David Auerbach reviews the autobiography of science writer Martin Gardner:
Gardner is at his most emotional describing what seem[s] to have been a classically happy marriage — he recalls sitting on the subway with his wife and newborn as one of the happiest moments of his life, a moment of peace and accomplishment, not ambition or prestige — and describing a very traditional sense of religious awe. While Gardner had no patience for supposed evidence of anything supernatural, he remained a firmly nondenominational monotheist for most of his life. He baldly admits that this is a matter of faith and flies in the face of all available evidence, and that it is a choice he has made for the sake of his own happiness. I suppose you could say he proselytizes a bit, but since he knows that his case is weak, he doesn’t come off as particularly confrontational: “I managed to retain faith in a personal God and a hope for an afterlife.” Gardner writes:
Philosophical theism is based unashamedly on posits of the heart, not the head.
It freely admits that atheists have all the best arguments. There are no proofs of God or of an afterlife. Indeed, all experience suggests there is no God. If God exists, why would he so carefully conceal himself? All experience suggests that when we die, our body rots and nothing in our brain survives. […] It’s a lasting escape from the despair that follows a stabbing realization that you and everyone else are soon to vanish utterly from the universe. It is an effort, perhaps genetic, to relieve the anguish of believing the universe is nothing more than the tale of a blind idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
A weak case seems to make for a more robust faith.
The Dish 