century) designed to provide validity to the undiscerning lay-person, should they feel the need to convince themselves of at least some-degree of a reasonable foundation for the beliefs around which they have structured their lives.

Footnote 2 (!): My friends who are teachers and practitioners of all manners of engineering (including my brother) would never let me live it down if I let your comment on engineering slide 'past the keeper'! Having studied engineering myself, I can assure you that contemporary engineering is infinitely more complex (hyperbole) than anything going on over in the humanities faculty. Indeed those who have spent their entire careers teaching and writing theses on engineering principles may take issue with the idea that the discipline is entirely geared towards industry (your 'bridges and planes'). Like economics and law, there are those who are employed professionally and those who remain intellectuals in the enlightenment sense of the word (as are philosophers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, etc.). To suggest that engineers (I realise that this was just an example) do not deal with the most complex areas of physics imaginable, in order than it not distract them from carrying out potential public-private-partnerships with the state government for profit, is indeed an endorsement of anti-intellectualism.