Atheism cannot be a scientifically held position, because it relies on the certain knowledge that God does not exist. There is no way that such certainties can be established – for a start, science does not deal in certainties, and adherents of religion believe in the existence of God in a proper sense, that is, irrespective of physical evidence, without asking that such existence should be revealed (that creation scientists do this very thing is, of course, pathological, and traduces religion in the same but obverse sense that Dawkinsian atheism traduces science).
I still think it is useful to distinguish between faith and belief. Faith is like a poem. Belief is an attempt to explicate that poem in terms of doctrines and codes, which are never equal to the poem, and may well distort it.
Joyless fundamentalist atheists liek Dawkins, Hitchens, Amis, just like joyless fundamentalist anythings, are dangerous closed minded people surest of that which they know nothing of, due to their utter belief in the solidity of their own personalities.
ReplyDeleteTerry Eagleton put it rather well deescribing the above figures:
ReplyDelete'The implication from Amis and McEwan - and from Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - is that civilisation and atheist rationalism go together, and I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. The debate over God - Muslim or Christian - is for them increasingly becoming code for a debate on civilisation versus barbarism. I think one needs to intervene and show the limitations of that.'
'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it is to read Richard Dawkins on theology.'
'They buy their atheism on the cheap, because they have never been presented with an interesting version of faith. With people like Dawkins there is a kind of inverted evangelism; I find it extraordinary that not once does he question the terms of his science.'
Eagleton suggests that the question 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster. Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God 'if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap', whereas even in the simplest sense, 'for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is... He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.'
I like that distinction between faith and belief, Frank. Bill Styron, you're on the other side: Is Frank right?
ReplyDeleteFrank is certianly more right than wrong; an intellectual map in the head is something very different from living truth. And remember faith is a movement towards this truth, not the final end of inner possibility. A living truth that doesn't bow down to the falsenesses of evil, wars, torture, etc. But as Jesus said:
ReplyDeleteThe world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.
The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.
Faith is fine, but what is the substance of that which we have faith in. Truth is an absolute which cannot be transgressed, that is, unless truth isn't an absolute, which of course it is.
Repeated himself there. Meant to add the quote
ReplyDeleteThis is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.