Atheists and believers alike try to reduce religion to a sort of argumentative and speculative science, as if God ought to be another fact that we can record and document. I find it ironic that so many atheists, who claim they just have no belief whatsoever, believe so strongly that God, if there is a God, must be the sort of being the sciences could describe, making differences in the world that we can test and verify. Most internet atheists at least, insist that God must be a cause whose effects we can discover by experiment and observation. Many of the most devout atheists who hold this completely faith-based belief about God, are actively proselytizing their faith on the internet, which strikes me as a strange activity for a group that insists, they simply have no beliefs about God. I will add that the result of this belief, perhaps even the motivation for it, is to declare themselves more logical, intelligent, and scientific than the believers they see as holding competing beliefs.
The simple and undeniable fact is the Theistic conclusion in not logically coercive, the human experience of reality is theistically ambiguous, which is to say that the human experience can be interpreted religiously or naturalistically with equal rational justification. That is why it has always been referred to as a matter of faith, but for those who choose it, it does provide a rationally satisfying way of making sense of the broadest possible band of human experience, of uniting in a single account, the rich and many layered encounter that we have with a reality that is experienced as full of value, meaning, and purpose.
The basis of faith is not inferential reason, it is personal encounter with a personal, moral, liberating, and transcendent power and presence. And because our state of conscious awareness is a feature that trumps all others in the matter of epistemic authority, for the believer, there is no validity to arguments that try to deny this encounter.
If true intelligence involves the ability to view and understanding widely different things from multiple different perspectives, an aptitude for grasping a wide range of truths, relationships, and meanings, and the capacity for abstract and symbolic thought, then it follows logically that the contention that one can reduce reality to only one of its modes, to know it in only one of its forms, is an unintelligent claim.
Science does not contend that reality can be reduced to a single ontological level, on the contrary, science asserts that reality is in fact, multileveled, it asserts that the four dimensions of existence that we call reality, are contingent and relative to a greater reality of more dimensions, there is a transcendent reality of which we cannot have certain knowledge, and which can only be expressed metaphorically. Consequently, the belief that the believer is in some way being “unscientific” is unfounded.
