Here I Stand

Milbank and Hart: PoMo Critiques

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:35:24 -0700

"Postmodernism articulates itself as, first, an absolute historicism, second as an ontology of difference, and third as ethical nihilism … its historicist or genealogical aspect raises the spectre of a human world inevitably dominated by violence, without being able to make this ghost more solid in historicist terms alone. To supplement this deficiency, it must ground violence in a new transcendental philosophy, or fundamental ontology. This knowledge alone it presents as more than perspectival, more than equivocal, more than mythical. But the question arises: can such a claim be really sustained without lapsing back into the metaphysics supposedly forsworn?”

Von Balthasar on Beauty

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:46:37 -0700

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her tow sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”

Isaiah Berlin on Hamann

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:23:45 -0700

Hart on the Theologian's Art

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:51:32 -0700

"Religion, after all (as everyone knows), is a realm of purely personal conviction sustained by faith, which is (as everyone also knows) an entirely irrational movement of the will, an indistinct impulse of saccharine sentiment, pathetic longing, childish credulity, and vague intuition. And theology, being the special language of religion, is by definition a collection of vacuous assertions, zealous exhortations, and beguiling fables; it is the peculiar patois of a private fixation or tribal allegiance, of interest perhaps to the psychopathologist or anthropologist, but of no greater scientific value than that; surely it has no proper field of study of its own, no real object to investigate, and whatever rules it obeys must be essentially arbitrary.

The Theologian's Art

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:48:49 -0700

Imago Dei in Dostoevsky

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:39:05 -0700

"Dostoevsky's use of the biblical language of 'image and likeness' [in The Brothers Karamazov] is an index of the importance of these categories in his imagination. If humanity is in God's image, there is something that it is like to be human, something beyond any negotiation or contingency. In this sense, Adam cannot wholly die. Yet if every individual is of incalculable value, a situation in which large numbers of human beings are liable to suffer the obscuring or defacing of the image is an insupportable tragic one. Adam will not wholly die, but this does not mean that the death - morally or spiritually - of any one child of Adam is tolerable."

Amorality of Economics

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:31:38 -0700

"Although economics as a discipline is as riddled with conflict and division as is theology, economists are perhaps more agreed around some basic principles. One of those principles is that wages must be determined by what the market will allow and not by the intrusion of political authority. Thus, most economists argue against the state fixing a minimum wage, let alone a just wage, because the establishment of such a wage will produce unemployment and low productivity. A minimum wage is permissible only insofar as it is less than what the market would actually bear if left to itself. But here is where the social order that theology assumes conflicts with that assumed by the economists."

The God Confusion

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:14:15 -0700

Introduction

I thought I’d write a little something about the storm of interest which has arisen in Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delusion. And I want to begin by saying that I believe that as a phenomenon it’s the best thing to have happened to Christianity in the West for many many years. Although The Da Vinci Code stimulated huge amounts of interest in the Early Christian Church, Gnosticism and the debate over the divinity and humanity of Christ, it didn’t define the battle-lines between the Christian and secular views of the world anything like as successfully as Dawkins has done in this book and in many subsequent lectures and debates.

Why this confidence? Because history has shown again and again that Christianity’s most dangerous enemy is not persecution – it’s indifference, boredom, ignorance. Persecution, as we know, creates martyrs and the blood of the martyrs is…? The seed of the church. Tertullian put it like this: “the more you butcher us, the more numerous we become: the blood of Christians is seed.”[1]

Now anti-Christian sentiment isn’t so intense that we’re being physically persecuted, but what I call “worldview warfare”, which is being fought out simultaneously in many many vitally important battlegrounds – human sexuality, just war, ecology, abortion & euthanasia, faith-based schooling, embryo research, marriage, parenting, the family, crime & prisons, third-world health and poverty, radical Islam – is raging like never before. And we must engage in this, as soldiers for Christ. The apologist’s favourite proof-text is a verse taken from 1 Peter 3 – “always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in your hearts”. I prefer to go back to Jesus deliberately misquoting the commandment in Deuteronomy 4.6 that you "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” by adding, “and with all your mind”.[2] The Greek word dianoia is linked to the word metanoia (“repentance” or, more literally, a “mental U-turn”), and it means something like the whole of your mental faculties – mind, imagination, understanding, intelligence. It’s not just on the basis of scriptural authority that we are to engage God with our minds in this war - it’s on the basis of words uttered from the very lips of Jesus himself, in answer to the question: “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

The Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument

I don’t have time to address every point Dawkins raises, so I’ll stick to the two main arguments he has against the existence of God, which he says are the main basis for this view that belief in God is irrational and then look at where he thinks truth from and where we get morality from.
The first argument is the Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument goes like this: it’s based on a criticism of the argument that the probability of the universe coming into existence in the way that it did is like a hurricane sweeping through a hangar and assembling a Boeing 747. Dawkins attacks this by saying that it actually shows theism is enormously improbable, because if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."
The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create.

The argument rests on the premise that complexity can only arise out of greater complexity. But why should this be the case? Look at textbooks on evolutionary theory, for instance, - the whole point is that these simple single-cell organisms evolve into more complex life-forms.

Secondly, Dawkins’ definition of “complex” in The Blind Watchmaker is something which has parts “arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone”; but the claim of the Christian is that God is spirit, not matter;[3] therefore He does not have any parts; therefore He cannot have any parts arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone. So by Dawkins’ own definition, God is not complex.

Thirdly, even if we granted that God was complex and not simple, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the Christian from saying fine, God is more complex than the world which he created?

I’ve called this talk “The God Confusion”. And the reason I’ve done that is that none of the new atheists has seriously tried to show that the god they’re arguing against comes remotely close to the God we believe him to be. Debate between Christians and atheists is absolutely impossible if we can’t even agree how to define the being whose existence we’re arguing about. Judaism, Christianity, Islam hold fundamentally to the proposition that God is a necessary being. What do we mean by that? Well, we mean that He is not an appendix to something else. He was not created by anything or anybody else. Philosophers like to say He is not contingent, in the way that every aspect of His creation is. Which basically means uncreated. And this isn't some fancy definition of God dreamt up by smart Alec theologians to anticipate Dawkins' objection: it is at the very heart of the biblical understanding. I don't have time to look at all evidence, but I wd put you for starters towards Exodus where God tells Moses he is to be called I am who I am + in John where Jesus says before Abe was, I am. Neither the Father nor the Son are shackled by time. The Godhead cuts across space-time, or if you prefer it is utterly transcendent.

So the question which Dawkins raises “who made God?” is, I’m afraid, a completely incoherent one. It’s like asking someone “What will next Tuesday smell like?” or: “What colour is that idea?” It’s a meaningless sentence. It is an unanswerable question, but not quite in the way that he would have us think.

Now Dawkins absolutely hates Christians telling him that they don’t believe in the God he disbelieves in. But straw gods just won’t do. He may not like this definition of God, but I'm afraid that if we Christians, Jews and Muslims are deluded about God, then the burden is on him to show that it is God about whom we are deluded.

The Multiverse Argument
Let’s look quickly at Dawkins’ objection to the fine-tuning argument, which basically rests on the observation that almost everything about the basic structure of the universe – the fundamental laws of physics, the initial distribution of matter and energy – is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur. Why is this? Many thinkers reason that it’s simply not rational to say it “just happened” (those of you who’ve seen the bumper sticker know exactly what it is that “just happens”). Because the probabilities involved here are inconceivable – 1 in 10 to the power of 40. Someone said that if you covered Russia in coins, piled each coin up to the moon and then painted the side of one coin red and asked a friend to find it in one go, that’s the sort of probability we’re talking about. The most rational conclusion is that there was a supreme intelligence at work in the universe’s creation. Stephen Hawking writes: “the odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”
How does Dawkins deal with this? Well, with great difficulty, it has to be said. His answer is that we are actually living in one universe of many. “There are many universes”, he says, “co-existing like bubbles of foam” – and we just happen to be in the one which can support our existence. There’s a wonderful footnote here: “[I’m told] this idea is hated by most physicists. I can’t understand why.” Well, perhaps because there’s not the slightest evidence for it.

Alvin Plantinga, the world’s greatest living Christian philosopher, demolishes this argument very quickly. He says imagine you’re playing poker with some mates. One of them deals himself twenty straight hands of four aces in the same game of poker. The odds against this happening are enormous. You tell him to stop cheating. He says “Well, I know it looks suspicious. But what if there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of poker hands, there is one universe in which this possibility is realised. We just happen to find ourselves in the one universe where I always deal myself four aces without cheating.” Would that wash with you?

Atheist Evolution & Truth

So there are some objections to Dawkins’ two main arguments against the existence of God.
But what I want to do now is look at two other key areas where he claims that Darwinian evolution dissolves like acid (to use Daniel Dennett’s metaphor) any possible justification for believing in God. The first argument is that because evolution might be able to explain how we came to have religious faith, therefore the object of that faith is a false one.

Can we see already how that's a really dodgy logical move? Philosophers like to call this the “genetic fallacy” – from the Greek “genesis” – i.e. to do with beginnings, origins. What do we mean by a genetic fallacy? Well very simply it means that you can’t prove the value or truth of something by appealing to how that something came to be, to its origins, its beginning. You get this quite a lot I find as an objection to Christian belief – “you’re just a Christian because you were born into a Christian family in a Christian country with broadly Christian values and were made to go to chapel at school”. To which the obvious reply is that you’re just an atheist because you were born into a society which is increasingly hostile to religion and where atheism has acquired a kind of bizarre intellectual cachet – but this reply also of course does not prove anything. Either way, you’re not saying anything about whether the beliefs you hold are true or false: all you’re explaining how you came by them. Here’s another example – what if someone tomorrow finds the God gene – what would that prove? That we are deluded by our genes from realizing we live in a godless universe? Or that God encouraged within us a predisposition to believe in Him if we freely chose to do so? There’s nothing to tilt our reasoning in either direction.

So that’s the genetic fallacy. I really like the fact that it’s called a genetic fallacy because Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s finest geneticists and there’s a sort of delicious irony in finding logical fallacies which bear the name of his own discipline.

The second objection is a more serious one. Let me summarise: natural selection doesn't care about whether we evolve to think true things about the world. In fact, research has shown that you've got much better chances of survival if you're ever so slightly paranoid about the environment around you.
You might tell your atheist friend “I believe in Jesus.” And your friend could say “Well, that's great, as long as you realise it’s just an accidental by-product of a wider evolutionary survival strategy.
“I believe in self-sacrifice” – “Well that's because altruism in the long run will benefit your kin group.”
“I believe in objective moral values” – again, that belief is just an illusory aid to help you and yours prosper that little bit more.
“I believe that God heals today” – for goodness’ sake: don’t you know how many studies there are showing how powerful the psychological impact of the placebo effect is?
“Ok, I believe in evolution…” “Ah, well that’s different”. “Why is it different?” “Well, look at all the evidence for it”. “But we’re not disputing the evidence: we’re arguing about which worldview best fits the evidence.” Worldview warfare, remember?

You see here’s the thing: if the atheist claims that his version of evolution is true, then his very belief that it's true is driven not by the desire to discover true things about the world, but by the desire to survive in the world; and therefore the atheist cuts off the very branch from which he's been criticizing religion. But if the Christian approach to evolutionary theory is true, our brains are not entirely the product of survival mechanisms; they carry within them a spark – that spark which is the image of the rational God within us – that's what gets us onto having true thoughts about the world; that's what anchors our insight into the evolutionary processes going on around us in truth. Because the Christian claim is that at the very root of the universe is not matter, but mind, reason, rationality. You see the problem with atheism is that it's just not rational enough.

Atheist Evolution & Morality

So that’s the truth side of things. What about morality? What about good and evil? Dawkins has a lot to say about the evils of religion, almost all of which I think it would be very hard for us to disagree with – indeed, it takes up a large chunk of the book. He asks us to imagine, with John Lennon, a world without 9/11, the crusades, witch hunts, and so on – a world without religion, he wants us to believe, would be a paradise.

Other writers in response to Dawkins have set out much better than I can what sort of utopias are created by those who would try to eradicate religion, so I’d like to leave that to one side. Suffice to say that T.S. Eliot once said that to ask whether the world would be better off without religion is to ask a question to which we can never know the answer, because our culture is so fundamentally shaped and influenced (for good or ill) by the Judaeo-Christian worldview. In fact, to take this a bit further, our very concept of “better off” would be dictated basically by the moral code contained in this worldview. I had a good chuckle when Dawkins cites with approval a list of ten commandments he Googled and found on a blog (this, I’m afraid to say, is one of his favourite research method) – this include “treat your fellow human beings with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect”, “test all things”, “always be ready to forgive wrongdoing”. Any of these sound familiar? They bear an uncanny resemblance, I think you’d agree, to many passages in the Christian scriptures which he so forcefully condemns.

But the more profound objection I have against Dawkins’ moral theory is this: if the atheist’s theory of evolution is correct, then there is actually no way to adjudicate what is right and what is wrong. We’re back to our old friend natural selection: natural selection doesn’t care about morality; or at least it only cares about it insofar as it increases your survival prospects. Dawkins himself writes this in Unweaving the Rainbow:

"In the universe of blind physical forces some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice… at the bottom of the universe there is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music."

Do you see the problem? If at bottom there is no evil and no good, then how on earth can Dawkins find a non-arbitrary basis for saying that – for instance – the God of the Old Testament is genocidal and that’s an evil thing for Him to be? Or that his imagined utopia without religion is “good”. I just can’t see any way that can be done.

This leads me into deeper point which you must always remember when discussing pain, evil and suffering with friends – always affirm their basic conviction that pain and evil is an outrage. But then ask them to push that a bit further and say, ok, where does this sense of injustice come from? Is it simply a part of the shifting moral zeitgeist, as Dawkins argues? Because if that’s the case, being moral is like having a favourite brand of beer – it’s basically subjective, up for grabs, depending on where and when you’re born or what your genes’ survival strategy is. But if God exists, and we’re made in his image, that changes everything. Our gut instinct for example that the holocaust is the most horrific evil imaginable any time, any place, anywhere, is on the money, because our view of morality is rooted in a God who is goodness itself; who is the ultimate judge as to what is evil and what is good; and because we bear his image, we have a purchase on what’s objectively right and what’s objectively wrong.

Conclusion

As I explained at the beginning, books like these are a marvelous way to get people talking and interested in the beliefs we hold as Christians. And it’s one of the best ways to love God. We are hardwired to love, worship and find our ultimate fulfilment in God, and to love him with all our body, soul, strength and dianoia – after all, it’s part of our DNA.

Does Religion Poison Everything?

Fri, 09 May 2008 07:11:15 -0700

“Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival … As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won attainments [I am touching upon]. Religion poisons everything.”

Thus Christopher Hitchens, the British-born commentator and polemicist, in his immensely readable and provocative book published last year entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. What are we to make of such a trenchant claim? Are we to put it down to the nature of the polemicist’s art, staking out the most extreme opposing ground possible and slug it out from there? Or should we take him at his word? Is he right? I want to start by suggesting that he is not right, obviously. Religion, like sex or food, can be used or abused. We don’t find anyone in Austria calling for the state to legislate its way into the bedroom because one of its deranged citizens sexually assaulted his own daughter. We don’t ban fish and chip shops just because some fanatics of the fat-fry choose to carry out suicide strikes on their own bodies.

Does Reason Require God?

Wed, 07 May 2008 08:54:02 -0700

For those of you who were at all interested in my post on the evolutionary argument against atheism, I based a talk I delivered last November at Friday Forum on it which can be found here.

I am giving another talk on Friday 9 May entitled "Does Religion Poison Everything?" -- it is both a critique and an affirmation of Christopher Hitchens' recent book God Is Not Great. A link to the text will be up fairly soon, but please come along to heckle!

Bernstein on Secularisation

Wed, 07 May 2008 03:28:12 -0700

"Until recently theories of secularization (in all three aspects) were accepted virtually without question. But in the past few decades secularization theories have been severely criticized – especially the decline of religion thesis and the privatization thesis. Some sociologists of religion now advocate the complete abandonment of the theory of secularization. Religion is certainly not disappearing in the modern world. Indeed, the empirical evidence indicates a tremendous growth of a variety of different religions in many (although, not all) regions of the world. Furthermore, rather than increasing privatization, we find an almost aggressive move toward a public role for religion in social and political movements.”

Why Belief in Evolution Requires Belief in God

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:34:42 -0700

“With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind?”

Charles Darwin (Letter to William Graham,

Tree of Life

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:16:14 -0800

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 2.4 & Micah 4.3

An Accidental Saint

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:38:06 -0800

St. Vladimir of Kiev, whose statue you can see – rather quixotically – just as you emerge from Holland Park Tube, fell somewhat by chance into sainthood. Indeed, if you had found yourself in his court as the first millennium was drawing to a close, you wouldn't have been likely to throw your hard-earned rubles on young Vlad as a future candidate for canonisation. For Vlad’s paganism bordered on the fanatical: he instituted the cultic practice of sacrificing humans to feed the insatiable appetites of the Norse gods; he built a staggering number of shrines and statues to them in those lands which he had brutally subdued in his youth; he had, in addition to several wives, around 800 concubines to meet his every need. There are not many major players in world history who could claim to have plumbed such chasms of debauchery.

Explosion of Life

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:57:40 -0800

I couldn't really go on for much longer reading all these wide-ranging and insightful thoughts from the About Life world without trying to join in myself.

More from me anon I hope; in the meantime let me warmly recommend to Christian and non-Christian alike a recent speech made by Pope Benedict in Sicily on the Resurrection as an "explosion of life" and the tremendous need for the Church (I think that on the basis of Vatican II's Lumen Gentium we can include non-Catholics - and even non-Christians? - in that) to seek the strength needed from the Holy Spirit to "give positive and convincing responses to the longings and questions of our people".