Oct 20
It’s a busy week around here, so apologies for the lack of original posts. In the meantime, I continue to come across interesting articles and posts discussing the justification for/origins of our moral intuitions (which has been the subject of conversation around here for the last little while). Here are a few quotes on these matters from the eminently quotable David Bentley Hart who last week wrote this essay for First Things’ On the Square: Read more
Given some of the discussion that has been taking place on an earlier post, I thought I would pass on this link to an interesting article by biologist Frans de Waal in today’s edition of “The Stone” (a philosophy forum from The New York Times). The entire article is worth reading as I think he touches on a number of very important points (including the limits of science), but I was especially drawn to one particular section. Read more
Later this month Prof. John Stackhouse from Regent College will be here in Nanaimo to talk about the New Atheists (can we still call them “new?”) and whether or not it is crazy to be a person of faith. Those who have been long-time readers of this blog will know that this is an event that has special interest for me because a) I wrote about the New Atheists for my masters thesis a few years back; and b) John Stackhouse was my supervisor for this project. So I’ll be there with bells on. And if you are on Vancouver Island on Saturday, October 23, I would encourage you to attend this event (you can register here). I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say. Read more
Well, the blogosphere is abuzz this week with the results of a survey on religious knowledge conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life—particularly the fact that atheists and agnostics scored highest on the quiz. The sheer volume of words being devoted to these results makes me hesitant contribute still more. Whether it’s Christians desperately explaining the results away or atheists/agnostics pointing to them as yet one more piece of evidence demonstrating their intellectual superiority over their benighted religious brethren, it all gets very tiresome. Read more
Sep 15
Richard Dawkins famously opens chapter two of The God Delusion with the following oft-quoted, adjectivally promiscuous salvo:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Read more
A few more loosely connected thoughts and links for a (holiday) Monday morning…
“The Stone” is a New York Times philosophy forum that I have enjoyed spending time at recently. Yesterday’s post by Tim Crane called “Mystery and Evidence” is one of the best attempts I have seen from an atheist to honestly lay out the difference between religious approach to the world and a scientific one. Crane critiques the view popularized by Richard Dawkins (and others) that religion and science are two competing alternatives for the same explanatory slot—as if religion were a kind of primitive science that offered the same kinds of explanations that science now offers in a much more comprehensive, rational, and intellectually satisfying manner. Read more
After a couple of weeks away from home on vacation where I tried to limit my reading to novels, I picked up Samir Selmanovic’s It’s Really All About God again this morning. As I’ve alluded to before, it’s a bit of a rambling and not altogether coherent apologia for a kind of “let’s just embrace mystery and all get along” approach to the challenges of the religious plurality that currently characterizes many parts of our increasingly globalized world. So far, the book strikes me as a commendable enough practical approach to living peacefully with those who do not share our beliefs, but one that tends to wander too frequently into confusing a practical political and social strategy for a coherent philosophical/theological worldview. Read more
On the off-chance that anyone out there is looking for further evidence that our cultural discourse is being seriously degraded and trivialized by the proliferation of technology, an article in yesterday’s New York Times alerted readers to the availability of iPhone apps to help believers and non believers arm themselves for war. There are anti-Darwin apps for Christians, “Bible Thumper” apps for atheists, and others, no doubt, each doing what all apps are designed to do: provide entertainment, “illumination,” and diversion as quickly, and with as little demand to think for oneself, as possible. Read more
Last night at our young adults group we talked about, among other things, the frequently encountered view that Christianity is a strange relic of the past, that has nothing useful to say to us in the present, no normative force or existential/moral relevance in a world that has “grown up.” It is a well-rehearsed and often repeated story: once upon a time, primitive people thought there was objective meaning in the cosmos, we now know this to be false, and our only course of action is to salvage what personal meaning we can from the scrap heap of a random and chaotic universe. Read more
It seems like every time I walk into a bookstore these days there are a handful of new books on the shelf, confidently explaining how science has shown this or that religious understanding of the world to be unfounded, misguided, false, naive, etc. The obvious response to such claims—and one that is frequently made—is to question just how it is that science could “prove” or disprove anything about an overall worldview within which science is located. Read more
I’m still mulling over some of the excellent lectures I heard last week at Regent College’s Pastors Conference on Science and Faith. One lecture, in particular, focused on the “new atheists” (who are increasingly becoming, well, not new) and their often simplistic misunderstandings of the scope of science, the relationship between science and faith and the roles both play in our consideration and adoption of world-views (incidentally, I noticed today that David Bentley Hart has another wonderfully entertaining and insightful critique of the new atheism up over at First Things). The basic idea in the lecture (delivered by Denis Alexander) was familiar enough: just because science can explain one level of reality very well, it is not thereby equipped to explain or even suited to address every level of reality. All that was very good, if relatively standard stuff. Read more
A feature ran by The Washington Post yesterday has generated a bit of discussion around a study called Preachers Who Are Not Believers by prominent atheist Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola from the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University (those familiar with “The Four Horsemen” of the new atheism will know Dennett well). The study outlines interviews with six “courageous” clergy who maintain their jobs in the pulpit while privately nursing unbelief. It is a classic modern tale of the triumph of reason and the inconsistencies and dissonances that come with the slow, inevitable drift away from faith in the modern world. Read more
Over the past three days, atheists from around the world have been meeting in Melbourne, Australia for the 2010 Global Atheist Convention. Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, and PZ Myers were just a few of the atheist luminaries on hand to bolster the atheist community and inspire them to increasing confidence and boldness in a world (supposedly) dominated by religion. Read more
I’m a little all over the map this morning, but here’s a few loosely connected thoughts/reflections about unbelief on a Monday morning…
This month’s issue of our denominational magazine, the MB Herald, is about atheism/unbelief and contains an article by yours truly. It is a bit of a hybrid piece—a discussion of the new atheists (Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris), a reflection upon conversations with a friend (no stranger to regular readers of this blog), among other things. Based on what I’ve read of the issue thus far, there are a number of articles and features definitely worth checking out. Read more
Some of the toughest questions I have been asked as a pastor are some variation of the following: Why is God allowing this to happen to me? The life situations that prompt these questions can range (and have ranged) from the relatively insignificant to the profoundly traumatic and unsettling, but the brute existential fact underlying life on this planet is that things do not always—or even often—go as we want them to. If one chooses to believe that a good God presides over a world that so frequently and sometimes agonizingly frustrates even the most basic human desires and aspirations, the questions of theodicy become even more acute. If God is in control and he’s supposed to be so good, why all this misery? Why any misery for that matter? Read more
Yesterday as I was driving around town, I listened to parts of a CBC Radio interview with outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins who was in Canada promoting his new book. Based on what I heard, it was fairly predictable fare—Dawkins delighting in cataloging and heaping scorn upon the exploits of fundamentalist young earth creationists, the program host knowingly mm-hmming and piling on the ridicule. Nothing demonstrates one’s intellectual and moral superiority more ably than making fun of the ignorance and dogmatism of fundamentalists, after all. Read more
A while back, I had a conversation with a young couple who had differing religious perspectives about how they anticipated raising future children. One of the options floated about was something like this: “We’ll just raise them ‘neutral’; we’ll expose them to as many religious and irreligious options as possible and let them make up their own minds.” Well, that sure sounds admirable enough. Give them the choice. Don’t stuff anything down their throats. No indoctrination or coercion whatsoever. What could be more honouring of the individuality and freedom of our children than that? Read more
It’s fairly common these days to see religious belief presented as a kind of primitive holdover from our superstitious past. So in that sense, yesterday’s article from the National Post‘s religion blog, “Holy Post” was nothing new. What was interesting was the angle Prof. Hank Davis has apparently taken in his book called Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in the Modern World. The objects of Davis’s criticism—what he sees as prime examples of “caveman logic”—are the purposive phrases we use in everyday life. “It was a sign,” “thank God,” even “good luck”—we use these phrases seemingly instinctively (in fact, Christians seem to have a whole separate arsenal of them: “it was a ‘God thing’,” “it’s all part of God’s plan,” etc.). But do they make any contact with what is objectively true? For Davis, the answer is obviously “no.” Read more
Rumblings 