Monday, March 24, 2008
God Etc
An email from Newtonabbey informs me that I have an enemy who is 'constantly irritated' by my 'dopey musings'. I'm with him on that one. But what struck me about the email is the last sentence - 'But then, as the person who declared that Richard Dawkins is the strangest man you've ever met, your judgment of what does or doesn't make sense is hardly top notch.' I don't understand that at all. Dawkins IS strange. And, even if others don't think he is, what's so terrible about me thinking he is? But the wider point is - why Dawkins? Any breath of criticism of the man and his ideas are now treated by large numbers of people as offensive if not blasphemous. But I don't want to get all ad hominem this Easter, so I'll address the wider issue behind this - God, previously discussed in terms of Anglicanism by Nige. John Gray has dealt far better than I ever could with the intellectual failings of the new wave of militant atheists. I'll just make a simpler point. From about the age of thirteen I knew that God didn't exist in any sense that would satisfy the scientific imagination. I didn't become an atheist as a result, I simply concluded that either he didn't exist in any sense at all or he - or something like him - existed in a way that was inaccessible to our reason. I thought, and still think, that this was a pretty straightforward position that needed no further analysis. It also left me free to take God very seriously indeed, which I do. I defy anybody who doesn't take God seriously to come up with a credible reading of Titian's Assumption, which is another way of saying not to take God seriously is not to be fully alive. I became aware of the rise of militant atheism in the late eighties and concluded at once that it was a)stupid and b)cruel. Worst of all, it was c) wildly superstitious. The superstition was the belief that if everybody stopped believing in God then the world would become a better place. I still find it quite incredible that otherwise intelligent people believe this. When the new wave of God-doesn't-exist-and-good-riddance books came out, I was staggered. Of course, he doesn't exist in any meaningful sense and, since proving he doesn't will either persuade nobody or, if it does, it will achieve nothing, then what on earth is the point of these books, apart from making an awful lot of money? This is my problem with Dawkins and friends - I honestly don't know what they are talking about. I can't argue with them because there is, quite simply, nothing whatsoever to argue about.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Let’s face it, there is no material difference between Saulus and Paulus, i.e. between Dawkins and, say, Billy Graham - for either one is a militant!
ReplyDeleteTo me, science is profoundly religious, it is theology for true believers, the breath of God for logicians.
But why make a crusade out of a plain fact?
Dreamy
I'm going to make an intellectual, witty and original comment here:
ReplyDeleteDawkins is a prat.
And Selena, will you kindly take those legs away from here, exciting Byan's amorous propensities ... and over to my place?
ReplyDeletecatch u later, honey...
ReplyDeleteI don't recognise Dawkins' world - this concrete, absolute Universe 'out there' that's subject to measurement and analysis.
ReplyDeleteI live in my own world and it's cosy, limited, restricted and functions adequately for my needs.
But I'm not a solipsist, we all have them but they converge in some kind of fuzzy dream.
But how can this be concrete? How can there be a vast, unimaginably wide place out there? It doesn't make sense. I don't recognise this place.
That idea seems so parochial.
The Universe is more local than that, a set of dreams.
(& he will say that it can be tested but that is suspect, doesn’t fool me, no matter how many tests, how many times...
& Selena, re. your comments on an earlier post, I bet I could get Dawkins to throw the first punch in a ring debating whether the earth is round or flat! I don't believe either and because I don't have the need for such certainties I could be very needling!)
A revealing post, Bryan. You seem to be re-defining what it is to be alive so that one is not alive unless one takes God seriously. Even Dawkins et al do not have the arrogance to suggest that the people with whom they disagree fail to satisfy their criteria to be living things.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, God here seems to be your own, aesthetic-mytho-poetic re-invention of the supernatural God, considered not only to exist in a literal, meaningful sense by the world's monotheistic religions, but whose existence is believed to be demonstrated by the answering of prayers, the performance of miracles, and by the dispatch of emissaries to the Earth 2,000 years ago.
I think I was trying to say that science does not interest me. I used to be into it (astronomy as a teenager) but gave up when I realised that science was an impossible enquiry. In the world such infinities - infinite enquiries - cease to exist. My old philosophy tutor used to say 'if one leaves the world what's left but inner or outer space?'. 'Between 'shit and 'sky lie th'hills' should be an old Lancashire saying but it isn't. When one is in the world the world opens up, blossoms, flowers and, may I dare say it, God is revealed. When Dawkins was asked what he would say to God on meeting him his answer was ‘Why not enough evidence?'.
ReplyDeleteBehold the world.
But humility is required.
Gordon, you are over-complicating things. I interviewed Dawkins once and pointed out to him that if creationism was not taught in schools then Darwinism would be incomprehensible as a historical phenomenon. He agreed and further agreed that, therefore creationism should be taught. I could have done the hack thing and made a headline out of this but I didn't. I just reported it and nobody noticed. Really the weak form of what I am saying is no more than that so, on this at least, I have Dawkins on my side. Your second par seems to be a misunderstanding. Titian had a god which was related but not identical to the god of Milton which in turn had some similarities to the god of Blake, Eliot, Einstein etc. These gods are intrinsic to the way we understand the world and, specifically, the various forms of the Christian god are intrinsic to the world of the west, which includes science. Christianity may not be generally necessary for science but it was certainly necessary for the emergence of science in our culture. This leads, I think, to a strong version of my argument which is that god is an essential subject of study without which you will lead an imaginatively impoverished life. I think I could even make Dawkins agree with that.
ReplyDeleteOne thing is obvious from this stooshie.
ReplyDeleteThe god vs godbotherers debate gets adrenalin flowing in epic quantities.
Religion makes my brain hurt.
Most of the good people I have known have not been christians and a whole lot of the christians I have known have not been good people.
Religion is no guarantor of goodness.
Atheism is the only religion that is emphatically wrong. While we can say that, with our present state of knowledge, there is unlikely to be a god, in the way that the churches describe him or her, most certainly we cannot say that there is no god, we simply do not know.
Anyone who disputes that is either batty or a NUFC supporter.
Now go away you lot and leave me to count my share of this months Barnett formula divvy out.
PS..who`s this bloke Darwin then ?
Yours faithfully
Malty
Well said. Dawkins and A C Grayling are very weird, and come across as intensely buttoned up vicars. They both sound, look and act like the embodiment of what they're railing against.
ReplyDeleteBryan - as I understand it, your disagreement with Dawkins is over (1) whether it is feasible that religion could ever be somehow removed from the world, and (2) whether the world would be a better place if it could.
ReplyDeleteSo the fact of the existence or otherwise of God is a red herring, and the interesting thing about God is what humans have made of Him, and what that belief has made of humans.
Well, I agree with all that, but at the same time it's also a very comfy position occupied solely by post-Anglican, poetry-reading, art-appreciating, English chin-strokers like you and me.
Dawkins would argue, with some justification, that it doesn't have much to with the sharp end of religion.
Also, Bryan, your position is as much informed and made possible by the history of disbelief and dissent as it is by the history of belief.
ReplyDeleteJust trying to find out from whence the Gospel of St Thumper is being preached this Eastertide... Not Norfolk, certainly, as there's only a truck parked in the 'yard. Happily, St Andy and St Alice supplied succour to the needy.
ReplyDeleteHail (and snow and sleet and rain), St Thumper of Elsewhere
God is a word. What is referred to by the word? One definition could be the origin of existence. Existence does exist, and most would agree it does require some form of cause. Ergo, there is no such thing as an atheist. He simply replaces the first cause with something fitting the state of his personal intelligence, such as a large explosion- a Big Bang. He still believes in God, just a humorously dumbed down version to suit his dumbed down sense of being alive.
ReplyDeleteI agree, there is nothing to argue about.
ReplyDeleteAtheism is the only religion that is emphatically wrong. While we can say that, with our present state of knowledge, there is unlikely to be a god, in the way that the churches describe him or her, most certainly we cannot say that there is no god, we simply do not know.
ReplyDeleteBut as Andrew K pointed out God is a word with a common meaning. The god that the churces describe, Him, is a personal being dispensing salvation or damnation with regard to how one establishes a personal relationship with Him. If you don't buy that, then you don't believe in God, as far as I make it. That's the kind of atheist I am.
Now if you think that the Universe came into being by some impersonal life force, some "elan vital", some "ground of being", well you believe in something, but it isn't God, as the word God is commonly defined. Find some different word for what you believe.
If everyone by default believes in god by the sheer fact of existence, then the word has no meaning. The question of god isn't that there was some first cause to existence (ground of being), but what that first cause is. If you can't place any positive attributes to that cause, then you haven't stated anything. Saying that God is the "ground of being" isn't saying anything. That's not an answer, it's a question. The question is "what is the ground of being?" Is it bigger than a breadbox? Can it fit in a thimble? Does it get angry?
AFAIK Anthony Flew is still an atheist, and for that matter so is Bryan. Words have meanings.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSigh, what a discussion to round off the Easter weekend. I feel much happier, and closer to God, in Whom I don't believe, contemplating this as a truer reflection on the weekend. Fair makes yer glad to be alive.
ReplyDeleteMark, as I so often am, I'm with you. Meanwhile my son, also a Mark, is doing a math project using statistics. His idea: Rate of suicide has gone up concurrently with increased secularism, atheism.
ReplyDeleteMight be true. In the Catholic credo of my childhood, suicide was a sin that sent you to hell.
I believe in something and it has no basis in proof -- it's sheer faith. I know we are part of something far, far larger than ourselves and our puny intellects, feeble senses. Guess I've got the God gene.
"This leads, I think, to a strong version of my argument which is that god is an essential subject of study without which you will lead an imaginatively impoverished life. I think I could even make Dawkins agree with that."
ReplyDeleteGiven that Dawkins has just written a whole book on he subject of god, I am sure it would be a pushover to persuade him that this is an essential subject of study. It's just that the study pretty emphatically leads intellignet people to the conclusion that god doesn't exist. Dawkins does not suggest anywhere (as far as I know) that creationism should not be taught in the sense of teaching people about it, ecplaining what it is idiots mean when they say they believe in creationism, only that it shouldn't be taught as being true. Bryan, I think your bonnet bee about Dawkins leads you to fundamentally misunderstand him.
"I believe in something and it has no basis in proof -- it's sheer faith."
ReplyDeleteThat is fine and only your business unless you expect public policy to be influenced by your superstitions, like, for example, in discussions of the use of human embryos in medical research. Dawkins and others see a threat there that Bryan doesn't seem to recognise or, at least, consider to be very serious. I think Dawkins is right. John Gray, by the way, is just silly on this subject. He cannot go two sentences without contradicting himself or committing an egregious solecism.
John M. So how the hell do you comprehend yourself - outside of your materialist explanation? And how do you comprehend that?! (I'm on my knees here, not in supplication but in comprehension meltdown:) HOW DO YOU DO IT?!
ReplyDelete"John M. So how the hell do you comprehend yourself - outside of your materialist explanation?"
ReplyDeleteI don't understand your question. Why should the invention of a supernatural, super-strong giant help in any self-comprehension? How would that work? What do we need but matter?
What do we need but matter? Good lord, man, without the electricity pinging through that matter in your head, you're just a rock!
ReplyDeleteHope you're descended from George Meredith of The Egoist fame.
"It's just that the study pretty emphatically leads [intelligent] people to the conclusion that god doesn't exist."
ReplyDeleteI wonder what is meant by "intelligent people": I assume you mean something other than the all-too-common usage, namely, "people who agree with me." Otherwise I would have to consider this statement a grossly uncharitable and (therefore) untruthful one.
Oh Viz, you beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteHaving said which, I am convinced that John M was writing with his tongue firmly in his cheek. He couldn't possible have used that old hallmark of 1st Year Sociology undergraduates debating and trying to sound profound - "egregious solecism" - if he wasn't. Could he?
The confabulation of belief in creationism and religious belief is also a sign. Surely he isn't so lazy as to create mere straw dogs for his argument, when minimum research would show that creationism is a dogma subscribed to by a very small minority of Christians.
btw, john, i agree with you about the wingnuts who are freaked out about the use of human embryos for stem cells that would treat certain diseases. but that's just been superseded anyway. scientists have figured out another way to make stem cells without resorting to the embryos. forgot where i read this, but it was quite recent. Scientific American, maybe? I get that one in the mail.
ReplyDelete"What do we need but matter? Good lord, man, without the electricity pinging through that matter in your head, you're just a rock!"
ReplyDeleteThat electricity, Susan, is matter too. Energy, matter, it's all the same stuff in different forms. What it isn't, is 'spirit' or anything silly like that.
"Otherwise I would have to consider this statement a grossly uncharitable and (therefore) untruthful one."
Alternatively, Viz, you could just look at the evidence and see what it tells you. I will define 'intelligent' any way you like.
"The confabulation of belief in creationism and religious belief is also a sign."
No, it isn't, Recusant. I was responding to a specific point that was made by Bryan B against Dawkins. Bryan semed to think that Dawkins had made a significant concession when he agreed that it would be approriate to study creationism in its historical apsect in school. But Dawkins has never suggested that all discussion of religion be banned or suppressed. he just points out that its specific claims are either false or nonsensical and so it shouldn't have the same staus as science.
But Dawkins has never suggested that all discussion of religion be banned or suppressed.
ReplyDeleteBut he has argued, quite firmly, that parents who pass on their faith to their children are guilty of child abuse. Dawkins gets a lot of mileage out of playing the polite, diffident English gentleman. If he were, say, German, his image would be very different.
he just points out that its specific claims are either false or nonsensical and so it shouldn't have the same staus as science.
On the contrary, he thinks religion should be assessed as if it were science and that its claims should be subjected to the same objective tests and standards of proof as science. He's like Duck, demanding the faithful fess up as to whether God is bigger or smaller than a breadbox (schism alert!). His whole argument is based on the demand that the eternal and immaterial be judged by temporal and material standards, believing that will inevitably make them disappear.
"On the contrary, he thinks religion should be assessed as if it were science and that its claims should be subjected to the same objective tests and standards of proof as science. "
ReplyDeleteWhere religion makes claims about the world, he believes thee should be tested the way any other claim should be, yes. And what can be said against that position? Why should claims make in the name of relgion be given a pass while those made in the name or, say, politics, shouldn't? All that stuff about 'the immaterial' is meaningless unless the claims made for the immatraial are expected to impinge on us creatures of matter.
He is right that it is abusive to bring children up to be religious. There are many, many testimonies to the debilitating effcets of being foced into faith through upbringing. Although the abuse is not always especially serious or damaging, often it is. The fact that some adults later embrace the religion of their childhood positively, does not make it any the less abusive to force children into a faith any more than a later ideological commiment to, say nazism, would mitigate against the abuse of rearing a child into nazi ideology.
John, the evidence immediately before me is that a person who does not believe in God apparently sees nothing untoward in suggesting that anyone who answers the question of God's existence in the affirmative, or at least not in the strict negative, must be unintelligent. From this evidence I am inclined to conclude that you are not interested in persuasion; that is, unless you actually consider such battering ram rhetoric persuasive, which I doubt. However, for the time being I will continue to assume that most non-believers are interested in persuasion.
ReplyDelete"Where religion makes claims about the world, he believes thee should be tested the way any other claim should be, yes. And what can be said against that position? Why should claims make in the name of relgion be given a pass while those made in the name or, say, politics, shouldn't?"
I am curious: do you differentiate between religious and scientific claims about reality? If so, in what way(s)?
Ah, John, we've been awaiting the obligatory Nazi analogy. Amazing how smoothly it rolls off the tongue, isn't it? Doesn't work nearly as well with New Labor or the Lib-Dems.
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to the kindly befuddled vicars who thought the Christian solution to all problems started with making everyone a nice hot cup of tea? I guess the Stormtroopers For Jesus did them all in.
What do we need but matter?
ReplyDeleteHow Can
This Lump Of Stuff
Be,
Hang
In The Universe
Like It Were A
Place,
Where Matter Hangs Out In?
How can there be this place, this prosaic
place
like a backyard, or a building site, something so mundane and full of rubble (ours was when the kitchen was converted)?
HOW CAN THIS BE?!
THINK HOW RIDICULOUS THIS SOUNDS!
"That electricity, Susan, is matter too. Energy, matter, it's all the same stuff in different forms. What it isn't, is 'spirit' or anything silly like that."
ReplyDeleteHow do you know it isn't spirit? Nobody knows what it is. Once you get past the atomic level there's very little science can make out and explain, it's so small they can't even track electrons.
I like and hugely respect science, progress, mozart, root canal etc. but just how far can science go?
Read Kant and Hume- there's a whole range of philosophers who have discussed why science can't fully explain the universe or the "thing in itself."
A chuckling Peter Ackroyd, eyes twinkling with the inside knowledge only available to the Trickster (capital T), when asked about science advised, 'don't believe any of it!'. One of my most cherished TV memories.
ReplyDeleteHow Can
ReplyDeleteThis Lump Of Stuff
Be,
How can it not be?
The question is quite moot, because it be.
there's a whole range of philosophers who have discussed why science can't fully explain the universe or the "thing in itself."
ReplyDeleteNeither can religion, for that matter.
He is right that it is abusive to bring children up to be religious. There are many, many testimonies to the debilitating effcets of being foced into faith through upbringing.
ReplyDeleteI may be an athiest, but I'm not buying this claptrap. I was brought up in the Catholic faith. There was no abuse involved. This is prejudice, not intelligent discourse.
His whole argument is based on the demand that the eternal and immaterial be judged by temporal and material standards, believing that will inevitably make them disappear.
ReplyDeletePeter, you continue to make my own points for me. It is religion that ascribes temporal and material standards to the eternal and immaterial. The "first cause" is a temporal concept. Who says that causality transcends the temporal universe in which we find ourselves? A personal being is a material concept. God can either be in our image or he can transcend the temporal and material.
As the great Chinese sage said, the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao. The God that can be named, imagined, known or believed in cannot be the real God.
Might it be that atheists don't believe in God because they do not experience him; and that they don't experience him either because they are not able to or because God does not want them to (for whatever reason)? Maybe God is choosy about whom he reveals himself to (politically incorrect as that may sound -and not that that would mean they'd be going to hell either, etc).
ReplyDeleteJust an idea. In any case, if we presume that Atheists experience existence the same was convicted theists do (which is a large assumption that I doubt), it is weird why such different explanations for the same or similar experiential phenonema are cited.
Ive always found it both insulting and patronising how atheists explain my experiences of what I call the divine in terms of some psychological evasion or weakness on my part. Is it that they experience what I experience but then somehow are able to not draw cosmological inferences from that but rather stand back nd accept that it is pure illusion and projection..
or as I suggest do they just experience the universe differently....?
In any case the poverty of thesist-atheist dialogue is Im sure explained by the lack of attention given to the personal experiential factor.
" was brought up in the Catholic faith. There was no abuse involved."
ReplyDeleteI suppose this depends on what you mean by 'brought up in the Catholic faith'. Did your parents tell you as a child that if you did not accept the dogma of the church you would spend eternity in hell? If they did, they were, in that regard, abusive
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletesnakepit stammered more like!
ReplyDeleteElberry is so right but I daren't say it. There does seem to be some autism involved in these atheists/materialists/whatever & with thus comes the indomitable power.
But so does come the self-sacrificial/murderous power of the absolutely religious. Both live by the Word, be it the Bible, Koran or now The God Delusion or the 'evidence' of science.
So the truth must lie in the middle: in doubt, humility and self-sacrifice - to a community not to an idea.
In the world not in an idea.
And in the world people are linked by what is most important: each other and ideas go by-the-by. Love is what counts and if that is not the revelation I don't know what is.
Might it be that atheists don't believe in God because they do not experience him; and that they don't experience him either because they are not able to or because God does not want them to (for whatever reason)? Maybe God is choosy about whom he reveals himself to (politically incorrect as that may sound -and not that that would mean they'd be going to hell either, etc).
ReplyDeleteMight it be that you think you are experiencing Him but you're wrong? If by experiencing Him you are referring to an internal mental sensation, then it could be that the atheist experiences it but recognizes it as a totally different phenomenon - an internal subjective experience that originates in the mind and not external to it.
Have you ever been on a train or bus and then experienced the sensation of motion not because the train was moving but because the next to yours started to move? The mind is not a perfect, objective detector of external reality, it interprets and massages signals based on an internalized model of the world. It makes assumptions and takes shortcuts. It forces narratives onto events with none. And it sees agency everywhere. Agency detection is the minds favorite mode of interpretation.
Always doubting, always doubting, evading, dodging ducking. We live in queer dark times! This lumpen universe cannot be (in the form that I describe if you read it carefully).
ReplyDelete'Do you not see the Light my friends?!'
Contradicting myself here but thus is Man.