A REFLECTION ON GOD AND CERTAINTY by Marley Blancpain Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchens. Four names that evoke anger in the devout and dread in religious leaders tasked with defending the beliefs to which billions around the world adhere. Dubbed the four horsemen of New Atheism, these men have helped solidify and popularise a new brand of scientific atheism that many consider to be the final shudder of religiosity in the West. Armed with eloquence and the mass-dissemination facilitated by modern media, they have coordinated a campaign of interviews, videos podcasts, debates, publications and lectures proclaiming with evangelical certitude the proposition that God does not exist. For many, this is a highly rational and realistic approach. After all, the world is full of horrors. Millions suffer every day and the physical sciences continue to prove fruitful in providing more convincing explanations for phenomena long confined to religious accounts. A key contributor to the success of the new atheists has been their subscription to materialist prin-
ciples. As a philosophy, Materialism holds that the universe comprises of nothing but matter and its processes and interactions. It is true that scientific inquiry gives no indication that the universe and consciousness consist of anything but ordinary matter and its more enigmatic forms (take dark matter or space-time). Neuroscience has shown us that the human capacity for love does not require a divinely imbued soul, but only the electro-chemical transmissions which promote reciprocal behaviour between mates and kin. Evolutionary biology firmly demonstrates that humankind was not created on the sixth day, but is the resultant product of approximately 3.9 billion years of evolution; a process that requires not divine providence, but merely natural selection, genetic variation, and a heathy dose of time. Materialism and the physical sciences are fundamentally complementary to Atheism by providing an overarching framework that explains how the world works without diverting to any form of Theism. Indeed Dawkins, a seminal evolutionary biologist, recalls his understand-
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