 Alright, so to conclude, we'll look at a couple of final challenges in the domain of science and religion. In the first, I'll call it a theoretical challenge. And one way to illustrate this challenge is to look at a quote from Richard Dawkins. So here's what Dawkins writes, the know-nothings, or fundamentalists, are, he says, honest. They're true to history. They recognize that until recently, one of religion's main functions was scientific, the explanation of existence, of the universe, or of life. Historically, most religions, says Dawkins, have had or even been a cosmology and a biology. I suspect that today, if you ask people to justify their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They're wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it. So says Dawkins. So what we have in this passage from Dawkins is a challenge that you hear articulated by many people in many different ways. And we can think of this challenge in terms of a four premise argument that goes as follows. Premise one, the only potentially good reason anyone ever had for believing in supernatural entities was the existence of some phenomena that could not be explained otherwise. Second premise, all phenomena that we formerly thought were explained by the activity of supernatural entities have now been explained in purely naturalistic terms. Third premise, so there are no longer any good reasons for believing in the existence of supernatural entities. So the conclusion is we should reject belief in those supernatural entities. So what should we think about this argument? Well, there are actually good reasons to challenge the first and the second premise of this argument. So the first is, is it true that the only potentially good reason anyone ever had for believing in supernatural entities was the existence of phenomena that couldn't be explained otherwise? And the answer is probably not. In fact, if you interview religious believers and ask them why they believe what they do, very few of them actually give you a scientific reason. Very few of them point to the existence of the cosmos requiring some sort of explanation or the existence of life requiring some explanation. In fact, most of them will point to some sort of experiential evidence. Now you might wonder whether or not that really undermines premise one because you might think it's never the case that experiential evidence is good reason for believing, for holding some religious belief. But that itself is contentious. So those who study the question of religious experience have argued that, in fact, it's very difficult to show disanalogies between religious experience and sense experience that give us good reason to favor the second but not the first. So if we have a sense experience of something, a cup being on the table, for example, our seeing that cup gives us good reason to hold the belief. There's a cup on the table. Now imagine someone who has a purported religious experience. Perhaps they have a near-death experience in which they come to see the existence of what appears to be an all-loving, warm, welcoming light that they understand as some sort of a personal being. Should they take that experience seriously? That is, are they entitled to hold that what seems to them to be the case is in fact the case? And if you answer no, it's not. It's an answer that's very hard to justify because it looks like that sort of experience should be given the same sort of presumption of innocence or the presumption of truth until shown false that our sense experience has. Now there are certain challenges that have been raised to this line of reasoning. For example, some people will say, the reason I'm entitled to believe that the cup is on the table is because I can confirm it by a different sense, by reaching out and touching it with my hand. But even if we weren't able to reach out and touch it with our hand, if there was something that blocked us from having a second kind of experiential access to that reality, that probably wouldn't undermine our belief that the cup is on the table. If it's too far away for me to touch it or for some other reason I can't get access to it, it still looks like I would have good reason to hold that belief. So likewise, some religious believers have said it could be the case that we have only a single modality that provides us with access to religious reality and we should hold, again, that those beliefs on the basis of those sorts of experiences are innocent or presumed true until shown otherwise. So if that's right, that's a good reason to reject premise one. What about premise two? Is it true that all phenomena we formerly thought were explained by supernatural agents have now been explained by science? And the answer to that question is probably not. As I mentioned earlier, we really don't have a naturalistic account of the origins of life. That doesn't prove that supernatural origins are the right way to explain it. But that's not relevant here. What's relevant here is that premise two claims that all of these phenomena have been explained. And it looks like that's not true. But notice, even if it were the case that some of these natural phenomena that formerly were explained by appeals to divine action have been explained scientifically, that alone isn't a good reason to give up on religious belief, because it might be the case that rather than holding religious belief as an explanation for the origins of the universe or the origins of life or the apparent existence of fine-tuning in the cosmos, even if those things are explained naturalistically, one might adopt a religious hypothesis or a religious understanding of the world because it provides a global explanation for a variety of different types of belief. So for example, perhaps the reason I hold to a religious belief, I hold to the claim, for example, that God exists and is the creator of all there is, is because I think it provides an overarching explanation for things like that there are objective moral truths, if you think there are objective moral truths, that it provides, that it's more likely to be true that there's a divine being in a world where there are immaterial souls, if you think that, in fact, there's good reason to hold that there are immaterial souls, or that theism is more likely in a world where we survive our bodily death, if you have reason to think that we do, in fact, survive our bodily death. So if we take a variety of different claims and ask, is there some overarching theoretical explanation that's more likely to be true if this suite of claims is correct, that might also provide us with some reason for holding to the religious hypothesis in contrast to the argument here.