All we see
Theological ruminations in letters to the Guardian.
…there is nothing to lead any person to postulate a teapot circling the sun, but look around – all we see came from somewhere and although such a thought does nothing to prove the existence of a creator, it makes such a being worthy of consideration.
Well yes, all we see came from somewhere, but the question is where. ‘A creator’ could mean any number of things; there is no more reason to leap from ‘somewhere’ to ‘God’ than there is to leap from ‘somewhere’ to Jennifer or Bubbles or Squirrel Nutkin. ‘A creator’ could be a machine or a natural process or software or mice or some entity that we can’t even imagine. The fact that all we see came from somewhere does not by itself provide a reason to identify somewhere as any one particular thing much less any particular person much less a particular person described by some desert goatherds 30 centuries ago.
A vicar says That’s not Our God.
I don’t believe in the God whose existence Dawkins denies either – nor do most people in the British Christian churches.
Really? Really? How, exactly, does the God of the British Christian churches differ from the one Dawkins doesn’t believe in? And how explicit are the vicars in British Christian churches about that different God?
A professor of mathematics at York is not afraid of banality:
Science cannot decide between these world-views, but scientists on both sides believe that science supports their own faith (for atheism is also a faith – as even Dawkins says, you cannot prove there is no God).
Norm comments on that:
Atheists – or at least the kind of atheists whose atheism I am ready to defend, being one – think there is no God because they think that the balance of everything they know, all the putative evidence, all the would-be reasons, for believing in God fall short, whether singly or in combination, of establishing that He exists…It is no more persuasive to call atheism a faith than it would be to say that scepticism about the existence of beings that believers themselves regard as mythical – dragons, unicorns, mermaids – is a faith.
No it isn’t, and yet the attempt keeps being made (and it does at least convince the already-convinced). Why is that? Partly, I would guess, because people have been trained (by the steady drip-drip of just this kind of endlessly-recycled bad argument) to think that, for instance, the fact that all we see came from somewhere means that it came from a particular guy called God. This means that few people think that the existence of all we see constitutes evidence for the existence of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, but they do think it constitutes evidence for the existence of ‘God’. They’re wrong, of course, but they don’t know they’re wrong. The thought is so familiar it’s like a well-worn path that it’s hard to abandon. Part of the definition of ‘God’ is that it is a being who created all this stuff; that’s not true of dragons or mermaids. The problems with the notion that a guy called God created all this stuff are not familiar to most people who believe that (and the believers to whom the problems are familiar usually don’t bother spreading that familiarity around), so it comes to seem like a crude mistake not to think a guy called God is the somewhere from which all we see came. And then professors of mathematics pass it on.
It’s perhaps worthwhile pointing out – and I speak from experience – that it’s always possible for a theologian to back away from a particular defintion of God. People do it all the time. I can’t believe in a god … – and here you add characteristics that you can’t countenance in a god that you would believe in. After all, there are an endless number of ways to define God. The problem is, it doesn’t really matter how you define God, unless you can give a good reason to believe in the being so defined, and there really are always lots of reasons not to.
I think those must be the three most irritating cliches used by religious people to defend their irrationality.
The first and third don’t survive even the most cursory critical evaluation, and the second is such a blatent evasion.
The vicar seems to think he can define god in a way that’s consistent with reality but still get to make outragous claims on god’s behalf. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. I always wonder if people who use that argument are being deliberatly dihonest (“this’ll get them off my case”) or if they genuinly don’t realise how inconsistent they’re being.
“How, exactly, does the God of the British Christian churches differ from the one Dawkins doesn’t believe in?”
He is nominated as different. This is Dawkins vs. Duchamp.
The assertions of faith are not the same as the arguments of reason.
I was tempted to write to the Guardian about Rob Siddall’s letter, but it is wrong in so many different ways simultaneously that I couldn’t think of a way of covering them all in a pithy way (not one they would print anyway). I wonder if it whether it would help that I have actually been on a Clapham Omnibus, or is one only reasonable while actually on board?
Shriek!
Very good, Ken. Yes – if you want to be permanently reasonable you have to remain on the Clapham Omnibus, in the garage and all.
Would it be of use to remind ourselves of just how “Russell’s Teapot” goes? If you think not, then by all means delete this.
[Russell’s teapot, as scalped from Greta Christna’s Blog]:
“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
Notice that it is not so much a refutation of that notorious gob-stopper,”Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as it is a criticism of “Faith”.
That’s quite a good working definition.
God: a malleable concept that one can shape into whatever form best dodges the question.
That’s really good.
Thanks Elliott, it would be of use, I wouldn’t dream of deleting.
Don’t most churches still accept the Nicene Creed as the touchstone of being a christian?
That’s pretty much the deity Dawkins doesn’t believe in.
“How, exactly, does the God of the British Christian churches differ from the one Dawkins doesn’t believe in?”
By being so much more sophisticated and nuanced a concept, obviously.
Oh crumbs, I can still sing in plain chant and recite, off by heart, in both Latin/English, all of the “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium – yet if you were to ask me what a simile was I could not tell you, that is unless I looked it up or asked OB.
The religious were so busy brainwashing people like me that they never got their priorities right.
And surely this is a rhetorical dodge on top of the too-convenient re-definition, because Dawkins does not disbelieve in one definition of god, but all the alternative definitions that include existence?
“Those who criticise atheists’ views on God as primitive seem to forget that their religion did once have an actual foundation, namely the Bible/Koran/Torah etc., which does explicitly state what God is like”
Yes this is a God who cannot affect warriors wearing bronze armour.
Possibly he was a bit tired after creating the universe and needed to save his energy for turning whales into submersible fish prisons.
(The B&W article on how Dawkins’ God is identifiably the God of the Nicene Creed was excellent btw.)
That article, by Edmund Standing, was voted all-time top number one favorite at Dawkins’s site. Not just A favorite but THE favorite.