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As for the people who have never met me yet think I am daft or unintelligent for believing in God (the ones who you are referring to ShyBoy), well I can only feel sorry for their narrow-mindedness. Although, as it happens mostly with narrow minds, they are usually born from ignorance.
I think that faith and spirituality is a very good thing.
But I also believe (know) that Islam, Christianity and Judaism are man-made ideologies which are replete with absurdities, scientific errors, cruel teachings, misogyny, violence, intolerance and many more things (as well as some good teachings which any decent human being would know of anyway).
Why do you think faith is a good thing? There are plenty of reasons for believing in a creator, but I wouldn't consider faith to be a good one.
If i thought you were daft for believing in David Cameron's "Give Married People a Tenner" scheme (i'm not suggesting you do), would you consider me narrow-minded? Why is it any different that i might think you're daft for believing that the Catholic Church has the answer to ... well anything?
:yes: Pretty much sums up what I think
I went to sunday school and was raised Anglican, but it was never shoved down my throat. From when my and my siblings reached secondary school, my parents allowed us to come to our own conclusions about life and spirituality and everything.
Maybe that wasn't the best of examples.
You stated that people who consider you daft for believing in the supernatural are being narrow-minded. I, in part, disagree. I wouldn't consider someone narrow-minded for not believing that the TV Show 'Britain's Most Haunted' wasn't a complete set-up. I would consider someone who believed that Britain's Most Haunted was real to be daft, maybe not daft as a person, but certainly daft as far as their views on spooky TV shows go.
I can tell you what I think the difference is, but I'm not sure my answer would satisfy you, since you seem to be looking for something objective and tangible to hold on to, and faith in God isn't objective or tangible (which is why you lump it along with any other thing 'supernatural' however ridiculous it may be.)
What I find narrow-minded is to lose respect for someone's intellect because they are open to believe in something even if it hasn't passed the test of the scientific method.
For me, belief in God only really differs from other supernatural beliefs because it resonates so well with our acute sense of our own mortality. There seems to me to be an obvious link between our inability to comprehend the end of life, and the invention of God. I think we, as a species, have an innate disposition to serving or believing in something larger than ourselves - something shown not only by religion, but in political systems and even the reverence of individuals.
I think why people, myself included sometimes, are suspicious of the intellectual thought gone into religious belief is that it smacks heavily of wish-thinking; faith, after all, is belief without evidence. To be a theist you have to be able to selectively divorce yourself from rational and critical thinking - take a position that you want to be true and try bend you mind to incorporate it.
I'm still to hear a single argument, even the most eloquent argument from the most distinguished theologian or cosmologist, that doesn't essentially come down to basic god of the gaps theory. I just wonder at what point did it become necessary to turn "I don't know" into "God did it."
I think Hitchens deals with it quite well when he asserts we have minds that are always searching for explanations, and that we'll even consider a conspiracy theory as better than no theory at all.
As for divorcing yourself from rational and critical thinking - I don't agree. Philosophers, for example, have reached the conclusion that God exists through rational thinking methods. You don't have to divorce yourself from it, it's more a case of being open to different possibilities and putting your intellect in service of them, instead of the other way round.
Just watched them debate. Dinesh D'Souza twice (don't recommend it if you value your ears) and Alister McGrath are probably the most famous. Wasn't impressed by either. They had quite detailed and well put together arguments, but like I said, it was still essentially god of the gaps theory. And of course both made the cardinal sin of making a great argument for deism, and then for no reason whatsoever, making the leap to assuming that this is justification for the validity of their own personal theistic beliefs. Whether it's better in writing, I don't know, but if their books are basically an expansion of their debate, then they have nothing to say in my view. In fact I was more impressed with Al Sharpton, even though I disagree with most of what he says. He at least admitted that the existance of a god is in no way related to the validity of his personal faith. And at least he has a sense of humour, which you have to to debate this topic.
I haven't yet heard a cogent argument in favour of God, let alone one which supports any of the supernatural or significant claims purported by any of the major religious texts. I'd consider the possibility of religion, or at least the existence of God, if i'd heard a serious argument for it. It appears, however, that most of the arguments of the proponents of religion boil down to The God of of Gaps argument - as IWS states.
Btw, could you care to enlighten me in the difference between deism and theism?
Theism is the whole interventionist God deal. Deism is God created the universe, but plays no further part in it.
But anyway, in discussing the existence of God does it really matter as both would give credit to there being a God?
I do find theology to be a fairly pointless exercise in general though, because it comes from the assumption that religion is to some degree true. In other words, you will never get an atheist theologian, and so it's a biased position from the very start. I'm much more interested in what philosophers have to say on the issue, since they tend to come up with the best arguments either way.
I would be interested in hearing some of his arguments if you have any, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't have been incorporated into either of the arguments of D'Souza or McGrath if they were that good, considering that they've both released books in the past year, and are both appearing in debates fairly regularly at the moment.
Just because someone doesn't believe in God doesn't mean they can't take an interest in the study of Gods or religion in general.
Well proving theism would certainly prove all of the claims of deism, but proving deism wouldn't prove most of the claims of theism. Proving that a god created the universe in no way proves that he is watching you, cares about you, cares about your moral behaviour, wants you to not eat X, Y and Z, wants to be worshipped, offers an afterlife (you'd think people would be grateful enough for this one), still exists, or any other claims that various forms of theism make. Which was my point. Theists will often juxtapose their arguments for deism with their theistic beliefs, as if one has any relevance on the validity of the other.
Deism is a simple academic argument. The debate between an atheist and a genuine deist would last about 2 minutes, because it's a simple matter of disagreement that can't be proved either way. Nobody has ever based their life around deism or atheism, because neither are especially important to anyone's day to day lives.
Hmm, I've never heard of one anyway. I think they can study theology, and history of religion and psychology of religious beliefs, but I consider a genuine theologian to be someone who studies "God" and their own religion and religious experiences in general. I think there's just a massive area of theology that an atheist could never take part in.
Well I'm not surprised you haven't found any valid arguments by theologians then if, from the start, you consider it to be a pointless exercise. I'd pretty much say you're biased too
So you're basically saying that because you've heard these two guys debate you've heard all there is to hear about theology?
I find that quite, er, localist to say the least. As in any discipline, there are different currents of thinking, and many different reasons to publish books, and what interests the community varies from place to place, all which hold influence on a thinker's work, and what (s)he will include in their publications or public conferences. I had never heard of D'Souza or McGrath, does that mean their ideas aren't any good as they haven't reached me before?
I'm just saying that anyone who is currently professor of theology at Oxford university will have been influenced by any conivncing arguments from the past, and will use them in a debate or add to them. And I didn't hear any. I would've thought if theology had anything to contribute to this particular debate, there would be no-one better placed to bring them to the table. So either the arguments don't exist, or McGrath has an incredibly poor grasp of the topic.
I'm still in the same spot as before. There are a million reasons why a theology professor wouldn't include the ideas of another theology professor, and lots of them have nothing to do with if they're good or not.
Anyway, since you asked, one of his central ideas is that God isn't the answer to all our 'hows' rather to our 'whys'. He makes a symplified similie which is as follows: imagine the human being as a cork. One day the cork asks itself 'where do I come from?', 'how did I became to exist'? And so many people would say that there is a superior being who created them all, naming him God. And then science develops, and finds that in fact, there exists a cork-making machine, and that's where they all come from. So, what Bentué says is that God isn't the cork-making machine, but rather, he is a bottle, giving meaning to the existence of the cork. In other words, He is not the answer to how we came to exist, but rather what gives meaning to our existence. Thus, the existence of God answers our questions of 'why' (the meaning of life), not our 'hows' which are for science to reply to. Religion and science are not opposed to each other, they answer to different domains.
Without trying to get too much into a philosophical discussion as to the meaning of life, does that analogy not make the assumption of the meaning being derived from an external source (i.e. the person who designed the bottle)? Does it not also make the assumption that the process of manufacture; the bottle-making machine (which in this analogy, I would equate to evolution, rather than a creator, because the creator would be the person who set that process in motion, not the process itself) has an ultimate aim, meaning or design that has been assigned to it by an external source? And in this case, is it not in direct contrast with the way we understand the world scientifically, where the process is blind as to the outcome, and has no meaning? God is the answer to our hows rather than whys? Why is God the answer to anything? On what authority does he come to that conclusion? Is "god" not essentially an answer to an unanswerable question?
Anyway, I understand the spirit in which this analogy is meant, and so I wonder why so often religious ideas attempt to claim to be able to answer questions in scientific areas where they clearly have nothing of any value to offer (and I would level the same criticism at science attempting to answer questions of the meaning of life). I'm not sure whether this is a human error, or whether there truely is an ideological difference, which makes it inevitable (most likely a bit of both). But that was certainly my criticism of the theologians in the particular debates that I has witnessed.