When you don’t know what you don’t know

Ron Ronsenbaum for Slate explains that, as an agnostic, he is just as skeptical of the certainties of atheists as of theists. But clearly his impatience is with the fundamentalism of atheists:

Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist's criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself. I just don't accept turning science into a new religion until it can show it has all the answers, which it hasn't, and probably never will.

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing….The "brights" seem like rather dim bulbs when it comes to this question. It's amazing how the New Atheists boastfully stride over this pons asinorum as if it weren't there.

You know about the pons asinorum, right? The so-called "bridge of asses" described by medieval scholars? Initially it referred to Euclid's Fifth Theorem, the one in which geometry really gets difficult and the sheep are separated from the asses among students, and the asses can't get across the bridge at all. Since then the phrase has been applied to any difficult theorem that the asses can't comprehend. And when it comes to the question of why is there something rather than nothing, the "New Atheists" still can't get their asses over the bridge, although many of them are too ignorant to realize that. This sort of ignorance, a condition called "anosognosia," which my friend Errol Morris is exploring in depth on his New York Times blog, means you don't know what you don't know.

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

The folks who put up this billboard in Austin last Monday should take him up on the challenge:

Rosenbaum writes that he’s been “following with interest” the argument of philosopher (and Christian) Alvin Plantinga.