Too ignorant for atheism

I read Scott Adams' blog. He's the author of Dilbert. If you're just a casual Dilbert fan, you may be surprised at how crass he can be on his blog. But so far I read it anyway, because he's an atheist who writes well otherwise, and I'm interested in atheism.

One of his atheistic ideas is that we are "moist robots," which means we don't have free will. His argument is that since physics is deterministic, our brains must be deterministic and therefore free will is an illusion. And even if we admit some (quantum) randomness in physics, free will is supposed to be ordered, not random.

The question of free will here is a proxy for the question of God's existence. The latter is out of bounds because God is "beyond time and space and the natural world — whatever any of that means." But free will is about us, so it must be explicable in terms of physics, which is deterministic, etc.

And he's basically right. If religion is true, then it has to connect somewhere: there's got to be some point at which the "spiritual" and psycho-physical worlds actually meet.

Scott's an atheist, so he's decided they don't. I'm a Christian, so I really, really want them to. Luckily, just as Scott is too ignorant to vote, I'm too ignorant of science to give up on religion:

• Spiritual experiences are common to all cultures across time and space: that's a lot of evidence. Have scientists adequately addressed that body of evidence? I have no idea.
• My understanding is that we are a ways from directly observing anything on the Planck scale, and that things get really wacky down there. Is an actual connection with something like a "spiritual realm" too wacky? Multiverses seem at least as wacky as God, but again, I have no idea.
  
• The brain seems really complicated. Can we really explain it exhaustively? No idea.

A common atheist line is that "God" is the name religious people give to whatever is just beyond the understanding of science. I think science definitely has God on the run, but our current understanding of the world still leaves room for the possibility of an actual connection between the psycho-physical realm and a purported "spiritual" realm. Or at least I'm ignorant enough to hope so. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.