In a October 15, 2007 article in Salon, Pinker was asked whether he was an atheist and replied yes.
“The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, ‘Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.’ For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.” (p. 560 The Meaning of Life)
-Steven Pinker (Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author)
(via on-reflection)
