As easy as science
And speaking of ignorance and silliness, there’s always Theo Hobson.
[A] creationist is not someone who subscribes to the idea of divine creation; it is a believer who refuses to admit the difficulty entailed in Christian faith, who wants it to be as easy as science…[W]hen I say that I believe that God created me, and the whole world, I am making a difficult statement of faith. It is the most difficult statement of faith that can be made: it is saying that I trust God will right all wrongs, cure all pain. For Christians do not just believe that God created the world, but that he created it good, and that this fundamental goodness will ultimately triumph.
A couple of points. One, it’s not just difficult (and for most people it’s not even difficult, it’s dead easy), it’s wicked. Possibly that’s what Hobson means by ‘difficult,’ but if it is it must be cowardice that prevents him from saying so (because why else wouldn’t he say so?). It’s wicked to say all that because it means that all the suffering the world is so full of is ‘good’ and intended by a conscious agent; that’s a bad thing to say. At that rate one could just take Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot to be incarnations of God; at that rate we are trained to embrace cruelty instead of rejecting and reviling it.
The second point is that it’s typical of Hobson’s particular kind of conceit, to say that ‘faith’ is difficult while science is easy. Bullshit. It’s faith that is easy, because it’s an act of will, with no skill or knowledge required; science is difficult because you have to know lots of stuff to do it. It’s just conceited self-flattering rhetoric to reverse the terms that way.
He inadvertently hits on something. Faith is more difficult because it is a daily denial of even the basest of the facts in front of someone. Must be tiring.
Now come on – you’re being unfair. Faith is obviously difficult if it requires you to believe that this…
To believe that God created the world is not really a quasi-scientific theory; it is an act of innocence, of total affirmation, of total gratitude. In a sense it is prelapsarian, only fully possible in a pure, unfallen state. For adult humans, it is a bit of an effort.
… makes such sense. Because by his own criterion it’s not only difficult but impossible. Original Sin = an inability to enjoy the ‘prelapsarian’ state necessary to believe – nay, totally “affirm” – that God created the world. Pardon the language but our Theo thinks any of this makes any sense then he’s out of his fucking gourd – why waste your time on him?
Sorry but this species of pseudo-intellectual ‘liberal’ Anglican mind-gloop beloved of the Guardian and particularly CiF: anything’s better than that.
Really. That particular bit made me come so close to gagging that I couldn’t read it all the way to the end.
Of course his faith is difficult – intellectual contortionism and wilful blindness in defiance of reality are not for the faint-hearted.
His beliefs about divine creation are equivalent to sticking a 1975 Lada badge on a Boeing 787 and then persuading yourself not only is this modern American jet really an old Russian clunker of car, but also the car is better for getting from Singapore to Sydney.
Good grief!
But aren’t we always being told that it takes more faith to believe in science than in goddidit?
If you want to understand Hobson, you have to start at the end, where he says, with considerable aplomb: “The way forward is for Christians to try to communicate the complexity of faith, to get it across to people like Grayling that we affirm Christianity as “the true myth”, which need not clash with science.”
Now, this makes Christian faith very difficult indeed. First of all, it’s a myth. Second, it’s a true myth. And third, t’s compatible with science.
Does this make sense? In order for this to make even the smallest amount of sense, the ‘true myth’ must square at some point with the findings of science; but the only way myth can be held to be true is if we are prepared to withdraw into a world in which none of the questions which trouble Christians now were being asked. We hive off into a little world of our own, where science really has no input at all, and then slip in and out of the scientific world as it suits us. Whenever we come out into the light of day we claim congruence, and then we slip back into the dim clouds of incense around the altar.
Theo Hobson is perhaps the least intelligent of the contemporary apologists for Christianity. He just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t seem to realise that you can’t have your faith and science too. Once you’ve call a tall story a ‘true myth’, you’ve lost the truth altogether, because if a myth is true, how does science even begin to get into the picture? Which is why Paul Tillich began his systematic theology with the ‘broken myth’.
Hobson is the kind of Christian who claims to know, but when you rub his gray cells together, all you get is incense smoke.It’s really time for him to stop pretending that he has his fingers on the pulse of the 21st century. He hasn’t even made it to the 17th!
Looks to me like he never acdtually READ any Creationist literature to see what they were on about. They are exactly what he says they are not.