I liked my own reply on this Substack post of his so much I decided to use it as my own Substack post!
Those “New Atheists”—they were prime examples of very smart dolts doing the same sort of navel-gazing that philosophers, those tiresome people, have been doing since we learned to make scratchy thingies with which to preserve our deathless words for the ages. On this plane of existence—and who knows how many others there might be?—there are no answers to the ultimate questions.
Where did the building blocks of the universe come from? How can you get something out of nothing? Where does space end? How can anything go on for infinity? Who made God? How can any entity come from nowhere? How is it possible to always have existed? Who invented natural law? Why do “people of faith” keep making God in their own images? Why do they shrink God to fit?
And everyone gets so cute about secularism. There’s no such thing. Politics is religion. Atheism is a dogma. We poor things, yet another species designed to live in packs and hardwired to sort ourselves into hierarchies and always searching for the alpha to lead us to salvation of one sort or another and getting led over cliffs more often than not—why are we hardwired that way?
Me, I don’t need to know. I always had my own certainty that the Big Something exists—or maybe, as my FFFFG said scornfully, I was just brainwashed too early to remember the process.
Anyway have fun. You ain’t gonna get nowhere with it, but at least we can’t get lost going on circular journeys. We end up where we started.
That was a good reply. I tend to lean toward Michael's attitude on this, however. Probably because I wasn't programmed with religion from an early age. I've always thought your lifelong beliefs were pretty much set by the age of three.