On Belief: Not entirely unrelated (okay, it's entirely unrelated; but it's my post, so shut up!), I find myself very sympathetic to Charles Murray, interviewed here, on the matter of faith:

Murray: With the Enlightenment, we started a whole series of major acquisitions of new knowledge about how the world works. These were important and real and had great amounts of truth to them. They also played hell with the old verities. I'm thinking of the rule of reason as against traditional religion. I'm thinking Darwinism. I?m thinking of Freud. And Einstein.

In all sorts of ways, you had body blows to the ways of looking at the world that gave concepts such as truth, beauty, and the good their meaning. Take the good as the obvious example. If we are bundles of chemicals and religion is irrelevant and we have no souls, etc., etc., etc. -- I can go through the whole litany -- the good is sort of stripped of texture and richness.

reason: But the Enlightenment view is essentially correct, right? We are chemicals....

Murray: Here's the central dilemma. If the new wisdom is correct, then all of the anomie and the alienation and the nihilism and the rest of it make a lot of sense. As I note in the book, if that's all true, then one novelist suggests that all we can do is maintain a considered boredom in the face of the abyss. There have been a wide variety of efforts in the 20th century to come up with a rationale for positive action, but I actually think that the only way to maintain one's energy and sense of purpose is by being deliberately forgetful. That's why Camus was so miserable. He couldn't be forgetful enough.

I'm an agnostic, but I should add that I think the most foolish of all religious beliefs is confident atheism.

reason: So you're laying down a 21st-century variation of Pascal's wager? You don't really believe the transcendental goods are ordained by God, but we have to act as if they're true if we want to live purposeful lives?

Murray: You're right. I'm not a believer, but I am also not nearly as confident as intellectuals were 50 or 60 years ago that I do know the truth. I am much less willing to say, boy, was Johann Sebastian Bach deluded [because he believed in God].