| View Blog
|
| Discussing faith and delusion, part 3
|
|
|
Following on, here's my reply to an unexpected email*. I'd be interested in the views of thoughts.com members:
I'm not going to be able to prove anything for you. I'm sorry but belief (and equally non-belief) is a personal journey. I can only tell you what it all looks like to me.
But that you want to ask questions even of someone like me is part of that journey and you may want to dismiss it all, and that's fine. It's better than the approach which is effectively shouting "no God, no God na-na-na-na-na-nah!" without wondering why so many people over so much time have been so utterly convinced that there's more to it than that.
By the way, I always feel the label freethinker is much abused. For me, it's not about deciding that there is no God and deriding anyone who thinks that there is (we have many debates on this over at www.thoughts.com) but about questioning, opening and honestly (freely if you like) and being clear about the parameters we set ourselves in asking the questions. If we do that, no matter where we end up (believing in something or believing that there's nothing to believe in) then we are freethinkers. When I started asking questions I admit I actually wanted to find there was nothing more to it all than what's in front of me so that I could just get on with doing what I thought I wanted to do. I don't know why it became so important to me to find out.
I'm going to start with Dawkins. It's not my job to tell you what to believe and if Dawkins answers all your questions about the world, that's your choice.
But for me, I read his latest writing and found it to be poorly argued, to the point of being merely a statement of belief from an atheistic viewpoint. I'm not going to critique the whole of the God Delusion here - there are books out there and not just Alistair MacGrath's that do that- but there were a couple of glaring problems with it that I mentioned in my comment on Jon's blog.
For example, Dawkins is clear that as there are many different views on who and what God is so he came up with his own definition (this is what I mean about parameters)- but what he sees is a child-killing Old Testament God that is vindicitive or a weak New Testament God that's were he to exist would need to forgive sins commited by all humans in any case in order to be benevolent. Well, neither one dimensional characterisation fits with how I see God, and I find it hard to understand why I should accept the knocking down of this parody of my God as the new truth when the person doing the knocking down has made no attempt to understand the complexities that theologists and philosphers have wrestled with for centuries- one critic likened this analysis to like someone trying to comment on biology with knowldge gleaned only from the Book of British Birds.
The comment [another commenter on Jon's blog] made, about Dawkins taking the worst examples of Christians who do not live according to God's law (e.g. killing an abortionist) and extrapolating that to all believers, is correct - Dawkins cheapens his argument with that sort of thing. It's like me saying that all atheists are going to murder school children because of the kids that commited a school massacre at Columbine High.
I really detest bad scholarship and the use of quotes incorrectly attributed to early Christian scholars by 18th century atheists and the lack of understanding of e.g. Luther on reason rile me. (Luther's point is an important one: the central claim of christianity is that salvation is given at no cost to the individual but that human nature finds that unreasonable and assumes we need to work for it. To say that this means that Luther is saying that belief in slavation denies reason is a bit of a twist and whether it's deliberately incorrect or just poor scholarship I think it's inexcusable).
Also irritating is that I feel that essentially Dawkins is saying that his theories such as memes are scientific because scientific research and understanding evolves and they can be proved in time, but he seems to think that something once said on the nature of God, no matter how outlandish, must stand for all time and not be thought through again or reconsidered by later thinkers. And how rude would you think I was if I said you'd been infected by a "disbelief virus" that was somehow warping you away from the truth? And yet that virus idea is the hypothesis he puts forward for the fact that the majority of people across all time have believed that there's a god of some description out there.
It may all fall down on faith but that doesn't actually make it de facto incoherent or wrong. As you say, there is necesarily an element of faith in believing in God, and I would maintain in not believing in him. I cannot prove that he is there, but nor can you that he isn't - as you said in the past even Dawkins has acknowledged this, though I think he goes beyond that in "The God Delusion".
I think actually I have the opposite problem that you do regarding MacGrath and faith and Dawkins and science. MacGrath necessarily speaks of faith in personal terms - a relationship with God is a personal one. He is also careful not to be peronally insulting to people that, as he originally did, do not believe in God. I guess that's why he uses "it seems to me" or "I think".
The point is that Dawkins also starts from a position of faith - that science is all - but rather than express this as a personal position he believes that anyone that disagrees with him is deluded and expresses it vociferously, I think the expression was credulous fool (given that this covers around 50% of scientists, it's a bit degrading to his fellow professionals).
I'm no bible belt fanatic, and certainly not a creationist. I find no conflict between science and my faith I guess because I can look at the bible and say that Genesis is an expression from early peoples to explain the beginning of everything not a step-by-step description of the exact process of creation, and not so different from a hypothesis that starts effectively in the beginning was nothing, which exploded. Science has no answer for what caused the big bang (yet? ) nor for the protein chains that occured in the primordial soup that eventually became complex life as we know it - I find "it just happened" as unsatisfactory as I assume you would find "God made it happen". Equally I don't think that Darwin answered everything (nor did he for that matter) and I'm worried that the religious-type fervour attached to Darwinianism glosses over the inconsistencies as much as the creationists do over inconvenient facts. At some point I'll write my own blog post on the tree structure of genetics and why our search for a proto-cat that is the ancestor of all modern day cats may be mistaken, but I just don't have time at present.
But to answer you point about evidence and leaps of faith, I guess for me my starting point on faith is that of a historian rather than a scientist.
When you look at the major world religions while all have their own route to salvation/ happiness/ oneness with the world, they have all had to take a position on Jesus. That's a big impact, bigger than any other one individual in the whole of history.
So I figured if I wanted to understand whether any of it was real or just a real waste of time, I needed to know who he was, whether he actually existed, what he said and whether he actually came back from death. It took me several years of reading widely (and rather a lot of gross reading about what happens to someone when they are crucified) to conclude that to the best of my ability to tell, Jesus really existed and did what it's claimed he did.
That's a bit scary when it happens to you, you start having to work out what to "do" about it. From that point on, that there is something more to life than that which is in front of us was clear, and what Jesus said really matters as the only person ever to have truly gone through death and come back again. But how this realisation interacts with the world around us, with issues like suffering, ethics and science became interesting. Fortunately when you find yourself in this situation you find that you are not alone - the theology that Dawkins seems not to understand is thinkers through the centuries trying to work it out.
As I see it, God doesn't just work through thunderbolts but through people, in the good deeds and the amazing acts of self-sacrifice that people have made that make a lie of a selfish gene. I see his echo in the world around me, but you may well prefer the Douglas Adams quote "isn't it enough to see that the garden is pretty without needing to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?"
I'm sorry if your interaction with Christians has been of the amiable but a bit pointless variety. I've had the chance to meet some truly amazing, inspired people over the last few years [...]. People who've found faith in adulthood often seem to have the most amazing stories and are not using their faith as a comfort blanket but as a challenge to themselves to go out there and make the world a better place through love no matter what they themselves have experienced previously.
And you never really "settle" it (even Mother Theresa who truly lived out her faith had doubts from time to time), and I'm still reading, still testing it, still looking for loopholes. But I've not found them via Dawkins.
So my challenge to you if you feel that there's nothing out there anywhere that would make you doubt for a minute your atheist convictions would be to really look into Jesus and read as widely as possible about him, whether he actually existed, about his life, his words, his death and whether it's possible that he could have come back to life. It's not something that can be done in five minutes.
It would all be so much easier if it wasn't for real. If you are feeling really brave try an Alpha course or a Christianity Explained course - may be you've already done one? They are interesting because they're based around meals or run in pubs and you can say anything, ask anything, debate anything and no one tries to force a view down your throat. I helped out with one recently at my church and met some fascinating atheists who wanted to show us that we were wrong [...]. And if you conclude that Jesus didn't exist or didn't do or say what it's said he did, and that his promises are all lies then at least your position is an informed one.
I'm going to stop writing now as I'm amazed if you've got this far. I wrote more than I meant to and it's not word perfect by any means. I'm certain I've not convinced you of anything as that is not my aim, but I hope you realise I didn't say what I said about the God Delusion out of Christian petulance or from a position of ignorance.
For me, a true freethinker would not be putting their faith in Dawkins (as in "if Dawkins is certain then that's enough for me" -a phrase one commenter used on Jon's original blog, a statement of belief in a sort of high priest view if ever I've seen one!) and would not be afraid to question and search.
Attending Alpha should be a matter of genuine interest... after all, if you get nothing more out of it than some decent meals and a chance to debate something that clearly matters to you with people who are also interested, you've lost nothing but a few hours. Then you can get on with your life, in whichever way you see fit.
*= I'll put my hands up right now and say that since sending it I've wanted to edit it a little because it was around midnight when I sent it. Removed portions of the text refer to people I know that would not be appropriate here. I've used square brackets to show this. |
|
Posted by rose22 on 2008-07-14 07:19:37 | Rating: | Views: 61
|
| |
|
|
