Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

Religious people try to impose their beliefs on others, but, it was said, when secular people make their case, they just have facts, and people who disagree are closing their eyes to those facts.

The second main reason that the world will become more religious is that religious people have significantly more children, whereas the more irreligious and secular a population, the less often marriage happens and the smaller the families.

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”

all people have innumerable beliefs about reality and relevance that come to us through bodily experience, authorities we trust, and communities we are part of.

If every individual seeks his or her own meaning, we will have fewer shared values and meanings, which will erode social solidarity and public institutions.

Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: “You need to stop doing that!”

There is no “view from nowhere.”

And are you not, then, actually giving a universal answer to the Meaning question, namely, that the meaning of life is to have the freedom to determine your own meaning? Are you not, then, doing the very thing you say should not be done?

It is assumed, not proven, that a God beyond our reason could not exist—and therefore we conclude that he doesn’t exist.