Atheism Central for Secondary Schools

Knowledge is based on the interaction between the senses and experience. Together, sense and experience give a picture of the world about us. It is necessarily interactive in nature. Children born with a rare condition that means they have no sensitivity to pain have to be prevented from gnawing their fingers off. This shows the importance of the senses in human development. Those who suffer from leprosy have a similar condition and the damage done to their fingers and limbs is the result of their inability to experience pain. Burns and cuts go unnoticed or response times are too slow to prevent serious injury. An experiment on kittens (Scientific American 1967) showed that when they were unable to choose what to look at the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting visual information failed to develop.

We can be sure that the senses are reliable (with some limitations) because they have been tested by evolution and our own life experience. They gave our ancestors sufficiently reliable information about the world to be able to survive - and they have done the same for us - so far!

We can know many things indirectly from others - although many of the things passed to us by others are incorrect. We can have greatest confidence in knowledge which is passed on to us after a process of verification, review and criticism. We must always be ready, however, to accept that our perception or understanding may be wrong.

Reasoning can then compliment senses and experience to discover things which could not otherwise be perceived. For example, infrared detectors can be used to modify our senses and amplify our experience of the world around us. On a larger scale radio telescopes do the same. We can build large scale theories of the way the world works and test it against what we observe using scientific method. One of the cornerstones of scientific method is that if something cannot be verified it cannot be accepted as true.

Religions make a series of unverifiable claims about the universe based on the notion of divine revelation. We know just how difficult it is to prove anything scientifically. We know how the scientific world is open to error because scientific claims are always open for criticism. It is the process of criticism which is part of scientific method that enables science to arrive at a reasonable answer. In fact, it is because of our confidence in the scientific method that we are willing to submit ourselves to the surgeon's knife. We know that there is a multiplicity of religious faiths which view the world differently. None of these faiths can be proven yet all refute each other's claims. None of them accept criticism or modification. To believe in any one of them is as foolish as to allow a priest to perform open-heart surgery.