- a) A quick browse through suggested that it could be interesting, enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.
- b) His arguments are becoming increasingly well known. Even if I don’t agree with his conclusions, I ought to have a clear enough grasp of his reasoning to be able to debate the issues.
- c) If the Christian world-view is true, then it ought to stand up to robust counter-arguments of the kind that Dawkins presents. Therefore I have nothing to worry about in seriously examining the factual and logical evidence that denies God’s existence. I’ll go further. Unless I can start with the same facts Dawkins draws our attention to, and employ the same rigorous powers of logic he brings to bear, and be honest enough with myself that I don’t jump to a foregone conclusion and ignore evidence that doesn’t fit... unless I can do all that and still reason my way to a Christian understanding of God, then my world-view is frankly not worth believing in.
In case any reader thinks I am in danger of actively supporting Richard Dawkins, I should point out that I baulked at the thought of him receiving royalties from my purchase of his book – so I borrowed it from the local library!
Perhaps I shouldn’t begrudge him his royalties, because I have found myself provoked and stimulated. I agree with him at many points (though not his key point, that God is a hugely improbable hypothesis) and he has helped me think through deep issues with greater clarity. Here’s the first of my reflections.
“Science deals with HOW and theology deals with WHY” is a popular cop-out. I agree with Dawkins that theology should not be immune to scientific enquiry. One point he makes is that a universe created and sustained by a personal God who interacts with it (and with its inhabitants) on a daily basis should look different to a universe without God. I have long argued that a God who never interferes with his world or his people might as well not exist. And it impossible to remove such interference from the physical realm. Even if God is limited (and I don’t believe he is) to nudging our thoughts in the right direction, then this constitutes interfering with the firing of neurons in our brain (a physical process).
So, as I look at the kind of universe we live in, does it seem to be a universe with God or a universe without God? It certainly looks to me like the former. I can’t justify this on the basis of scientific experiment. It just the overall impression I get. I know this is hardly very rigorous logic, but maybe I can explain it with an analogy. How do I know my wife is anything more than a physical entity simply responding to external stimuli in particular ways? How do I know that she exists as a ‘person’ like me, with the ability to make free choices, express love and form relationships? My wife with such a personal aspect ought to be different from my wife without it. Yet the difference would be hard to describe in purely scientific terms. It is only by living with her over time that I become convinced that she is a person and not a sophisticated biological automaton.
I know that Dawkins dismisses personal experience as too susceptible to wishful thinking or self-deception. But all I can say is that my experience of the world is that it looks, feels and behaves very much as if it were a world graced by the presence of a loving God.
(see also later post)
1 comment:
Dawkins has faith in science. Science is based on the unprovable premise that the observable characteristics of the material world today is the same that would have been seen yesterday, and that of tomorrow. No empirical activity can prove that the laws of nature are constant.
Neither can it be proven that human logic is a consistently valid method of truth deduction. For instance, one can't “prove” that if A=B and B=C then A=C. It is either self-evident or not, but we can’t prove it.
These are axioms, in other words, articles of faith. They make a lot of sense to us, and they seem to hold true. But we have nothing outside them by which to know (as opposed to believing in) their validity.
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