... doesn't exist, God sure remains a topic of heated discussion:
... It's Not God Who Needs Saving - It's Us.
... A Farewell to the Philosophy of Religion? Why not a Farewell to Philosophy? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have been reading Peter Stothard's extraordinary Spartacus Road. I can't say much about it, since I have to write a review of it tomorrow, but one lesson to be drawn from it is that latter-day secularists ought to be boning up on their classics. Horace, for instance, was typical of the educated class of his time in subscribing to Epicureanism, which held that gods may exist, but that they pay us no mind, and we ought to pay them none. It isn't exactly atheism, but it comes to much the same thing. It gives one a nice idea of what a purely secular society might be like: plenty of people still believed in and honored the gods, but they were mostly unsophisticated types, I gather (that alone sounds very contemporary). But there is a bleakness to the "sophisticated" outlook of the day that leads me to think that is one reason Christianity spread so quickly throughout the Roman world. I say this as someone for whom that Epicurean viewpoint has always held some appeal.
You're absolutely right: It often seems as though the atheists are trying to convince themselves as well as everyone else. I think some of the stridency of tone is because they're trying to assert certainty where there isn't any.
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear to you, Frank, I don't mean to go on and on about any of this. I agree with you more often than I disagree.
However, it bothers me when people misrepresent what science is, in these discussions. What it really is, what its strengths and limits really are, how it really works in practice. For any such discussions to be useful, people need to be clear what "science" is AND what "religion" is. That's why I mentioned fuzzy logic before: there's a lot of discussion in which no one defines their terms, and even folks like Dawkins end up misrepresenting science. So all of my objections have really been about making sure that the definitions aren't abused.
Well, it's good to have people like you around, Art, someone who knows more about science than I do and can help fill in the lacunae from time to time. We do agree more often than not and what you say here is pretty much what I have been clumsily trying to get across here and elsewhere. Science and religion are not the same thing. To take one for the other or to try to substitute one for the other would be risible were it not so potentially dangerous.
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