Roger Ebert on God
Just received a Tweet with this link. Really great to hear from non-theologians what they think about God.
How I believe in God by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times
When I was in first or second grade and had just been introduced by the nuns to the concept of a limitless God, I lay awake at night driving myself nuts by repeating over and over, But how could God have no beginning? And how could he have no end? …
Where’s the gardener?
Anthony Gottlieb
The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”
Gottleib does a smashing job surveying the battleground: we’ve got the “New Atheists”, e.g., Richard Dawkins
One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and…is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.
Doubting and religious belief
This is a topic that interests me a great deal. There was a thread on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that I found intriguing. It was prompted by Pope Benedict’s recension of the prior excommunication of a schismatic bishop. (More posts on the current situation coming up.) Any reasonable person would call this bishop a holocaust denier. But that part is an aside. The substance of the post is about faith and doubt. Sullivan writes:
… the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.
New natural law and Robert George
I’ve just finished reading David Kirkpatrick’s profile of Robert George in the NY Times Sunday. It’s probably no shock that I’m not screeching, screaming conservative. But neither am I a liberal frothing at the mouth. This goes back to my describing myself as a “thinking theist”. I want to avoid getting political here. Rather, I’m just going to share some views about the intersection of religion and philosophy.
What caught my eye, of course, was the reference to Aristotle and Thomistic thought. (Disclaimer: When I first studied Aristotle it was in conjunction with Thomistic thought. I’m in no way an enemy of Thomist thought, per se.) But as I continued to read, I saw the challenge emerge: do we rest on reason and our intellect? Or do we depend on our moral inclinations? It’s my old “faith versus reason” thing. Read more
E.T. phone the Vatican
OK. Here’s more on the Vatican and space. This time a search for alien life.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said in that interview.
“Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.”
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered “part of creation.”
Deism is back
Deism is back. This is a very interesting development. There are political ramifications, I suppose. We know that some have pushed the idea that the America’s “founding fathers” were Christians. And by “Christians” they usually mean people who hold the same beliefs as contemporary American evangelicals. The topic of evangelicalism in America is way beyond the scope of our course this semester. But what is interesting is that as “everybody” knows, most of the founders were in no way “evangelical” in today’s sense of the word. This isn’t to say that there was nothing like evangelicalism in the colonies at that time. There was. We’re just focusing on the founders. Read more
The moody deity
Salon.com has an interview with Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God. This quote reminded me of James’ discussion of medical materialism. Here the point isn’t so much what is going on medically (!) with God, as taking a look at some non-spiritual, i.e., material, causes or explanations for why God’s moods change so much.
At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?
I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he’s very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that’s what I mean by being a materialist.
The always provocative Penn Jillette
Penn (of Penn & Teller) on the difference between an agnostic and an atheist.
The continuing battle between faith and reason
Richard Wolin has weighed in on the debate in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. He gives a balanced overview of the history of the debate and its past and current interlocutors. In this short article Wolin takes us through Hegel, Adorno, Habermas, Berger, Dennett, Dawkins, Taylor, and more.
I agree with Wolin when he says that:
A genuine and fruitful dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is impossible unless one takes the standpoint of one’s interlocutor seriously.