This coming Sabbath, June 26, I'm going to do something I don't remember trying before. I'm going to reply to the challenges presented by the new atheists--people like Dawkins and Hitchens.
The book, The Devil's Delusion by David Berlinski is one of my principle sources.
If you have any favorite arguments in favor of theism or any particular challenges to faith you would like me to address in the next couple of weeks, I'd enjoy reading your thoughts. So post a comment.
Today, I'd working security at the Washington Conference campmeeting.
Grace and peace.
John
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26 comments:
Belief in God is bad because it results in magical thinking. Believers expect God to help them, protect them, make it better and as a result they often don't do what they should to take care of themselves.
Belief in God is bad because it reinforces all or none thinking. God is perfect, man is evil.
Belief in God is bad, because acting "in faith", because "God told me to". Denies personal responsibility and makes people do otherwise stupid things. It is a terrible excuse that believers use when they want to do something stupid, risky, or hurtful and don't want to take responsibility for it.
Belief in God is bad because it results in an I'm right, your wrong attitude. It prevents believers from really listening to unbelievers, or even other believers, and it results in persecution of everybody that doesn't believe like me.
God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me.
Need I say more?
Believe in God is particularly bad for Adventists because it results in paranoia and a persecution complex which subconsciously results in behaviors which become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Belief in God is bad because believers are so focussed on getting to a perfect heaven that they discount the beauty in the here and now.
Belief in God is bad because believers magnify and awfulize evil. They fail to recognize the nature of most events as being a mixture of good and bad. They use catastrophic thinking.
Belief in God is bad because it causes people to live lives filled with inappropriate guilt and fear.
Belief in God is bad because it justifies genocide, slavery, rape, abuse, bigotry, homophobia, torture, murder and martyrdom
Belief in God is bad because it justifies genocide, slavery, rape, abuse, bigotry, homophobia, torture, murder and martyrdom
The one argument in favor of theism that I have found to be helpful is, if macroevolution exists, then it SHOULD be acting on other planets and solar systems. But, we have not found ANY evidence of intelligent ANYWHERE near us despite our far-reaching attempts to contact other forms in our milky way. Nothing is found. The only explanation for this is that some intelligent being DID create us and intentionally put us out away from other planets with life because of the taint of sin. Perhaps we were an experiment of sorts to see what we would decide (power of choice) and He gave us that seperation from others in order to prevent us and Him the guilt of spreading our sin to other places. Anyway, I found this idea intriguing. And, several evolutionists have struggled with why we have no evidence of previous or present life forms. It doesn't make sense according to macroevolutionary belief.
You might try checking out http://commonsenseatheism.com/. The author is a former Christian/atheist who tries to take an even handed approach to the debate. He has strong criticisms against the "new atheists," but he also has some strong criticisms against various forms of theism. His podcast, "Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot," is one of my favorites.
I am starting to think that being an agnostic is the best stance. According to classical theology God is completely Other, such that we can only know his as he reveals Himself. So until he reveals himself in a convincing way, being agnostic is appropriate. If he exhists and wants to save you, then he will have to convince you he exhists. If he is like Jesus, then it should be OK to not know for sure. If God is not OK with questions and doubt, then would you really want a god like that anyway?
So, I don't know if god exhists, or if there is an afterlife. I hope there is, but its OK if there isn't.
Anonymous raises some interesting points. It is true that some believers use religion as a method of avoiding effective responsible action.
Of course, the notion that people "ought" to act responsibly is based on ideas of purpose that are unsustainable apart from theism. That is, if there is no god, there is no "ought."
It is also true that religion has been used to justify genocide and homophobia. Nazism used science to justify genocide and homophobia. Some people practice genocide and homophobia just because they can.
Anonymous writes that theology posits the idea that God is "wholly other," i.e. utterly transcendent. This is certainly the dominant stream in Christian, Jewish and Muslim theology. However, in these religions and certainly in other religions, there are theologians who posit an utterly immanent God or god, that is a God-in-creation rather than a God-apart-from-creation.
Belief in God is used by some people to exacerbate inappropriate feelings of guilt. On the other hand, many people find belief in God a useful tool in dealing with their very real moral culpability. For these people divine forgiveness sets them free for productive, happy living after great moral lapses.
Anonymous is concerned that believers often fall into either/or, black-and-white thinking. It is true that believers do fall into this trap. Reading through the posts by Anonymous, it appears he has fallen into the same trap, setting up "belief in God" as a homogeneous condition which is inseparable from the some of the ill effects he cites.
In actuality belief in God takes many, sometimes contradictory forms. It has many, sometimes contradictory effects. A valid analysis of belief would have to be far more nuanced than the comments posted here by Anonymous.
Anonymous raises interesting questions. He addresses some of the problems associated with belief. He does not evince any knowledge of the complexity of belief and the even greater complexity of the linkage between human action and cognition.
To sum the entire debate into a sentance, Christians believing in God is a matter of statistics, for aethiests it's a question of reasonablness. Christians look at creation and say, the odds of this happening are so vanishingly small then God must have done it. Aetheists say, that you can't prove a negative. We don't believing in fairies and unicorns is unreasonable, so is believing in God. Both arguments are pretty dumb and I haven't heard any better ones yet.
I wish I had seen the blog before yesterday. If I were you I'd seriously reconsider your book. It's completely derivative of the same bad anti-aetheistic works everywhere. If nothing else it's worth noting that he's not even a scientist. He's a mathemtician. The two are very very different disaplines. He's also a spokesperson for the discovery institute which places him no where near the mainstream in scientific thought. Berlinski's main theme is that science has become a religion which would suggest that he understands neither very well.
Thanks Beel, I used to be far more critical of the Discovery Institute. And of ID. However, the more I read, the more I agree with the heart of their critique of scientism.
Science, in general, is not a religion. However, science as it is presented by Dawkins has many of the markings of religion, especially fundamentalism. For Dawkins, everything supports his viewpoint. Which makes me very suspicious. He is certain any genuinely rational person would join him in his conclusions if that person had access to the data. Given the longevity of the dispute, reaching back into antiquity, it is highly likely that the differing views are not separated by degrees of rationality or access to data. Rather they are separated by temperaments and other idiosyncrasies. And since human nature hasn't changed much through history, the argument never dies.
RE: "Anonymous does not evince any knowledge of the complexity of belief and the even greater complexity of the linkage between human action and cognition."
I am hoping you can help me with that. Since we can't prove God's exhistence one way or the other, it seems to me to come down to a pragmatic question. Is it better to belieive it God than to not believe in God? It is easy to see how belief in God is dysfunctional, it is harder to see how belief in God really helps. Do you have any ideas that would help ballance the equation?
RE: "And, several evolutionists have struggled with why we have no evidence of previous or present life forms. It doesn't make sense according to macroevolutionary belief."
It makes sense from the size of the universe though. We have only been able see planets for a few years, and we still don't have any way of projecting enough power out into the universe for anyone to notice us. Even if we had been able to do that when Gallileo got his first telescope, the message still wouldn't have had enough time to get to the other life forms and for the message to return. There is no mystery here. Our technology is still too limited and too young.
Anonymous wrote: "Is it better to believe in God than to not believe in God?"
A really excellent question. How to answer it?
1. Attempt a quantitative answer using demographic analysis. Analyze the correlation between the percentage of populations that believe in God and the rate of various measures of social health. Do believing populations or unbelieving populations have greater or lesser rates of child abuse, poverty, unwed mothers, morbidity and mortality, murder, rape, divorce, domestic violence?
At least one study I've seen along these lines suggested that believing populations have greater rates of these dysfunctions. Does this indicate that religion leads to social dysfunction or that the pain of social dysfunction leads to a greater reliance on the hope and solace religion offers?
2. Examine what happens in societies that move away from faith. I've not seen any statistical studies on this, but the anecdotes that come to mind are not favorable to the suppression of belief. Marxist Russia and China saw a decline in some of the negative social patterns of their respective pre-Communist cultures. However, what emerged was not happier, more moral societies. The history of Nazi Germany certainly does not recommend the suppression of vital, active Christianity. The history of Cambodia offers a similarly bleak perspective on the suppression of Buddhism in favor of Marxism.
3. Personal conviction. The primary metaphor I use for defending my own belief is faith as art. Belief in God is one of the major ways my mind paints the cosmos with meaning. Belief is the necessary condition for gratitude in the face of beauty. I don't know any way to fancy up this personal preference. I believe because it makes sense in non-rational, emotional, aesthetic ways. I have felt the allure of atheism since my middle teen years. At times the work of believing seems insuperable. However, when I approach the point of deciding God/not God living out a not-God position appears unsustainable, even anti-humane, because of the inescapable correlates: there is no morality, no meaning in beauty, no logical basis for preferring life to death.
I can't live there. Don't even want to.
The debate about the existence and character of God is thousands of years old. The very antiquity of the argument suggests to me that it involves unresolvable tensions and polar truths. We make a choice that works for us and for the people we care about, knowing that reasonable, good people will come to contrary opinions.
I listed three ways to address the question about whether believing or not believing is better, preferable, wiser.
I did not mean to imply there are only three or even that these three are the most salient. They are what came to mind immediately.
Perpetual Student. Thanks for the reference to the blog. I found it helpful in working on my sermon.
So far the only argument for belief in God that I find compelling so far is the thought that to be greatful/thankful is better than to not be thankful, and it is hard to thank someone who doesn't exhist.
The social arguments are too complex. Were the communist purges worse that the inquisition of crusades? And were they due to a withdrawal of belief, or a reaction to oppressive belief? I can't answer that.
I not convinced that you need God to have morality. It still seems to me that ANY value automatically defines "oughts" and "ought nots", and simple observation of the long term results of any given value would establish a system of morality. I think morality in the long run provides a survival benifit in the evolutionary sense.
If it could somehow be demonstrated that belief caused people to be happier, richer, and raise more and better functioning offspring then that would be compelling, but I don't know of any such evidence.
I'm not sure the benefits of believing in God out weighs the suspention of rationality required to ignore the evidence for evolution. I can see,and touch evolution and manipulate it in the lab. I can't honestly say that I see any response from God on a day to day basis.
Re: Belief in God as a reason to prefer life to death.
It dosen't appear to me from the Bible that God has much concern about death nor preference for life.
The simple theft of a piece of fruit results in a death penalty not only for the thief, but for all her innocent posterity. Then God demanded killing as a form of worship, and he gave the first murderer a lighter sentence than he gave the fruit thief. What kind of morality is that?
Then God kills the entire human race except for Noah? How does that compare to the Holocaust? He then sanctions episode after episode of genicide by and for the Jews?
What about Job's children. How was that fair? How can God sanction that and still be considered "Good"?
Then finally, it is supposed to be "good news" that the only way for God to be appeased is for him to kill his only son?
Sorry, I don't get it. It seems to me that belief in God might actually come down on the side of preferring death. The theologians really need to get to work and rework the story, the current one makes no moral sense.
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