From LINDA BAILEY
Mark Ridley bases his article ‘Infected with science’ (25 December)
on the premise that religious belief is irrational.
He also claims that faith in God can increase peoples’ faith in their
own value, and hence give them the courage to continue when they might otherwise
have given up. If this is the case, then religious belief will on average
be advantageous to the person who holds it.
If so, then the rational course for any reasonably self-interested person
would be to attempt to acquire religious faith, not to reject it. So the
kind of determined atheism shown by Mark Ridley, Richard Dawkins and others,
must therefore be either irrational or evidence for a lack of self-interest
on their part – perhaps sufficient to call the entire theory of evolution
into doubt.
Linda Bailey Dromara, County Down, Northern Ireland
Advertisement
