Trains Passiing in the Night

In response to the Huffington Post article "Bill O'Reilly Doubles Down On God Controlling The Tides: 'How Did The Moon Get There?'", I felt it my duty to point out the obvious:

In fact, Mr. O'Reilly and his critics are two trains passing in the night. Though he's not doing so in a very sophistica­ted manner, Mr. O'Reilly is asking philosophi­cal questions: Why is there something instead of nothing? What are we to make of the order to the natural world, in general, and of the conditions that make life on earth possible, in specific? Certainly, these questions are not scientific in nature and, thus, do not provide the same kind of verifiable conclusion­s that empirical research offers us, but that does not make them illegitima­te questions. Moreover, simply spouting off scientific explanatio­ns of natural processes in no way gets us closer to answering the kinds of questions that Mr. O'Reilly poses. If a God does exist, then scientific explanatio­ns only get at how God has ordered the world, not why God has ordered the world in such a way, and definitely not at the question of whether or not there is a God in the first place.

The mistake that Richard Dawkins, Stephen Harris, and others make is in thinking that because they are able to offer explanatio­ns of the evolutiona­ry process and other workings of the natural order, they can therefore dismiss the existence of God. This deduction, however, is a categorica­l mistake. In short, religious fundamenta­lists and dogmatic materialis­ts represent two sides of the same coin, in that both mistakenly assume that science and faith have to be in conflict. It's usually easier to defeat religious fundamentalists in arguments, because the wrongheadedness of their basic presuppositions tend to stand out more. The central mistake in reasoning that dogmatic materialists make, and one just as wrongheaded, has to do with their assumption that the only trustworthy knowledge available to us is that which can be empirically verified--an assumption which those who have taken even an elementary course in logic will immediately recognize as a self-defeating philosophical statement.