Philippine Atheists

I have two books to recommend to make good reading during the year-end break. The first book, What Evolution Is by one of the greatest evolutionary biologist of our time, Ernst Mayr, is an exceptional book in terms of conciseness and clarity. Pages after pages facts are brought upfront without much fluffing around, evolution concepts and ideas are explained with great clarity and parsimony, occassionally contrasting them with what Creationism could offer. I have yet to finish the book myself having read only halfway through but I feel happy that I already got my money’s worth just the same. This is one book I will be keeping in my library to serve as a handy reference whenever I need to check my facts or give me a hint on how to proceed when questions about evolutionary theory crops up for clarification, or if I simply have to drill down to the details of the updated theory. The book disagrees with Richard Dawkins‘ gene-centric approach to evolution.

The other book is Free To Choose by Nobel Prize in Economics winner Milton Friedman. It’s co-written by his wife, Rose Friedman. This book picks in the latter half of the 20th century where other libertarians left off earlier. Written in the same spirit as On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, this book will not fail to provoke your thoughts, on the ideal relationship of the individual and the state, with emphasis on personal freedom and conscience. The same spirit that I suppose was the intention by the framers of the Philippine constitution, and which remains an ideal rather than a reality.

Enjoy reading!

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What is god?

God is a being. God is a concept. God is a metaphor. God is nature. God is the sum total of our collective ignorance.

In short, god means different things to different people. Oftentimes, God means different things to different people of the same faith. So what really is god? Can we arrive at a universal definition of god? Much of the roots of misunderstanding in a god debate is that god is not well-defined and atheists usually suspect that because god exist only in the mind of its believers. For any dialog to continue, there must be a common ground where points of view can continue coming back to - a concept that should work as the pivot of the discussion. Specially in a god debate, god should not be left undefined or unbounded. Otherwise, the debate will most likely just go limbo. So what are some definitions of god? Recently, I came across a possibly new definition of god. Richard Dawkins says god is a scientific hypothesis. By this he means that the god hypothesis is in the realm of scientific inquiry and hence can be empirically verified or falsified. He is referring narrowly to a certain flavor of the god of the Abrahamic religions. I call this scientifically verifiable-falsifiable god the Dawkinsian god. This god is the god that is micro-managing the lives of some believers as the born again Christian would say “surrendering their lives to Jesus.” The Dawkinsian god is a god who is meddling with the natural world by influencing its events and outcomes by, presumably, its actions. Another attribute of this Dawkinsian god is that it’s hypothesized by the Creationists and Intelligent Design camps as The Creator, a designation shared by the Deistic god. According to orthodox Dawkinsian thinking, since god is the intelligent designer, and since ID hypothesizes that the irreducible complexity is the proof that there is an intelligent designer, i.e., god, this can be falsified by showing that the irreducible complexity is nothing but a failure of venturing further to really honestly find out what other natural cause or mechanism produced the apparent complexity.

What is your definition of god?

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