Of course, but my new book The Humanist has a renegade Jesuit, Tom Leahy, who wants to rescue both Jesuitism and Humanism as one morphed philosophy and movement. Each must get naked before the other, then profit from each other’s best characteristics. I do believe in respecting and rescuing human traditions.

I’d like to belong to a Humanist movement overseen by such as the Jesuits (their methodology) who take no prisoners (as the atheists don’t now) and are put into place by inclusive Humanists to manage our personal genomes and destiny.

By Jesus, when I went to church Sunday morning I’d know I had some chips in the pot and two great hole cards… so much better than drinking a bottle of whiskey, reading the bible and cleaning my guns..

Naturalism is a reductio ad absurdum approach that evaporates for lack of further or sufficient iterations. It presumes that we have at least found the pathway, even if we don’t know the destination, and while that may turn out to be true, it’s gratuitous for now and should not be voiced to preclude other possible routes.

One approach I take with naturalism is to ask this question: Define Life. If there is hesitation in the reply, it speaks to how little we understand the most ubiquitous phenomenon on our planet, much less the remainder.

Another notion I retain for this question of human destiny, knowledge-wise or otherwise, is that the Universe is physically beyond us right now. Distances are so great, that we must for the next century at least regard it as being little more than wallpaper, as pretty as it might be.

The consequence of this fact is that we have an interval between now and the advent of the Singularity – a century at most – to consolidate ourselves as a species, to become practicing Humanists, to use this last available interval to stabilize our planet toward sustainability. I advocate the colonization of Venus as a suitable sidepot, as a catalyst for youth.

That’s my handle on things and I’m sticking to it. Can I interest you in a little world federalism in the near-future…?

Attempting to define all of reality purely in naturalistic terms is to live in denial. The scientific community must eventually face the reality that naturalism has definite limits, beyond which there will always be ongoing mysteries.

The crisis of methodological naturalism is that it will always be based on finite human understanding, knowledge and insights. And is therefore forever limited. For this reason everything in science is regarded as tentative, and never the final word. And because science can never be the final word it will never be in a position to explain the universe in ultimate terms.

The reality is that all of science ultimately rests on phenomena that have no naturalistic answer, and probably never will have. Scientists don’t have the foggiest notion were the universe came from, nor the origin of the universes mathematical regularity, nor the cosmological constants, nor the laws of nature, nor even the origin of life. And no scientist has even the remotest notion of what energy or matter really is in the ultimate sense.

All that science has attained is still only a miniscule fragment of the whole truth. As acknowledged by David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate, “each answered question raises twenty unanswered questions.” Physicist Ronald Cole-Turner concurs, ‘’On the grand scale, the cosmos is hidden, almost mysterious. On the tiniest scale, the matter that makes up the cosmos is counter-intuitive. Cosmology is enigmatic while quantum physics is…well, pretty weird. “Quantum weirdness,” in fact, is now the accepted term. It refers not to inadequacies in quantum theory but to the problems we face in making sense of it at the level of everyday experiences.”

We can add to this the loopy logic associated with the naturalistic definition of science. For while natural law is declared to be the gatekeeper as to what is science, and what is not, the origin of the gatekeeper itself, natural law, has absolutely no naturalistic answer, and may never have. This is rather like appointing an unidentified alien to guard planet earth from all unidentified aliens, particularly God.

Methodological naturalism faces another credibility crisis, particularly in regard to the scientific communities mindless rejection of intelligent design. All of science operates on the reality that we can only apply logic, reason and intelligence in science because we, of necessity, live in a universe the clearly manifests intelligence, regularity and predictability. How can anyone do science on any other basis? And why would any scientist argue against this self-evident reality. If you are a scientist that finds it difficult to see any “intelligence” or “real design” in the world that surrounds you, then what sort of universe do you live in, and what is the basis of your scientific investigations?

The bottom line is that we live in a dependent dying universe running down towards heat death and maximum entropy, where usable energy, information and order will be finally dissipated, with nothing left to wind the universe up again. All this means that our “dependent” dying universe demands a “non-dependent” self-existing cause. The alternative to this is an infinite regression of dependent causes where nothing ever has the capability to bring itself into existence, in which case nothing would exist, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

God is both a philosophical and scientific necessity, and needs to be an option considered in science education in terms of the broader phenomena on which all of science is founded. The religion of philosophical naturalism and atheism currently being imposed on science education is only half the story, and ultimately delusional.

I’m sure that every Humanist believes every word of what you are saying, Steve. The main point of inclusive Humanism is – why stop there? Should we be working for world federalism too, to unify our governance under one responsible umbrella, outside the curse of corruption? The World Federalists are really small and I know I’m going to join and work with them on what I think is THE central issue for Homo sapiens.

Second, our over-association with atheism is undoubtedly costing us members. One example is the Peace movement, almost all of whose members would, I expect, be Humanists. Some atheists would say that they would first like to exclude the Christian, Jewish, Islamic etc. peace workers because to be a Humanist, you must be a-theistic.

What do you think – is it possible that we are gaining 5,000 juvenile atheists and losing 50,000 peace activists, in that one area alone?

If you can register on the Forum and start a thread on this, it would help get us up and going on it, and make others’ comments directly available to you, and yours to them.

Dwight

Until the religious accept non-belivers as viable , respectable , and valued parners in our society our attempts to work together will always be defeated by the very nature of theistic philosophies.