Posted on 09/28/2003 10:31:50 AM PDT by ZeitgeistSurfer
Oxford University Press gets the prize for the year's snappiest book title: "God?''
As the subtitle explains, this is "A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist'' about whether God exists, one of humanity's great questions.
The book doesn't assess any old deity but the Bible's unique, all-loving and all-powerful God.
This ancient question became quite current with two recent opinion pieces in The New York Times.
In one, Tufts University's Daniel Dennett caustically championed those like himself who don't believe in "ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny – or God.'' Dennett said atheists are "the moral backbone of the nation'' and (ignoring opinion polls) its "silent majority.'' He called atheists "brights,'' implying that believers are "dims'' or "dumbs.''
In the second piece, the Times' own Nicholas Kristof lamented a growing, "poisonous'' divide between "intellectual and religious America.'' He blamed believers for clinging to tenets he finds unreasonable, and implied that they lack applied brainpower.
However, there's ample intellect with William Lane Craig of California's Talbot School of Theology, God's defender in "God?'' In fact, he presents the opposite problem, employing new twists taken from physics and mathematics that will flummox ordinary readers.
Quick: What do you get when you subtract infinity from infinity? And do you favor the Oscillating Universe, Chaotic Inflationary Universe, Vacuum Fluctuation Universe or Quantum Gravity Universe?
Craig's equally able counterpart is Dartmouth College atheist Walter Sinnot-Armstrong. (The book is based on two face-to-face debates they held.)
Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame, an estimable Protestant philosopher (who must have escaped Kristof's notice) has proposed "two dozen or so'' arguments for God. But Craig thinks just five make the case, if taken cumulatively:
* One is the evidence for
supernatural miracles that display God's power, using as an example the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not a bad argument, but it's unlikely to convince non-Christians.
* God makes sense of the existence of the universe (which is where math and physics come in). Craig says it's good logic that "something cannot come from nothing,'' and God is the only reasonable explanation.
* God also makes sense of a universe that's "fine-tuned'' to support the existence of intelligent life despite the astronomical odds against it. He thinks it's more plausible to believe an "intelligent Mind'' caused this than that it just happened.
* God's existence explains the moral values whose objective reality we recognize, even when they're violated. (The Holocaust was evil even if the Nazis had won; child molesting is always wrong, and so forth.) Where do these absolutes come from, if not from God?
* Hosts of people profess that God can be immediately known and experienced. There's no way to absolutely prove this reality, but we all follow such basic beliefs drawn from experience in other contexts, and "it is perfectly rational to hold them.''
Sinnot-Armstrong, of course, finds Craig full of fallacies, as follows:
* Miracle accounts are "feeble testimony'' from "self-interested parties.''
* On origins, we just don't know enough, and citing God as the cause "is to explain the obscure by the more obscure, which gets us nowhere.''
* Even if "fine-tuning'' for intelligent life is highly improbable, what's to say a Mind created it? Maybe we're just lucky, like lottery winners.
* If moral values are objective, they're true whether or not God commanded them, so "God is superfluous.''
* Religious experiences don't suffice because they contain competing ideas of God. Anyway, if there were a God, he'd have the power to directly make his existence obvious to everyone.
Sinnot-Armstrong also uses what Craig acknowledges is "atheism's killer argument,'' how to explain the reality of human suffering.
Philosophers debate God's existence in book
It reminds me of that famous old wall graffiti, where someone scribbled "God is dead - Nietzsche". Underneath it somebody else scribbled, "Nietzsche is dead - God"
I love both of those. What it immediately reminded me of was the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. There's a bit in there where they explain the babel fish. This is from the Wikipedia:
Babel fish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Babel fish is a fictional species of fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
It is a highly improbable biological universal translator, a "small, yellow and leechlike" fish which, when inserted into the ear canal meant that the 'wearer' could "instantly understand anything said... in any form of language." This was both a useful plot device for Adams, who wrote on the subject that he always found the ability of all aliens to speak English very strange; and also the starting point for a joke about the existence of God.
According to the Hitchhikers Guide, the Babel fish was put forth as an example for the non-existence of God:
- "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
- "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D.."
- "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
- "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
The other bit from that book was there were supposedly several best selling books by philosophers with titles like "who is this God person anyway?" I always wondered if Adams might be a closet Inkling.
Your graffiti reminds me of a series of billboards down here in the mid-south area. All have huge white letters on a solid black background. Things like
"Sunday, My House, before the game - God."
They also had one
"What part of "Thou Shalt Not" don't you get?"
I'd really like to see you do a book review of it, although it would take some time. And it might be worth your effort to do so, because maybe you can tear it apart in front of all the FR Christians who admire Lewis's writings.
You could, of course, critique a Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist book, but that wouldn't count because FR has hardly any of those and so you wouldn't be able to challenge them. :)
I'd really like to see your book review of "Mere Christianity", if you're up to it.
Generally, any term, abstract or otherwise, that cannot be defined, is meaningless. But, in this case, the subject is God, which is not supposed an abstract concept, like, "justice," or, "importance," but an actual existent, like the, "universe".
The problem is, if I hand you a book and say, "believe this," and the book is written in a language you do not understand, you will rightly tell me you cannot believe it, because there is nothing for you to believe, you don't know what it means. You can neither reject it or accept it.
It turns out that almost every definition or description of God contains words which the describer or definer admits they do not know the meaning of. If something is defined by words without meaning, what is one to believe? First there must be something understood, then one can decided to believe or not to believe it. No one can believe what has no meaning?
Hank
I've read them. They're wrong. You read them, and believed them, but that is not surprising for one who believes words do not have to have exact meanings. No doubt it is comforting to have someone reinforce one's cherished irrationalities, expecially if they call themselves philosophers.
No wonder the world of philosophy is collapsing, its full of mystics, neo-palonists, and linquistic analysists.
Sorry, this mystic garbledegook gets no purchase here.
Hank
Whoever can look at the miracle of existance and still be an atheist is a person who is walking around with a blindfold.
So when did you turn Grand Inquisitor?
Is someone who doesn't believe God let's you do wrong and get away with it an atheist?
Hank
About the same time I found out that you turned atheist. I was starting to wonder why you'd dropped out of the Calvinist/Arminian threads.
Is someone who doesn't believe God lets you do wrong and get away with it an atheist?
Would you prefer I had said, 'turned your back on Jesus Christ'?
I have no preferance regarding what other people say. I believe in freedom of speech, and what other's say matters not to me.
Just a word of caution, for your sake. Be careful what you say. (Mat.12:37)
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