In his article, Will Self unashamedly promotes "belief in belief" - which Daniel Dennett thoroughly dismantles in his brilliant talk which can be seen on Youtube here, in 3 short parts:
"Belief in belief" is, after unpacking the motivations, at its core dishonest and rooted in one's own fears about the collapse of consensus that God is real.
Self goes on to promote the old canard that "we don't understand how electrical wiring works so when you press the light switch you have FAITH that it will work. We defer the understanding to qualified individuals".
Despite the reasons to believe this is not really Faith, as Peter Boghossian has shown in his recent book "A Manual for Creating Atheists", the main problem here is that despite what you think about our lack of understanding of electrics or anything else in the secular world, it far surpasses our knowledge about the metaphysical one.
This is because even the so-called "experts" on belief and theology either can't agree about how to understand God, or don't even claim to themselves. There are no "religious experts" in the same sense that there are experts in electrical engineering. Therefore faith in what these individuals assert involves a much higher order of uncertainty.
Self doesn't actually know that less belief in God would result in more nihilism, but he paints the false dichotomy of belief or nihilism while neglecting to mention any form of intermediate ie. humanism.
A poorly thought out article by Self, trying to disguise itself as rational.
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