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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Dungeon Master God

By John Pieret

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David Klinghoffer has a strange defense of his anti-scientism.

It seems that religion fulfills for adults the role that Dungeons & Dragons fulfills for 8 year olds, like his son: it provides "enchantment."

Science and reason, you see, suffers from "the dullness, the flatness, the aridity of the evolutionary picture of how the world works," while religion caters to "our intuitive sense that something else, something more, lies behind and somehow all around the façade of ordinary material reality."

He derides Richard Dawkins for using such words as "beautiful," "exciting" and "startling" to describe scientific discovery but that is nothing but question begging. Because Klinghoffer finds the facts of the material world as "flat as a lead pancake" does not mean everyone has to. There is every bit as much "enchantment" in exercising one's mind and discovering how the material world works as there is in pretending to be an elf or a wizard ... or in expecting a larger version of one to show up in the real world.

In any event, it is not an all or nothing choice, as Ken Miller and many other scientists know.

Rather amazingly, Klinghoffer admits that the same feeling of "enchantment" that drew him to D&D also drew him to Judaism and says:

For me, the fantastic dimension of Judaism points to another side of reality that our dry, desiccated secular age hates and denies. It reminds me that this pancake-flat world that Richard Dawkins prefers to imagine is not all there is. At least it's not all there may be. That gives me hope, and that is why I love it.

In short, he hopes against hope that science is wrong so he can go on playing his game of Dungeons & Dragons, Religion Edition, for ever and ever.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on December 03, 2009 (boomark / email).