To the editor:

“Honest, respectable belief starts with evidence and moves gradually to conviction, regardless of preference and ‘feeling.’ Irrationality begins with emotional intuition, cherry-picking evidence to suit.” (“Pitts’ hypocrisy,” Public Forum, March 4).

“Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what ‘truthfulness’ is.” (Nietzsche)

“The existentialist … thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values … disappears along with Him.” (Sartre)

“In some remote corner of the sprawling universe … there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, mendacious minute in ‘world history,’ but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die. — One could invent a fable like this and still not have illustrated sufficiently how miserable, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature.” (Nietzsche)

Apart from God there is no knowledge, hope, meaning, and morality. We exist, period. If you don’t believe in God, then be honest with where that leaves you. The atheist has no way to obtain knowledge and so all s/he claims to know is cherry-picking of unknowable evidence.

But if there is a God then it is quite rational to have knowledge and morality. Mr. Burkhead declared that God exists and gives His standards. Regardless of how others have cherry-picked their beliefs by their own preferences, God exists and judges. People can suppress that knowledge, but the only honest, respectable belief in this world is belief in God.