Saturday, September 01, 2012

In case you wondered …

… The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that's an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they're pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life." All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn't even have time to wave goodbye? It isn't "probably". New Atheists aren't claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn't a God. In fact they aren't claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It's as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

4 comments:

  1. I had thought the word that offends would be 'worry' - why does believing in God imply that one must be 'worrying'?

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  2. "The atheists are saying the things that atheists usually say in such contexts and so, alas, are the Christians, who are falling over themselves to condemn Spufford for failing to meet their very precise and utterly absolute theological standards."

    http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/30843722941/once-i-saw-this-guy-on-a-bridge-about-to-jump-i

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  3. "Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the first dizzy-intense phase of attraction settles (if it does) into a relationship. Rapture develops into routine, a process which keeps its customary doubleness where religion is concerned."

    http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/30846035473/early-on-in-this-i-compared-beginning-to-believe

    ReplyDelete