It Keeps Me Seeking: The Invitation from Science, Philosophy and Religion, by Andrew Briggs, Hans Halvorson and Andrew Steane

The nub of Professor Simon Oliver’s review of “It Keeps Me Seeking” (P. 42, January 3rd), is perhaps the “Conflict Thesis ”: that trained scientists can reach opposing conclusions about the existence of God. One possible resolution could be that the personal sense-making and world-view of believers is based ultimately within some fundamental interior mental states, probably from early in life. Coincidentally, this is well-illustrated just now by the reported self-dedication, at age five (sic!), of the recently deceased Trappist monk, Thomas Keating (obit. in The Economist, Dec 22nd). Non-believers reaching an atheistic perspective, I suggest, develop their world-views by structuring their sense of an exterior world in its own terms, without giving priority to the self. So the former understand the world from the perspective of interior experience, while the latter take the converse approach and would likely aim to explain their own interior experience in terms of their sense of an exterior world.