... Dennett was largely abusive. Theism corrupts “our common epistemological fabric”; it is a fairy tale; it is no better than astrology. At one point he compared theism to Holocaust denial. And this is particularly rich, coming from an apostle of atheism. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored industrial-scale campaign to obliterate a people who had remained intact for millennia out of their unshakable belief in God. The Holocaust was a collective organization of militant atheism, which clamored for the removal of God’s chosen people—theism’s most irrational symbol—from the face of the earth. To associate the spiritual heirs of its victims, who decline to abandon theistic belief out of a refusal (in Emil Fackenheim’s words) to hand Hitler a posthumous victory, instead with those who wish to cover up the crimes of the perpetrators is to engage in propaganda little more sophisticated than the slur that the Israelis are the New Nazis. So much for respecting “our common epistemological fabric”!
I think it more than "rich." I think it is appalling. But I have long thought that Dennett's manner of discourse bordered on formal thought disorder. It is grammatically and verbally correct but the sequence of thought seems aleatory (see Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, beautifully phrased - and dangerous - nonsense).
I also think it pertinent to quote this again:
... what could be the cause of being as being? Certainly not a being of the universe. For whatever being one would want to indicate as the cause of being as being, it would always be a participating being, a contingent being and, therefore, a caused being. Being, however, is not the cuase-of-being, for it is caused-being. Precisely under the aspects under which it would be indicated as the cause of being - namely, as being - it is not cause but caused, because it is participating and contingent-being. ... Nothing appears much simpler as soon as it is understood that the universe, conceived as the universality of all beings does not have the ground "to be" in itself. However, there is not nothing. There are beings, the universe is. Being is being-caused, being-under-the-influence-of-something-else; therefore it is excluded that this "influencing reality" would not be, for otherwise nothing would be. But something is.
- William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology
Speaking for myself, my faith is grounded in the sense of a presence well described by Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey." This is an experience I have had on more than one occasion and in my view experience trumps theory. Finally, whatever God may be, one thing He is definitely not: the terminus ad quem of an argument.
As you turn to Wordsworth, I find evidence (if that kind of word is permitted) by turning to Gerard Manley Hopkins and -- in a radically different style -- Flannery O'Connor. Each author's works add up to a strong testimonial correction to atheists' logic.
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