Sir – Dane Clouston (Letters, June 27) decries dogmatism in the religious, but do I not sense a hint of it in his unsubstantiated declarations that God is “imaginary” and human spirits are “mortal”?
His spiritual experience seems to be based on what his senses perceive of the vastness of the universe, but all that our senses tell us about is effects.
To find causes we need to employ philosophical or scientific methods, but even then, it is only their effects that we can see. And yet no scientist would admit that a phenomenon he could see did not have some kind of invisible cause, which he would like to find out about.
Why not then ask what about the cause of the universe itself? Surely, like everything else, it should have one. It is no use to answer with something like ‘the Big Bang’, for what went bang, and what was its cause? Well then, a creator seems to be a possibility.
Mr Clouston speaks of a supposed “imaginary powerful creator friend”. Is any idea imaginary if not proven? Were Newton’s theories of gravity imaginary when they were just ideas in his head?
If existing, a creator of a universe is bound to be powerful, and for this reason it seems sensible to befriend such a being.
Why assume that the creator, with such mighty powers, would not be interested in every tiny aspect of his creation, as if he were a businessman with too many items in his in-tray?
We are here in the realm of infinities, and cannot conceive such matters in worldly terms. Ultimately, atheism, too, is a belief, which cannot be proved. Ken Weavers, Headington
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