Reply to a Muslim (2)

I seem to be making progress with this lady. Again I won’t post her e-mail but you can gather what her comments and questions were from my reply:

Thanks for this.

I look at the Wikipedia a lot. “Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals’ daily lives and the treatment of mental illness.”

Personally I think psychology tends to comprise of statements of either the obvious or the false, and is often practiced by people who are trying to work out their own problems. I’m quite physicalist about it all, though emergent properties such as “qualia” are certainly interesting.

I think you feel anger towards the god thing because this particular metaphysical question is tightly linked to people’s feelings of security – that’s why they are willing to believe things without any evidence. But we can be stronger than that. We don’t need all the answers to live happy lives – all we need is reason and humanism.

Hope you have a nice day.

Gavin