Listening to Interesting People

I was listening to a podcast recently of an interview with an author named David Berlinski. He writes about math, and has a great deal of experience in the field, but he is clearly a philosopher. Anyway, the interviews were meaty and interesting and as I listened to them (each segment was published one day at a time) I sometimes had to start it over to hear it again for more comprehension. It was fascinating.

But here is a quote from it that I loved and wanted to share because it was insightful. The discussion was about a statement from another gentleman that both the interviewer and the author knew. It was something like "Well, I say to those who ask what I'll say to God when I meet Him upon my death, [on the reason for the speaker's atheism here on earth] You just didn't leave enough evidence of your existence for intelligent people to know you..."  The author laughed at the quote and replied to the interviewer that he'd heard their mutual acquaintance say that often, but here was the author's response to this witty remark:

"There a point of presumption in that particular argument --that Bertrand Russel also used--[the argument about not enough evidence]. The point of presumption is that human beings, constructed as humans are constructed, could so interact with God as to be persuaded by the countenance of Diety when they were left unpersuaded by the evidence of His handiwork. That's a remarkable presumption. Much more reasonable to me is that those who cannot see the handiwork could not see the countenance."

Awesome, huh?