Mira Bar-Hillel London SW19
From John Bunting
Sir: Why do atheists always define themselves in terms of what they don’t believe? Just for once, it would be nice to hear one of them say, for example, ‘I believe that the universe results from the operation of unconscious matter which came into existence spontaneously from nothing, and happened by chance to have properties that allowed it to evolve to the present complex state.’ Nothing wrong with that as a statement of belief, but there’s no more evidence for it than there is for believing that the primal matter was consciously created. Given that no conclusive proof either way is possible, I share the view of Erwin Schrödinger, who was well ahead of today’s ‘scientific atheists’ in his thinking on religion, and asked, with a respectful nod to Berkeley, what it could possibly mean for a universe to exist for millions of years before any conscious mind became aware of it.
John Bunting Godalming, Surrey
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