Quit Your Whying

I�ve been listening to comedian Pete Holmes� podcast You Made It Weird recently. A point of interest relevant to this blog is that Pete ends each episode with an exploration of his guest�s religious or atheistic beliefs. Most often his guest is a fellow comedian, a trade that fosters atheism almost as readily as scientific fields. Speaking of which, he�s had on scientists like Brian Green and Bill Nye as well as less scientifically literate types such as Deepak Chopra (that was a hard episode for me to get through even though it was about half the usual two hour length.) Pete himself is a lapsed fundamental Christian who still holds various spiritual beliefs while being sympathetic to the secular. I tell you all this to both encourage you to check out his show and to introduce a concept Pete often brings up--that science answers the �what�s and �how�s of the universe but offers little in terms of �why.�

The big �why�s were the last related questions I found of value as I left theism--most notably �why is there something rather than nothing?� Atheists don�t have a definitive answer to this and perhaps never will. Theists can answer it, but only with their go-to guess. They essentially answer �because God.� They then immediately stop asking questions, considering �because God� becomes more absurd when the question is �why is there God rather than no God?�

The only thing more frustrating than an empirical God of the Gaps argument is a philosophical God of the Gaps argument, which is what we have here. Pete is filling a gap with an assumption, as he has been conditioned to by his upbringing. While we should try to discover answers to every �why,� the problem with the question is that it eventually creates an unknown in any body of knowledge. When a �why� question is answered, a new �why� question applies. The result? A gap that keeps on giving. The better question may be this: with what degree of reductionism are you comfortable?

To illustrate this, here is another favorite comedian of mine, Louis CK, talking about kids.

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