Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis

601. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61630 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 6, 2007 at 3:41 am

Goldy (post 1768, or #61609):

So, what, we still "are" after we die? Death is not the end?

No – at least there is no reason to believe it is. In fact the idea that death is the end is based on a false argument that goes more or less like this: Before we experience other people die we experience them experiencing; After we experience other people die we don't anymore experience them experiencing; Therefore after we experience other people die they don't experience anything; Therefore after we experience ourselves dying we won't experience anything.

Now if there was some reason to believe that our brain produces our capacity for having conscious experiences then we would have a good argument for believing that there is no experiencing after death, because after death our brain gets destroyed. But, unless one is a naturalist, there exists no reason at all to believe or even to suspect that our brain produces our capacity for having conscious experiences. So the belief that death is the end of experiencing is a half-baked implication of naturalism; if one does not believe in naturalism the idea that death is the end is rather fantastic. (I say "half-baked" because as it turns out even in naturalism there is no good argument to justify the belief that our brain produces our consciousness; see post 548 about this – there are several posts in this thread that discuss the relationship between brain and consciousness, for example 135, 492, the aforementioned 548, 567, 616, 664,677, 778.)

602. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61595 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 5, 2007 at 11:41 pm

BAEOZ (post 1715, or #60097):

meantime we do still not know where life goes to on death - Downunder

Unless you want to violate the 1st law of thermodynamics; there is nothing after death.

I don't quite see the connection. Our experience of life may well survive our experience of death, and, who knows, we may in the afterlife continue to experience an environment that follows the 1st law of thermodynamics.

In this context I would like to note that some naturalists are not that certain that "there is nothing after death". Sam Harris for one. Also about half the expert naturalist philosophers and scientists who were asked whether consciousness survives death by Blackmore in her "Conversations on consciousness" declared their agnosticism on that issue.

603. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61594 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 5, 2007 at 11:21 pm

Lauregon:

(post 1708, or #59774)

but really, Dianelos, pie in the sky is a very long way away from here and now.

Not really very long way away – people keep telling me that life is short :-)

My granddaughter will probably never be able to support herself or live alone.

Probably never in this life. My beliefs may sound like pie in the sky to you, but I believe they are true and describe how reality is pretty well.

That's reality.

Not my understanding of reality, no.

I seriously doubt that any truly loving human being would ever contrive such a program for the development of human virtue.

Right, but let's be careful here. God is a person but is not a human being. What's more God is not just a person, God is all of reality. The idea of knowing God by knowing ourselves is meant to open our eyes to how reality is and to literally raise our spirits as it were – but not to bring God down to our level. To say that a seed carries the image of a tree does not imply that a tree is similar to a seed :-)

(post 1709, or #599779):

Would any "ideal person" do something as sadistic as condemning women to suffer agonizing pain in childbirth as a punishment for disobedience as the "God" of Genesis is supposed to have done? Would any ideal person use the threat of eternal punishment in "hell" as a means of extracting divine allegience? I don't think so. Do you?

No, I certainly don't. In fact I wonder sometimes if it's not better as a practical matter not to believe in God rather than believe that God is like that. But then again I wonder how many people really believe that God is like that - I can't very well imagine people being able to really believe that; maybe they are just saying they do having been frightened out of their minds - but who knows, I may be wrong.

(post 1730, or #61027):

On the contrary I have spend lots of time arguing that the evidence for God is overwhelming and inescapable – all data we have, both third and first-person data point to God. - Dianelos

Whose God, Dianelos? "God" as defined by what person or group? The God of Christian orthodoxy? The Jewish version? The Muslim version? Or, perhaps the literary-type "God," the poetic construction "God" that embodies human dreams and yearnings suggested by Bonzai in reference to Hedges "God" some pages back? Perhaps a psychological tool "God" constructed to make life seem easier and joyous? Whose version of "God," Dianelos?

Well, I suppose the correct answer is "Nobody's". God is all of reality and belongs or is defined by no-one, but is as it is. (Which, incidentally, is the same answer you'd get from a naturalist if you'd ask them whose physical reality they mean, the one described by this interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the one described by another.)

But you may insist: "What God exactly are you talking about?". My short answer there could be: "The God absolutely all evidence points to – find out the details for yourself as you have the same evidence I have." My longer answer is this: All concepts we coin to define existents, for example "apple", or "atom", or "gravitation", or "pi", or "beauty", or "mathematical laws" or whatever, refers to an explanatory pattern that is present in our experience. Further the patterns present in our experience are hierarchical, for example "fruit" is a more general pattern than "apple" which in turn is a more general pattern than "this particular apple". So the question arises whether there exists the most general pattern of all, an overarching explanation for all our experience. Most people would intuit that it exists because our experience appears to be coherent. If that overarching explanatory pattern exists then the next question that arises is: what are its properties? Well, to say "God exists" is equivalent to saying that this overarching explanatory pattern exists and that its most basic property is that it is a person.

It seems to me that even the burning of witches centuries ago was not so much motivated by religion (I am not aware of any injunctions in Christianity that call for the burning of witches), but by superstition – the explicit justification was the once again imagined threat that witchcraft represented for society. - Dianelos

The injunction "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live" is found in the Bible (Exodus 22:18).

Oh, I did not know that. I have not read most of the Old Testament myself for I did not see the point. So the question is to which degree we should consider Christian scripture in general and the Old Testament in particular to be religion rather than superstition. Here Dr Benway's point about "legal basis" is certainly relevant: that particular sentence in the Old Testament has probably served as the legal basis for the burning of witches. What can I say - I agree with Harris and Dawkins as well as with educated freethinkers of whatever ontological conviction that to believe in the literal truth of the Bible is not only obviously wrong but also harmful, both for people individually and for society as a whole. Still - in defense of my argument above - I don't see in the spirit of Christianity as I have learned it at school anything that would motivate one to follow that Biblical injunction, I really don't see that, quite the contrary in fact. The problem we all have is with the understanding of the Bible as the literal word of God, and I object that this is entailed in all theism, or even in orthodox or official Christianity (as far as I know the official understanding is that the Bible is the word of God but not in a literal sense and that therefore it requires interpretation and understanding through tradition; I trust no Christian church today approves of the burning of witches that took place in past centuries, right?)

Actually, Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, contradicted the Old Testament again and again, like when he said at the Sermon on the Mount: You have heard that you should hate your enemies but I tell you that you should love them; you have heard an eye for an eye but I tell you to turn the other cheek; etc. Further he said, contrary to the literal scriptural reading, that one can work to help others on the Sabbath, and when people were about to stone a woman according to the Law he asked the one who had never sinned to throw the first stone. It seems to me that it was rather those who understood scripture literally, the studious scripture readers, who felt threatened by Jesus' message and who asked for Jesus to be silenced.

Because the entire Bible is believed by devout Christians to be the very word of God, the killing of witches was dutifully performed by Christians.

Oh, come on. There are also injunctions to stone one's children if they don't have the right beliefs, Deuteronomy 13:7-11, so what? BTW I learned that bit of Biblical nonsense in Harris's "The end of faith". Actually there is a part in that book with an entire list of trivial transgressions that are punishable by death in the Old Testament. Harris's intention was to show how dangerous literal belief in the Old Testament is, but the actual effect on me was the opposite: As nobody (except maybe some really loony types – not even fundamentalists in general) is today suggesting that people who commit these transgressions should be punished with death it shows that nobody really believes this stuff anymore. Many parts of the Bible are bad enough, but at least they were written in very ignorant times – I don't see how modern books full of scaremongering and lacking any sense of proportion can help. Surely it's not like one wrong balances the other.

On whose authority can it be said they were wrong to ignore the Biblical injunction?

On our own authority of course :-) That's what reason is for. And as it's God who gave us reason it should be especially clear for a theist that large parts of the Bible are nothing more than superstitious nonsense, and others, frankly, nothing more than abject ethical failure.

I think I understand now a major cognitive difference between the stance represented in Harris's and Dawkins's books and my own stance: I see religion as humankind's response to the most fundamental structure of reality and religious institutions, traditions and scripture as historical ramifications of religion; whereas Harris and Dawkins consider science to be humankind's response to the most fundamental structure of reality and consider scripture to be the central part of religion.

It's also not unusual for religionists to quote Biblical "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" defenses for capital punishment.

So they pick and choose what's worse in the Bible :-( Which is particularly strange as they are Christians and in the Gospels Jesus explicitly speaks against the ethics of an eye for an eye (Matthew 5:38ff): "You heard that it was said: Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth; but I, I say to you, not to resist the evil, but whoever shall slap you on your right cheek, turn to him also the other; and whoever is willing to take you to law, and your coat to take -- permit to him also the cloak. And whoever shall impress you one mile, go with him two, to him who is asking of you be giving, and him who is willing to borrow from you, you may not turn away. You heard that it was said: You shall love your neighbor, and shall hate your enemy; but I, I say to you, Love your enemies, bless those cursing you, do good to those hating you, and pray for those accusing you falsely, and persecuting you, that you may be sons of your Father in the heavens, because His sun He does cause to rise on evil and good, and He does send rain on righteous and unrighteous. For, if you may love those loving you, what reward have you? Do not also the tax-gatherers the same? And if you may salute your brethren only, what do you abundant? Do not also the tax-gatherers so? You shall therefore be perfect, as your Father who in the heavens is perfect."

The problem, Dianelos, is that argumentation for the character and edicts of an unseen, supernatural Supreme Being are inescapably capricious

The problem surely lies is the way I explain what I believe, for in my understanding God is anything but capricious.

(post 1734, or #61068):

The last sentence should have been, "On whose authority can it be said that the (alleged) word of God as recorded in this Exodus passage was wrong and shouldn't be taken seriously?"

The same answer as above: on the authority of our (God-given) reason.

(post 1744, or #61283):

Your original point was that knowing and thinking aren't necessary to developing trust.

That was never my meaning. I agree with you that you can't trust a person you don't at all know.

Exactly the way it is for God. After all, according to my understanding, S/He is somebody who is not unpredictable nor mysterious.- Dianelos

Presumably then, you can explain all unpleasant and horrific events and circumstances which humans experience.

Well I tried to explain that in post 1680 (#59597).

Quite on the contrary: God being perfectly good is in many ways easier to understand and predict than other people. -Dianelos

As long as you assume that all that happens is necessarily and ultimately "good."

Rather: As long as you assume that all that happens is necessarily and ultimately for what's good for all of us. As I wrote before I think it makes no sense at all to consider personal tragedy a good thing.

What's partially unpredictable is the physical environment we find us in, and one can understand why God would have caused us to experience such a basically random environment. - Dianelos

One can? I can't.

Well, suppose you are God designing an experiential environment which is apt for imperfect persons to attain virtue. Now consider the following ethically challenging event that may happen in our world: A child slips from her mother's hands and falls from a bridge into a river; her mother cries in anguish for she cannot swim; you are good swimmer and wonder if you should jump into the river and try to save that child. Now, suppose God had created an experiential environment that were completely predictable. Then you would have predicted that if you tried to save the child you would certainly fail or else certainly succeed – in either case your experience of that event would not represent much of an ethical challenge. (Not to mention that mother would have predicted the accident and would not have attempted to cross the bridge in the first place.) Now suppose the other extreme, that God had created an experiential environment that were completely unpredictable. Then whether you tried to help the child or not would have no effect on the chances of that child surviving – not much of an ethical challenge here either. So neither extreme experiential environment works well for attaining virtue; the optimal environment would be one where bad things can unpredictably happen but where there is some predictability about the result of a decision of ours – which is just about the experiential environment we find ourselves in.

You've said that trusting "God" is like trusting friends. I seriously doubt that you'd long retain a friend who willfully for his or her own personal reasons caused you or someone you love to "experience such a basically random environment" that visited upon you or your loved one catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, birth defects, etc., etc., etc..

Yes, I said that trust plays the same role whether one trusts friends or God: trust forms an element of all loving relationship between persons. But I did not mean to say that God is therefore like any other friend of ours and can therefore be thought about as one thinks about any other friend. After all God is not only our friend but our creator too, and even though God is a person S/He is also all of reality.

God's ways are not mysterious – that's only something that theists who don't understand God's ways say. After all, a benevolent God would not create us with the cognitive capacity to form meaningful questions we can absolutely not answer, would S/He? - Dianelos

Why not? "God" might have perfectly "good" reasons for confounding human cognition.

Interesting you should mention that. One theistic defense against the so-called arguments from evil and from God's hiddeness is the so-called defense from ignorance: We don't know why that is, but, as theism is true, there must be a good reason why God did it this way. (Which reminds me of a similar naturalistic stance: We don't know how something material could become conscious, but, as naturalism is true, there must be a way.) I see no error in the logic of that argument, but I personally find it distinctly ineffective.

You argue circularly, assuming a benevolent "God" because you assume that all that happens is necessarily "good" and expresses the benevolent will of a benevolent "God." Round and round and round you go.

Not quite. Actually at the very least I notice that there is nothing in my experiential environment that contradicts my God hypothesis; for example I see that even the nasty parts of my experience could be for the best if a benevolent God actually exists – and therefore do not contradict the hypothesis that a benevolent God does exist. But my argument goes far beyond non-contradiction. I argue that my worldview positively explains big chunks of my experience, including my experience of a partially unpredictable and limiting physical environment. I argue that the adoption of my worldview is experientially gainful and ethically empowering, which moreover are facts that my worldview easily explains. But my main argument is not really that I have sufficient grounds to believe that my worldview correctly describes reality, but rather that I have sufficient grounds to believe that adopting my worldview is more reasonable than adopting any naturalistic worldview. So my argument is not based on how well idealistic theism works by itself, but on how well it works in comparison to naturalism. That's an easier task, and is really the only possible way to think about reality, because as there are many possible realities that might produce the same experiential environment I find myself in it's impossible to identify which reality necessarily must be the one producing it; so the only way to reason about reality is to test which worldview about reality works best in comparison to other alternative worldviews. And idealistic theism works much better than naturalism under each of the criteria I could think of. As I found out in this thread it even works better as far as complexity is concerned, i.e. the reality that idealistic theism describes is much less complex than the simplest naturalistic reality. Idealistic theism works better than naturalism even in the context of science, as it avoids many of the paradoxes that a naturalist scientist must deal with, for example in relation to quantum mechanics.

It seems to me I got four main objections to my worldview in this thread:

1. The real world does not at all look like how idealistic theism describes it. Just by looking around one sees that the real world is an objectively real physical world, and the only question is whether a God must be added to it or not. That's a very understandable reaction, after all the easiest way to interpret our experience is by believing we are physical bodies moving around a physical universe – indeed that's the understanding we all reach as children and therefore a very deeply ingrained worldview. But even naturalism teaches that how reality seems to us is quite different from how it really is. So, for example, we see around us many colorful things when in fact no colorful things exist in reality.

2. My worldview of idealistic theism is unscientific. That's simply false. According to idealistic theism God directly creates our experiential environment a part of which consists of our experience of the physical universe following the laws that science discovers.

3. My worldview of idealistic theism is obviously artificial; it's an artificial construct not based on objective evidence and in fact custom made to avoid naturalism's problems. Well, being reality quite different from how it appears (as everybody, who actually studied what naturalists came up with when they tried to describe reality, agrees) any description of reality must be a mental construct. As for evidence the only difference is that my worldview uses both third and first-person data (i.e. both objective and subjective evidence), whereas naturalism tries to manage with third-person data only. The upshot is that my worldview uses all available evidence.

4. My worldview of idealistic theism resembles wishful thinking Which is kind of true, but also quite irrelevant. There is no reason to believe that reality must be such as to be undesirable. Also observe that if my worldview is correct then it should resemble wishful thinking :-)

(post 1745, or #61302):

However, if by "God" you mean something like the impersonal undifferentiated Vedantic concept called "Brahman," we might have some tentative element of possible agreement. I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of a non-anthropomorphic, impersonal, non-favor-performing, non-punishing, unifying fabric of all being that underlies and permeates all reality.

Well, I don't really mean something like that. In my worldview it's not just that God underlies and permeates all reality but actually and literally is all reality. We ourselves are part of God, parts of independent will, but intrinsic parts nonetheless. As for the properties you mention of "non-favor-performing" and "non-punishing" – I agree. I also agree with "non-anthropomorphic" in the sense that God does not of course resemble a human; maybe there is a big misunderstanding in that context: that we are made in the image of God entails our capacity that we may and will grow to resemble God. I disagree with your "impersonal" property though. What differentiates theism from other religious understandings of reality is precisely that: reality is personal. Let me give you a weak but nevertheless valid argument why it is more probable that reality be personal rather than impersonal: We are personal, and we form part of reality.

If that's what you mean by"God," then it might make some sense to speak of "trusting God," however, it would be "trust" in the sense of "que sera sera ("we're all drops in the ocean so go with the flow")" rather than "trust" as in the trust between friends.

I understand what you mean but I disagree. Observe that a reality where trusting all as in trusting a friend is called for is more beautiful than a reality where only trusting all as in "que sera sera" is possible. You may ask, what has beauty to do with it? Well, we kind of intuitively know that reality is beautiful, don't you agree? I am always reminded of how mathematicians and physicists (who both discover deep patterns in reality) always explain their intuition to follow a particular path in their thinking by saying something like: it just seemed a beautiful idea to investigate. And, at the very least, all other factors being the same, it's more reasonable to adopt a beautiful worldview than a less beautiful one :-)

But then, that's not the "God" of common discourse in the Western world.

Right. I may also point out that the "God" in my worldview is not the "God' of common discourse in the Western world either. I have a friend who is a Bishop in the Greek Orthodox church. He is very learned, but more importantly he is a good person who often speaks in a way that is both funny and moving - not to mention he is not driven around in a black Mercedes as most of his peers. Well, anyway, my relationship with him is marred by my feeling that I must keep my religious understanding to myself as not to trouble him. Once, just to test the waters, I asked him whether Origen (the second century great theologian) would be damned for believing in the "apokatastasis ton panton" (i.e. the restoration of all – the belief in universal salvation that forms a basic part of my worldview) and he answered that no, because Origen did not know better, but that we do. (Origen, by the way, believed that the spiritual alone is real – exactly like I do.)

604. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61352 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 4, 2007 at 11:26 pm

Steve99 (post 1701, or #59705):

That question ["how did consciousness arise"] is only meaningful if asked about the naturalistic worldview.

No, it isn't. You are not in a position to state *when* the question is and is not meaningful - you can't make it conditionally meaningful depending on which worldview you accept - that is not a rational approach. You can only declare the question universally meaningful, or universally not meaningful.

Well, the meaning of a question does depend on the context in many cases. For example to ask "what's the square root of -1?" greatly depends on whether you are in the context of real or of complex numbers. To ask "Should I nuke Moscow?" greatly depends on whether you are President Kennedy at the height of the Cuban missile crisis or whether you are a teenager playing a particular computer game. As for the question above it should be obvious that in a worldview according to which the fundamental aspect of reality is consciousness to ask how did consciousness arise is meaningless. I mean in any worldview if you keep asking "how?" there must come a point where such a question is meaningless. For example you may recall our discussion that it would be meaningless to ask Einstein "How does mass bend spacetime?".

By the way, you may ask *why* the problem is not dependent on worldview; after all some problems do indeed disappear from a change in perspective. But this one does not, as the problem itself arises from first-person experience. The question 'how does my consciousness arise' is context-free. You either ask it, or you don't, independent of 'worldview'.

Right, but two observations. First, by saying that some problems do indeed disappear from a change in perspective, aren't you contradicting what you said above that a question is either universally meaningful or not? Second, I think you are changing the question into "How did my consciousness arise?" and I agree that that question is universally meaningful. Idealistic theism's short answer is that all individual persons as well as the experiential environment they find themselves in are created by God. You may ask, how does that work exactly, how does God create other persons and their experiential environment? This comes close to be a meaningless question the way "How does mass bend spacetime?" is a meaningless question: one could answer that a defining property of mass is to bend spacetime and, similarly, that a defining property of God is to be able to create other persons. But it turns out the question of how God creates other persons does allow for an answer. I wonder if it will make much sense, but here is my best shot anyway:

First we should note the relation between consciousness and a conscious subject (i.e. a person); that's knowledge we have from introspection: Any conscious experience entails a conscious subject having that experience. Further a conscious subject has the freedom to think about and affect conscious experience (wave your hands in front of your eyes and see that work). Finally a conscious subject is a particular structure of conscious experience, namely one that has the above properties. Now, according to idealistic theism, all of reality consists of conscious experience structured as one person, God. We are persons too, and enjoy the very same properties of being aware of, thinking about, and affecting conscious experience, but our condition as persons is such that our freedom in these properties is limited by a set of rules which we call our physical environment. God's freedom, in contrast, is not similarly limited. As God is a person who exhausts all reality and we are persons that exist within reality it follows that reality is self-similar: the structure of each one of us reflects the structure of the whole of reality (our true nature is nature). So, to answer your question: God creates persons by using His/Her liberty to affect conscious experience to structure limited regions of it as persons. Once so structured, the created persons are experientially alive and can be aware of, think about, and affect conscious experience under the limitations of physical order that God Him/Herself causes.

But, you may ask: How does a particular structure of conscious experience become a conscious person having the three properties of awareness, thought, and will? Well, as far as I can see, that's the "how" question that admits of no answer :-) Here we have reached the deepest ground of reality: At its most basic, reality consists of personhood, i.e. by conscious experience structured as person(s).

You may also ask: What structure is that? Here the answer is: The same structure each one of us has and which can be known through introspection. We have already mentioned the high level structure: All persons are triune in the sense that they have the three basic personal properties (or hypostases) of being aware of, thinking about, and affecting conscious experience. (Which, by the way, is the same high level structure of any information processing system, namely input, processing, output.) Our individual limitations in these three properties are temporarily imposed by God for us to overcome by becoming more similar to the overall structure of reality, namely God. The degree of that similarity is described by the concept of "good" (identity being "perfect"), and we have coined words for describing the relative goodness of awareness, of thought, and of will – the respective concepts are "beauty", "truth" and "love". So the closer our awareness comes to God's the more beautiful the experience of our awareness becomes. And the closer our thinking comes to God's the more expressing of truth it becomes. And the closer our will comes to God's the more filled with love it becomes. Finally, to express the general measure of goodness in the structure of the conscious experience of a person we use the concept of "virtue". So, instinctively as it were, humanity has structured language in a way that is appropriate for describing how reality is by coining such fundamental concepts as "person", "goodness", "virtue", "awareness", "thinking" (or "mind"), "will", "beauty", "truth", "love", "freedom", "life", etc. – concepts that refer to fundamental aspects of our experiential life and therefore of reality too.

Christinity's fundamental dogma of the Trinity reflects the high level structure of reality (which is the same as saying the high level structure of any person), and it is interesting to note that this dogma is not really present explicitly in ancient scripture but has been developed through tradition. First note that God's overall goodness or virtue is perfect (as God is identical to God) - and is unsurpassable (except by God through creation). So God's perfection is the objective measure of all goodness. God's high level structure in the three hypostases is similarly perfect, so God's thinking, awareness, and will are perfectly good. In Christian tradition God's perfect truth of thinking is identified with the Father, God's perfect love of willing is identified with the Son, and God's perfect beauty of awareness is identified with the Holy Spirit. According to Christian understanding Jesus was the realization of the personhood of God within the same confines of physical un-freedom each human currently experiences themselves in, and as that realization was shaped by God's will it's identified with the second hypostasis of God, namely the Son. That's the principle or ideal of love, and by loving like Jesus loved is how we grow in virtue and hence become more similar to God, or, if you prefer, how we come closer to God. (That's the meaning of the often misunderstood statement of Jesus according to John 14:6: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father if not through me." Indeed, love, to have love for others as Jesus had for us, is the only way to come closer to God.) But Jesus kind of came and went rather quickly and was experienced by only a lucky few. The ever-present spirit that is there to guide us all towards God is identified with the third hypostasis of God, namely the Holy Spirit. That's the principle or ideal of beauty, and our sense of beauty is what guides us through life towards God. Indeed, without exception, the most ethical or virtuous act is the one that is inspired by the greatest beauty and the one that is moved by the greatest love. Finally, I personally find it remarkable that in the scripture of the three great monotheistic religions, despite their individual imperfections and incompatibilities, we find three statements that precisely describe God: "God is truth" in the Jewish Old Testament, "God is love" in the Christian New Testament, and "God is beauty" in the Qur'an. So it's like the three great monotheistic religions were each especially inspired by one of God's hypostases, namely Judaism by the Father, Christianity by the Son, and Islam by the Holy Spirit.

So, is that all I can say about the structure of personhood in general and of God in particular? Well I can say some more, but the point is that one finds out about God through introspection, i.e. by finding out about oneself. By knowing oneself and considering what is ideal one comes to know God, and hence reality. Take any other bit of your structure as a person, say your memory. Memory is a sub-structure of conscious experience that saves information about past awareness and thought and feeds future thought and will. So, God's memory saves all information there exists in reality about past awareness and thought. How can we find out how God's memory is? By considering how it would perfect. For me the answer is clear: Perfect memory is the one that remembers all that is good and forgets all that isn't. That's why every single act of love we do in this life, be it only a smile for a stranger, will form a part of reality for ever, and will become the indestructible treasure in heaven (see Luke 12:32-34). By doing good we become God's co-creators of permanent reality :-) As for the ugly things we do, these will be forgotten by God and will therefore utterly disappear from reality in the end. I think that was the original meaning of the saying that all evil things would be destroyed like what was thrown to the fires of Gehenna (the garbage incineration place of Jesus' time).

My, quite a bit of theology there. I hope it's not grating for an atheologian to be given that much theology, but this was the second time you asked me how God creates our consciousness (see posts 573 and 629), and I can't very well answer without using lots of theology ;-)

605. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61169 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 4, 2007 at 2:41 am

Lauregon (post 1707, or #59760):

My point was that we trust our friends because we know them well enough to know how they think and behave and can usually be relied on to help us out in common-reality situations, as contrasted to the unpredictable way "God" (allegedly) responds to human wishes, prayers, and desires. [snip] My point was, and remains, that we trust our friends because we think and because know them, and know how they behave and think, whereas "God" behaves according to his mysterious will. If our friends behaved as capriciously as "God" does, we probably wouldn't retain them as friends.

I agree that to trust a friend we need to know something about them, but I do not agree that that's all there is to trust: We trust friends because we love them, and we cannot love them without trusting them. Exactly the way it is for God. After all, according to my understanding, S/He is somebody who is not unpredictable nor mysterious. Quite on the contrary: God being perfectly good is in many ways easier to understand and predict than other people. What's partially unpredictable is the physical environment we find us in, and one can understand why God would have caused us to experience such a basically random environment. God's ways are not mysterious – that's only something that theists who don't understand God's ways say. After all, a benevolent God would not create us with the cognitive capacity to form meaningful questions we can absolutely not answer, would S/He?

606. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61147 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 4, 2007 at 12:31 am

Theistic myths.

We all, whatever worldview we adopt, are living in what is basically the same experiential environment (the first and third-person data we have) and which follows the same laws (first-person data follow laws too). Where we differ is in our interpretation of that environment, or, if you prefer, in our understanding of it. That is we differ in our answering questions such as: What does it all mean? What's the deepest order present in it all? What reality is objectively (i.e. independently from us) there producing it all? What should I be doing with my life? Now this thread has helped me identify a series of fallacious beliefs that are broadly believed in both by theists (who are an important class of super-naturalists) and by naturalists. I call these fallacies myths, precisely because they are so broadly believed and are so uncritically considered to be true by virtually everybody. Here I would like to list two myths, that both theists and naturalists believe are entailed in theism – the difference being that many theists manage to live with them (and hence adopt an incoherent worldview) whereas many naturalists reject the theistic worldview because of them. (In future posts I think I will list the myths about naturalism, as well as the myths about reality in general.)

1. A fundamental claim of the theistic thesis is that reality is governed by the will of a particular person, whose character or way of being is such as to objectively define all goodness. The first myth consists in attributing to God's character all-too-human and all-too-imperfect properties, such as a commanding, angry and vengeful nature. And, unfortunately, God being God is then supposed to display these qualities to the utmost possible degree. Rather shamefully and evidencing their lack of freedom of thought most theists manage to integrate these mythological properties of God into their worldview which therefore becomes incoherent. Naturalists intuitively understand that an ideal person is nothing like that, and therefore quite sensibly reject these theistic worldviews altogether. Naturalists' error consists in not realizing that not all theistic worldviews entail such mythological/incoherent properties of God. Or else, when confronting a theistic worldview that does not include these errors, they reject it as "wishful thinking" – as if there were good reason to believe that reality must be so as to be undesirable.

2. The second myth resides in misunderstanding of the concept of "faith" (or "pistis" in the original Greek). The correct understanding of that word is "trust", but is often interpreted by both theists and naturalists as meaning belief (in general or specifically in the context of God) that is at least to some degree unfounded in reason, in other words an impulsive belief, a belief that is based on an act of will rather than on thought. This interpretation is particularly confusing because even though it's basically false (namely confuses Apollonian belief with Dionysian trust), it is in part correct as the idea of trust itself does entail an element of personal self-transcendence; it's an act of will not purely an implication of reason. In other words, the concept of trust entails that one trusts the other person beyond what is strictly reasonable based on one's knowledge of that person. Should one absolutely know how a person will act in a particular context it would be misleading to speak of "trusting" that person in that context. (To give a stupid example: if you throw a child in the air it would be meaningless to say "I trust that the child will want to fall back".) So we use the concept of "trust" in order to express that one trusts a person implicitly and beyond what is strictly speaking based on reasoning. Persons are fundamentally non-mechanical (i.e. free) so perfect knowledge about how they will behave is impossible anyway, and thus trust is a necessary aspect of all loving relationship between two persons. Indeed a major fact in our condition is that one cannot love or be close to another person without the self-transcending realization of trust for that other person. But which is not therefore unreasonable, because as persons are free, to trust (at least to some degree) another free person is necessary to do as long as one wishes to be close to them. Trust need not be blind of course, but cannot be fully based on reason either.

So, my thesis is that by misunderstanding the original meaning of faith, both theists and naturalists are misled about one major fact of our relationship with God: both think that what theists are called to do is to believe in God not based on reason whereas the correct meaning is to trust in God (which cannot be completely based on reason). Further we are to trust in God not because the other person is God but because trusting is an intrinsic and fruitful ingredient of any close relationship. As in this context the other person is God trust is especially important for us as well as deserving by God.

A second corollary of the confusion about the concept of faith is that both theists and naturalists believe that belief in the very existence of God must follow the same principle, i.e. must transcend reason. That's why naturalists endlessly speak of there being no evidence for God and some theists actually conceding the same. That's completely wrong: Not only is there evidence for God, but that evidence consists of the whole of our experience of life and therefore is inescapable (nobody can really say to have lacked that evidence). And it is evidence for God because it cannot be understood without recourse to God. In other words far from there being no evidence for God, there is no evidence that is not for God: the whole of our experience displays, and every bit in it form part of, a deepest explanatory pattern or order which spells God. That, of course, is my theistic claim – the naturalist need not agree with it. But the only reasonable negation of that claim is that the whole of the evidence we have can be best understood without recourse for God – but not that belief in God entails not having evidence. So, the reasonable naturalistic stance vis-a-vis theism can be "Theism misunderstands the evidence" but not "Theism has no evidence". The difference is subtle but important, as it concentrates peoples' minds in better understanding the evidence of the whole of our experience of life, and not, as it often happens today, to assume that belief in God is supposed to be reasonable in a way that goes beyond evidence – a fallacious and incoherent assumption that virtually all naturalists and many theists make. And it goes without saying that once somebody falls for this erroneous assumption, the only reasonable implication must be to reject belief in God. Which naturalists do. But many theists don't because they think that that's precisely what God expects of them: to believe in His/Her existence without evidence, or else believe based on "holy scripture", i.e. text that is claimed to have been written directly by God, or at the very least especially and directly inspired by God. Which in turn is an intellectual stance that naturalists (as well as I) find endlessly irritating. The idea that God who is supposed to have given us our capacity for reason would also want us to base the most important knowledge there is (namely knowledge about reality) on an ancient and clearly flawed text is unintelligible beyond words. In fact, God's "Word" is the whole of our experience of life. And only a small (but arguably not insignificant) part of our experience of life consists in reading what other people have thought about reality, and it goes without saying that all people no matter how inspired (whatever that exactly means) are fallible.

So these two mythological beliefs about theism explain many of the common misunderstandings of theism. The first myth is ontological (concerns claims about how God is) and the second myth is epistemological (concerns claims about how one is to find out how God is).

607. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61020 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 3, 2007 at 10:53 am

BAEOZ (post 1697, or #59672):

Danielos, a requiem mass only goes to a catholic. Any catholic in fact. Only a Cardinal would bother with a head of state. It was Cardinal Bertram, who the church now tries to portray as against the Nazi's neopaganism, that may be true, but he wasn't against Hitler's catholicism.

Here's a list of quotes, by Hitler himself about his beliefs.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm

Oh, come on. Hitler was first a foremost a politician. You do not think that what a politician says in public is good evidence for what they think, do you? Hitler was the head of government in a Christian nation which he later led into all-out war; would you expect him to have come out and announced "Mein Volk: I don't believe in God myself and I think those who do believe in that unscientific nonsense are just a bunch of morons."?

For me Hitler's atheism is evident in the whole of his ideology which is 100% nationalist and 0% religious despite a sprinkling of religious sounding wording here and there (and I find it telling that atheists go at great lengths to uncover any morsel they can of Hitler using religious language). Hitler's atheism is also evidenced in what he and those closest to him said in private about Christianity. Further we know that he displayed zero religious behavior in his own public or private life (say going to church, praying, consulting with religious authorities, or whatever). For me the evidence is more than clear, but if you, evaluating the same evidence, find it points to Hitler having a Christian worldview, that's ok. Evidence is seldom if ever conclusive, especially in the context of historical claims.

608. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #61013 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 3, 2007 at 10:23 am

Dr Benway (post 1698, or #59675):

Give you an inch, you take a mile. Propositions accepted on the basis of intuition still must pass peer review before they get on our collective map.

Fair enough. But surely intuitions such as that we have will, or that some acts are objectively wrong – have passed peer review long ago. As far as I am concerned only a person who is really dogmatic about naturalism could ever even consider believing that they don't have will or that there are no objectively wrong acts. And I am happy to notice that Sam Harris, for example, is not dogmatic in this sense. On the contrary he dedicates a fair part of his book in defense of the need to use intuition in reason, and then uses his own intuition about ethics quite effectively I think.

We've agreed intuition can be misleading, so we don't normally allow it.

Objective observation can be misleading too, but "we" normally allow it. Einstein, for example, was a scientist who worked only with objective observations, was monumentally intelligent, and even so was mislead by all that objective evidence to believe with virtual certainty that non-local phenomena cannot possibly exist. And, incidentally, who exactly is the "we" who are in the position to allow or disallow one epistemology over the other anyway?

We grudgingly allow a few minimal ideas on the map without evidence. But that doesn't mean God, Jesus, and the resurrection are then allowed as well. Sorry.

I have never argued that one is justified to believe in God without evidence. On the contrary I have spend lots of time arguing that the evidence for God is overwhelming and inescapable – all data we have, both third and first-person data point to God. But the fact that evidence exists does not imply that is easy to understand. The rainbow is evidence for quantum mechanics, but prehistoric people did know nothing about quantum mechanics even though they saw a lot of rainbows. As for the resurrection of Jesus I have explained why I tentatively believe in it, and I have also explained why I don't think it's a big deal one way or the other. I think it's telling how so many posters here seize on this one point as if it were in some way critical for my overall argument. It isn't. Suppose I am wrong about what the closest disciples of Jesus experienced for a few days after his crucifixion: it doesn't make any difference whatsoever to my argument here that idealistic theism works much better than naturalism as a worldview about how reality is.

You were nonresponsive to my point, so I'll repeat it with the small bit you don't like left out:
Atheism does not come with a holy book, creed, or policy & procedure manual.

That's not entirely true. I find that atheists' belief system, argumentation, fallacies, and even manner of debating, to correlate quite positively. And I find that very popular books such as Harris's and Dawkins's both reflect and guide these. I even see a sense of nascent tribalism; it's striking how often atheists use the pronoun "we" to explain their individual thoughts, not to mention how often they express a sense of pride for belonging to the atheist class that is openly considered to be superior and to consist of especially intelligent, well-educated people, and realistic people. Or consider how often atheist posters spend their time congratulating each other or ridiculing those whose ideas put them outside of their group. Atheism is becoming tribal.

The Catholic Mass in Hitler's Germany included the words, "perfidious Jew." Prolly didn't give the Germans warm, fuzzy feelings toward all those folks they sent to death camps.

Right. Greek Orthodox mass, beautiful as it generally is, is shamefully full of anti-Semitic sentiment too. So, what's your point?

This was in response to a point you were making above it, regarding atheism being responsible for more bad stuff than religion. If you want to be cruel toward someone, you'll have a difficult time finding a legal justification in atheism. But most religions will provide a legal basis for cruelty against certain other people.

Ah, that's your point :-) Gosh, where do I start. Have you seen the Harris - Hedges debate? There comes a point latter in the debate where the moderator (rather clearly an atheist himself) gets frustrated with Harris's insistence that religious beliefs caused all the recent conflicts and violence in the Middle East (including the 9/11 attacks), as Muslims unreasonably believe that the Qur'an is the literal word of God. So he asks a simple question: the Qur'an has been around for centuries but it's suddenly now that some Muslims in some countries strike so violently. I think Harris didn't really understood the argument (which obviously is that something else than the Qur'an unleashed that hate, and that religious fundamentalism was apt to fan the most extremist expressions of that hate), or else he spins an answer claiming that Muslims have always been very violent (which is a historical fallacy by the way, Muslims have been much more tolerant with the populations of the countries they conquered than Christians. Even at wartime the only case of people being mass-murdered by Muslims I know of is the case of the Armenians in the hands of the nationalist and expressively non-religious Turkish army in the beginning of the 20th century). Hedges on his part argued the obvious: that the West's (and especially Britain's and the US's) policies in the petroleum producing part of the Muslim world as well as in Israel during the last 6 decades lies at the root of the popular and violent Muslim reaction, which not being blessed with modern military capacity finds expression in terrorism as the only available method to inflict pain to the enemy. Indeed terrorism has often been used by many desperate peoples with a strong sense of being subjugated or denied their rights, for example by the Vietcong or by the Jewish liberation movement in Palestine. As I mentioned in another post suicide bombings have been used in desperate situations by people who had nothing to do with Islam or even with theism or any kind of God-given scripture, for example by the Kamikaze when the US forces started to close in on their homeland. So it's really amazing how flimsy Harris's argument of a causal connection between terrorism and religion is. (I have continued to read his "End of faith"; a case in point I was reading only today is this: Harris, as well as Dawkins, make the rather strong claim that not only some but all violent conflicts are caused by religion. So, when apparently somebody pointed out to him the current conflict with North Korea, Harris manages to find a connection between religion and this avowedly non-religious country. Can the reader imagine what connection that is? --- "The problem of North Korea is, first and foremost, a problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable) beliefs of North Koreans" (note #17, page 242). Did you spot the connection? Religion is unjustifiable belief, North Koreans hold a lot of unjustifiable beliefs, therefore religion and North Korea are connected. :-P It seems to me that what counts is not so much the difference between people who believe God exists or not, but between people who think critically or not; people who deal with data and people who spin data. )

Most violent conflicts in the last centuries have obviously been caused by nationalism and tribalism and/or individual regimes' or groups' quest for more power. Nations and tribes in conflict are often distinguished by religion (but far from always – consider the many wars between Germany and France), but that's peripheral. You say that religion sometimes offers "legal basis" for cruelty and I agree. People who decide for cruel courses of action are the kind of people who will use anything that serves their goals, including religion or science - and I need not remind you how many of the great crimes against humanity have used science as a tool. But to argue that therefore science is evil makes as much sense as to say that therefore religion is evil. And, I don't really see people stop from cruel decisions because they lack a "legal basis", frankly. The decisions to destroy entire German and Japanese cities enjoyed of no such "legal basis", was taken by leaders we today fairly admire, and was nonetheless clearly against the laws of war, according to which one must not only abstain from attacking but actually must try to protect the enemy's civilian population.

Rather I think that leaders who decide for courses of action that will result in enormous cruelty only care to identify any justification for public consumption, which often turns out to be imaginary. So the cruelty of the Holocaust was justified on the imaginary threat that Jews represented for Germany (and Western civilization), the cruelty of dropping the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified on the imaginary need to avoid an invasion of Japan's mainland, the cruelty of the resent invasion of Iraq by the US (up to and including the snippets we saw in the Abu Ghraib photos) was justified on the imaginary threat that the Iraqi regime represented for the security of the American public, the cruelty of the Israeli policy towards Palestinians is justified on the imaginary threat for the very survival of the Jewish state, the cruelty of the US and USSR to threaten the entire human race with annihilation through their MAD policy was justified on the imagined threat that the other country's political ideology represented for humanity, the cruelty of Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's policies that led to the killing or starvation of millions or tens of millions of their own people was justified on the imaginary threat of "bourgeois" elements in their midst. In none of these justifications for public consumption, and by no stretch of the imagination, is there anything that has to do with religion. Now I can understand that some fine minds as Dawkins's and Harris's can be led astray by anger and see some imaginary threat where none exists; what I find much more worrying is that apparently many millions of educated people read their books so uncritically as to not notice the falsity of their claim.

Now I am not saying that religion is some kind of undiluted power for good. Religion (in the sense of religious institutions and religious ideologies) has not only been abused for evil but has also been a power for evil itself. So it's not only true that many religious beliefs have historically been grown out of ignorance and superstition, but also that religion has become and still is a cover for ignorance and superstition. Also, even though religious institutions have at times helped civilization along, at other times, undoubtedly, they have been an obstacle to the advancement of civilization. That's reality; one need not whitewash it but neither demonize it. I think that religion still effects some serious negative influences, for example the fundamentalists' hold on American society's voting tendencies (but that's democracy), the fundamentalists' gaining ground in Arab world politics (but that's an effect of Britain's and America's shortsighted - to put it mildly - policies in this region for the last six decades), and maybe more seriously, many a religious institution's ideas about human sexuality and their negative influence on national policies related to human sexuality and family planning. (When I lived in Costa Rica the Pope himself spoke against the use of a particular book on sexuality that was to be taught in Costa Rican secondary schools, a book that the local Catholic hierarchy had previously sanctioned and that had already been printed. The shameful result? The government retired the book. I remember the President's actual explanation: "If the Holy Father disapproves of this book we are naturally not going to teach it in our schools". - In Latin America the first cause of death for young women is that abortion is illegal. Many a religious institution's stance towards contraception and abortion is nothing but criminal I think.) Some fundamentalists' efforts to influence the teaching of biology in American schools is beyond stupid of course, but I also think it's beyond ridiculous to get all worried up over this issue as if there were a chance in hell that the fundamentalists' daydream of teaching Biblical biology in American schools will ever become reality. It rather seems to me that this issue has been exploited beyond any reasonable proportion by those who have an ax to grind to show how bad religion is. On the other hand, remarkably, the one institution that stood up in the US against the invasion of Iraq was - not academia, not journalists – but the local Catholic Church. Truth about human affairs comes in shades of gray, and those who expound a black and white understanding – be it religious fundamentalists or people like Harris and Dawkins (not to mention Hidgen's) - belong to the extremist fringe.

Actually I am having trouble thinking of a single serious crime against humanity - not to mention a serious threat for civilization or the survival of humankind today - that was primarily motivated by religion. It seems to me that even the burning of witches centuries ago was not so much motivated by religion (I am not aware of any injunctions in Christianity that call for the burning of witches), but by superstition – the explicit justification was the once again imagined threat that witchcraft represented for society. Some of the punishments (cutting off hands, stoning of women, female circumcision, etc) that may be practiced in some Muslim countries today are barbaric, but so is the not religiously motivated execution of prisoners in the US – and incidentally the world record in executions belongs to non-religious China. The closest case of a crime against humanity that was primarily motivated by religion I can think of is the handling of prisoners by some pre-Columbian civilizations.

So, how could Harris and Dawkins get it so wrong? Re-thinking the above I think what happened in their case is this: They are so absolutely convinced that religion is nothing but irrationality and ignorance, and they are so obsessed with religion's role in public affairs, that they mentally subscribe any state of affairs of irrationally and ignorance to religion – and it is reasonable to hold that irrationality and ignorance lie at the root of all evil. So here we have a logical fallacy, motivated by passion, based on a false premise, and given in the context of a true premise. Now I understand that Harris and Dawkins's stand against religion cannot possibly be similar to mine; after all they consider that any good effects notwithstanding religion teaches a lie based on humankind's irrational/superstitious impulse – whereas I consider that any failings notwithstanding religion represents humankind's best understanding of the deepest structure of reality. Even so, I think that Harris's and Dawkins's claim that religion lies at the root of all evil and today represents the greatest danger there is for the survival of civilization or of humankind is so grossly wrong as well as against reason and evidence as to be a failure of cognition comparable to Biblical literalism. Of course Harris and Dawkins are much more knowledgeable and intelligent than the typical religious fundamentalist – a fact that I am not sure I should find reassuring or upsetting. In any case I notice that, in his recent debate with Hedges, Harris clarifies that his position now is not that religion is the cause of all conflict but just one cause of conflict, which is certainly a step in the right direction.

To describe Harris as pro-torture is a misrepresentation of his argument. In fact, he says this:

While many people have objected, on emotional grounds, to my defense of torture, no one has pointed out a flaw in my argument. I hope my case for torture is wrong, as I would be much happier standing side by side with all the good people who oppose torture categorically. I invite any reader who discovers a problem with my argument to point it out to me in the comment section of this blog. I would be sincerely grateful to have my mind changed on this subject.

Thank you very much for this quote. Do you know where his blog is? I would certainly like to point out to him how his premise that the measure of ethics is the increase of happiness and not of virtue has led his ethical thinking astray – and that's why he is unhappy with the final implications.

And have you considered how come Harris is unhappy with the implications of what he sees as flawless reasoning? Because you can't keep truth down; we humans are built for truth.

609. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #60422 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 10:08 pm

Goldy (post 1696, or #59647):

But above I were not describing something I don't understand, but rather something that naturalists don't understand.

Physics, I believe. Well known to naturalists - and getting more known with research.

Yes, naturalists believe that physics has to do something with consciousness, but that does not imply they understand something about consciousness. It only implies that they hope or trust or have faith that physics (or science in general) will somehow explain how some material systems produce consciousness.

According to my worldview everything you see, hear or feel is basically caused by God (except those parts that are random or are caused by other people)

So what I feel and describe as the natural world, you think "God". Those parts that are random or are caused by other people, I see as part of the natural world....and since you can't see God there, I guess that's what you think as natural too. Odd.

What's odd in that? God causes all our experiences but leaves some of these experiences to be caused by the free actions of people around us, and allows some of our experiences (indeed our experiences of physical phenomena) to be random at bottom.

Goes to show - you are your own god. You experience your feelings and have your opinions and say "Oh, that's God". What jars you don't see as natural, ie of a god, so you don't put God into that picture - doesn't fit with that god in you.

Here you completely lost me. I see everything as natural, in the sense of being consistent with God's nature. I see many things that jar me (for example pain and tragedy, social unfairness, end so on) but I find they too are consistent with my understanding of God – in fact I can see the meaning in them. And I am very certainly not my own God :-) I don't know were you got that idea. It's not even true that my ideas about God are my very own, they are ideas that have been around for millennia. One advantage I have is that today naturalism's failures have become much more apparent than they were in the past. Also science has falsified several of the claims of religious belief systems, having thus clarified what religious knowledge is not (e.g. an explanation of physical phenomena). So I have the advantage of access to more knowledge, but the basic ideas of my theistic worldview are certainly not mine.

610. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #60421 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 10:03 pm

_J_ (post 1695, or #59637):

Take a step back: the supposition that there is a god at all is an expression of how you would like life to be. You would like there to be a god, and therefore like the question 'how God would like life to be, and why' to be important and meaningful. This is issue I was addressing in my previous post. It's not addressing the argument to just assume your way past it!

If I understand you correctly you mean that I would like reality to consist of a benevolent God who gives meaning to my experience of life, and that's why I have constructed a detailed worldview that somehow manages to fit the existence of such a benevolent God with my experience of life. Fine; you may be right about my motivation. I cannot deny that I would like reality to be deeply meaningful and beautiful; who wouldn't? But so what? The end result I get is a worldview that works better than naturalism under all criteria I can think of. On the Apollonian side it explains much better than naturalism the whole of my experience, both the third-person and the first-person data I have. On the Dionysian side my worldview makes me feel better by making everything I experience more beautiful, and also makes me ethically stronger and therefore helps me to live closer to how I would like to live – that is my worldview brightens both the passive and active aspects of my experience of life. So, what exactly is the problem with that? Maybe you think that the fact that my worldview sounds like wishful thinking is a problem? But if a benevolent God exists then the correct worldview is bound to sound like wishful thinking, don't you think? Or maybe you think the correct worldview must necessarily sound undesirable? :-) If so, why would you think that?

Well, first of all the most important thing in life is not loving God, but loving all persons.

In your god conception, yes. Your personal theism is laudable in this, and is also in a small minority.

Well, as long as we are talking about truth who cares about my ideas belonging to a small minority? What possible relevance could that have?

Certainly, the Christianity that I have personally experienced differs from this in its core doctrine. It sees loving all persons as part of Christianity, but only as a consequence of the essential act of loving god.

I am not sure that's true in orthodox Christianity. But in any case, the Christianity you have personally experienced should not cloud your judgment one way or the other. I mean it's quite possible that a benevolent God exists and, also, that you have experienced a Christianity whose dogma is full of errors. Surely you see the fallaciousness of the syllogism: "The Christianity I experienced teaches a lot of obviously wrong things; therefore its core teaching about the existence of a benevolent God must be wrong too." That's the throw-away-the-baby-with-the-bathwater fallacy.

All good flows from god, such that the (observable) good cannot possibly exist without the (unobservable) god. (I have presents, therefore there is a Father Christmas.) This kind of buggered up, morality-perverting, backwards thinking seems to be a lot more common than your version of theism.

It's not true that all good flows from God. All good flows from good persons, even though of course, as God is such a good and powerful person, a lot of good flows from Him/Her. On the other hand what you write above kind of sounds like a different argument, which goes like this: Goodness is defined by how God is; therefore anything else that is good is good because it's similar to how God is. Which I think is a correct argument. Look around you: Everything you experience that's beautiful or true or loving is such to the degree that it reflects or approaches God's beauty or truth or love.

As for the argument that if I have presents there must be a present giver, I think that argument is basically sound too. After all the concept of a present entails a present-giver. The question then is only whether it's reasonable to consider the good things we have in our life a present or not.

I too think that common Christianity is full of errors. The gravest common error, as far as I am concerned, is the dogma of hell, a belief that is common to the great majority of Christians even though it's completely wrong not to say unintelligible. But then again if one is interested in truth one should evaluate the strongest theistic idea not the most common one.

You may ask: "Why is it that so that popular Christian beliefs are wrong? After all, if the truth of theism is there to be discovered in the whole of our experience one would expect people to have discovered that truth by now." Well, I suppose Dawkins's meme theory goes a long way to explain why false beliefs can become quite popular. The popularity of false beliefs is not something that only happens in the context of religious knowledge by the way; it happens in about any other field of knowledge I can think of. Think of astrology and how absurdly wrong it is and even so is seriously believed in by billions of people. Think of how virtually the entire US society thought that invading Iraq was a good idea. Think of how virtually everybody believes that getting rich is a good idea. Think of how virtually everybody believes that science and naturalism are connected. Think of how virtually everybody believes that to return evil is a good idea because it feels good and because otherwise bad people would be allowed to run amok. Think of how so many non-religious people believe that religion is at the root of all evil. Think of how so many Americans think it's a good idea to vote for the party who promises fewer taxes. Now let's call beliefs that are good reproducers even though they are wrong "sexy". (Why did I pick that name? Because there are also sexy genes, say the ones that produce a long peacock tail, that are in fact "wrong" in the sense that even though they reproduce well it would be better for all peacocks if they did not exist.) Well, there are sexy Christian memes too. One of the sexiest is that by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior you are in fact saved :-P (I can hardly think of anything more stupid than that belief in the context of religion). Now why some memes propagate better than others is a scientific question. The answer to why sexy memes propagate efficiently is not to be found in reason but in the emotional reaction (positive or negative) that these memes tend to trigger. And the only way to help our own brain to not get populated by wrong beliefs is critical thinking: to always test one's assumptions and to always study the opposing point of view. Which of course religious fundamentalists don't normally do. (Why? Because their memeplex entails that to question faith is a damnable sin.) But also naturalists like Dawkins do not do that either; for example Dawkins expressively ridicules the study of serious religious books. (Why? Because his memeplex entails that anything non-scientific must be wrong.)

First I think our experience is such that it can't be understood naturalistically.

I disagree with you. See entire thread! ;)

With all due respect, I think that many of the posters here have not studied naturalism's claims about reality closely enough to find out how badly it works as a description of reality. What about every naturalist believes as an article of faith (including probably Dawkins as well as many theists) is that naturalism is science's understanding of reality. And as we all agree that the manifest and huge success of science evidences that scientific knowledge is true, virtually every naturalist believes this implies that naturalism is true also. But the belief that naturalism and science are intrinsically connected is simply and rather obviously false. Naturalists' implicit confidence (or should I say "faith") in naturalism is based on this fallacy, a fallacy so broadly and unquestionably believed in that it represents a modern-day myth.

In any case I disagree even more strongly with your belief that non-believers can be as happy and fulfilled as they might be through religion […]

I can't be sure about this. It clearly varies from person to person – propensity to be religious looks to be highly variable. I admit that it seems a logically reasonable hypothesis that actually being religious – even if religious beliefs are universally factually erroneous, as I contend – may be the best way of being happy and fulfilled, bar none. (To me, this argument seems quite similar to saying 'it's possible that the placebo effect is the best form of pain relief, bar none'.) Personally, I think that as we continue to understand ourselves better and better, the consolations of religion will become increasingly available to us through means other than religion. We'll see.

Think of the experience of my friend stricken with breast cancer. Do you think it's at all possible for a non-religious person, no matter how well they understand themselves, to experience cancer as something beautiful? I really don't think so. Religious belief has really exceptional power for good. Naturalists often criticize religion for that power, pointing out that through religion people can even overcome the fear of their own death, and point out how this facilitates suicide bombings. But clearly to not fear death (or to fear death less, or to clutch less to the quantifiable aspects of life) is in almost all ethical contexts a very empowering thing.

What I am saying is that the idea of religion that Dawkins, Harris, and fundamentalists all share is grossly wrong. The only theistic idea that should be taken seriously is one that claims that God is present and reachable within every one of us, but that all anyone of us may say or write about God may be wrong.

If this was the commonly-held theistic perspective, Dawkins and Harris would not have written their books.

I agree. They are fighting not for truth, but against common fallacies. There is an important difference between the two. If Dawkins and Harris had concentrated their critique on the errors of common religion their books would had been just fine. Buy they over-generalize beyond any reasonable measure.

The world's major religions slip off your definition like water off the proverbial duck's back.

Actually I think my worldview contradicts mayor premises of the world's major religions. So? Is that a bad thing?

So the naturalistic belief that the physical universe objectively exists is immoral too because there is absolutely no evidence, corroborative or not, for that belief. [etc.]

No, you've again slid into an ontology argument that we've done to death. It's as though the repeated statements to you that Dr Benway is ontologically agnostic and instead concentrating on the realm of observable experience in which 'corroborative evidence' has some worthwhile meaning have never been made. This is the slipping and sliding, sidestepping and backtracking that you are often accused of!

Dr Benway may be an ontological agnostic in the question of God's existence (even though I see him criticize theistic belief systems much more than atheistic belief systems). But surely most of the other posters here are not agnostics in the question of God's existence. So my argument stands: Naturalists keep arguing that there is no objective evidence for the theistic worldview while ignoring the fact that there is no objective evidence for the naturalistic worldview either. One of the worse logical fallacies one can commit is to violate the "what goes for the goose goes for the gander" principle, and it seems to me that naturalists fall into that fallacy all the time. For example even very intelligent naturalists like Dawkins and Harris argue on the one hand that the fact that many crimes have been committed by religious people implies that religion is evil, and argue on the other hand that the fact that many (and actually worse) crimes have been committed by atheists does not imply that atheism is evil. It's really a case of believing something blindly or on faith (in the sense of not grounded in reason), or else of grounding a belief on the flimsiest of arguments, such as quoting something a religious nutcase has said.

Who said that God is unseen, unheard and unfelt? Not me. According to my worldview everything you see, hear or feel is basically caused by God (except those parts that are random or are caused by other people), and how it is like to see, hear or feel is also caused by God.

…ie, the 'I have presents, therefore there is a Father Christmas' argument. How do presents from Father Christmas look different to presents from real people? How can you isolate the supposed God from the 'everything you see, hear or feel'? Unless you have a way, your god has no more claim on existence than the famous dragon in Carl Sagan's garage.

No. The presence or absence of that invisible dragon in the garage does not explain anything at all. The God hypothesis works because of a) its explanatory power, and b) its practical usefulness. Look. The question of God's existence is not the only ontological question around. When one wonders if one's wife loves one, one is making an ontological question. When a detective visits a murder scene and wonders who the murderer is, they are making an ontological question also. In all these cases the epistemology that leads to an answer is the same: To consider various alternatives and see which works best.

But, don't worry - I know your answer to this involves your doubts about naturalism (your contested objections on consciousness, morality, QM), and your feeling that your theism 'works better' (which you don't see as an unjustified step in the direction of the theoretical simulated 'Happyland', which you reject as 'nightmarish'). And so on.

Indeed. But I have not really understood what you find wrong in my answer, or what you find wrong in my epistemology (i.e. in my method for reaching an answer). Do you know of any other method to pick between alternative views about how reality is than to test which works better?

This is why I was trying not to post – five minutes have become forty.

I am sorry. Maybe I should stop answering your posts, but these issues interest me very much. I think ontology is very important because one's understanding of reality affects the quality of one's life, and peoples' in general understanding of reality affects the quality of society.

611. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #60419 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 9:56 pm

BMMcArdle (post 1694, or #59636):

There are gaps in science so I use my own wishes, ideas, hopes, imagination, to fill those gaps. It is what I believe, no matter what anyone else has to say about it, because it is a gap, of course.

I am not talking about gaps in science which are all solvable, but about gaps in naturalism - that's an entirely different matter. And many of naturalism's gaps appear to be very hard in the sense that nobody has even an idea of how to solve them (e.g. the problem of consciousness) and paradoxical (in relation to what kind of naturalistic reality could produce consciousness, in relation to what kind of naturalistic reality could produce the quantum mechanical phenomena we observe, in relation to how naturalistic hypotheses about reality are increasingly diverging and becoming increasingly complex, in relation to how any naturalistic understanding of reality clashes with our intuitions about free will, ethics, value, etc – and so on). Naturalism is really a mess; but most naturalists appear to ignore that fact.

612. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59622 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 30, 2007 at 12:42 am

BAEOZ (post 1684, or #59606):

Danielos, Hitler was given a requiem mass after his suicide, or at least offered one, by a cardinal. Not something you do for an atheist.

Maybe that's something a cardinal would offer to do for a dead head of state regardless. In any case a cardinal offering to give a requiem mass does not make Hitler into a religious person. (And, incidentally, I did know that story; are you sure it's true? My understanding is that immediately after the suicide guards took his and Eva Brown's bodies outside and burned them.)

But the Nazis were supported and had a lot of devout christians.

Possibly, but that does not make Hitler a theist either.

613. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59620 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 30, 2007 at 12:24 am

Dr Benway (post 1682, or #59602):

Atheism is a lack of belief in god or gods.

I disagree with that definition, as it implies various absurdities (newborn babies as well as brain-dead people are atheist, not to mention, arguably, dogs and cats) and moreover contradicts both the common and the professional usage of the term, see post 309 about how dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atheist professors of philosophy define "atheism".

On the other hand by approving the torture of suspected terrorists Harris is certainly permitting such torture...

You are mistaken regarding Harris' views on torture.

Where am I mistaken? I have analyzed Harris's thinking about torture in the lower part of post 1620 – is there anything there you disagree with?

614. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59616 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 30, 2007 at 12:16 am

Goldy (post 1679, or #59585):

From were I stand the idea that life is just a complex planet-wide chemical reaction, a chemical reaction that at some stage, somehow (nobody really has the slightest idea of how, so right now it's rather magical), becomes conscious is, well, fantastic beyond imagination, not to mention an efficient producer of paradoxes

Is this idea not God? Have you not just named what you don't understand as "God"?

But above I were not describing something I don't understand, but rather something that naturalists don't understand. It's naturalism that claims that consciousness arises from matter and that to me makes no sense at all. How or why should any material system become conscious? Just because it's complex? If so, how or why should a very complex material system become conscious? The sun is a very complex material system; does it mean it's conscious? Earth's weather patterns are a very complex material system. Is it conscious? Or maybe a material system becomes conscious if it's very complex in a particular way. If so, how or why should a material system that is very complex in that particular way become conscious? These questions have been asked for decades now, and the fact of the matter is that no naturalist has the slightest idea of an answer, not even the slightest idea of how an answer might look like. After all there is absolutely nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – in our knowledge of physical systems that would imply that some of them under certain circumstances would become conscious. As far as our entire body of scientific knowledge goes no material system should be conscious. It's easy to understand the growth of complexity in an organism's structure and behavior, and hence the evolution of intelligent behavior, up to and including human intelligence. But there is absolutely nothing in our scientific knowledge that would imply that any type of intelligent behavior should be accompanied by consciousness. Strange, no?

Why is it harder to accept the above than to accept there is something unseen, unheard, unfelt called God?

Who said that God is unseen, unheard and unfelt? Not me. According to my worldview everything you see, hear or feel is basically caused by God (except those parts that are random or are caused by other people), and how it is like to see, hear or feel is also caused by God.

615. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59610 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 11:29 pm

Dr Benway (post 1672, or #59546):

steve99:

You use as part of your ideas what feels right to you, when any reasoning person knows that such feelings are deeply problematic and not to be trusted.

Agreed.

If so then both Steve and you agree that Sam Harris is not a reasoning person. I quote from his "The end of faith":

Whatever its stigma, 'intuition' is a term that we simply cannot do without, because it denotes the most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding. […] The point, I trust, is obvious: we cannot step out of the darkness without taking a first step. The reliance on intuition, therefore, should be no more discomfiting for the ethicist than it has been for the physicist. […] The fact that we must rely on certain intuitions to answer ethical questions does not in the least suggest that there is anything insubstantial, ambiguous, or culturally contingent about ethical truth."

I agree with most of Harris's epistemology by the way, which I have described with more detail in post 1607.

Note that medicine didn't begin to make good progress until the development of the double-blind, placebo controlled trial.

Right, and the same goes for the rest of science. But here we are not discussing science's epistemology but ontology's epistemology. Why exactly do you think we should carry over science's epistemology to other fields of knowledge? For example I am sure you have quite some knowledge about your wife. Did you base that knowledge on double-blind placebo controlled trials? ;-)

I think I've been trying to make a single point in various ways in this thread, which Dianelos has not refuted and which I'll make again: Appeals to God as a basis for action are immoral, as this basis does violence to our collective need for corroborative evidence.

So the naturalistic belief that the physical universe objectively exists is immoral too because there is absolutely no evidence, corroborative or not, for that belief. As there is no corroborative evidence that other people have minds. Or that the world did not start 5 minutes ago. Or that time flows forwards and not backwards. Or that inductive method is reasonable. Or that the number 9^9^9^9^9 is larger than 8^8^8^8^8.

616. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59609 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 11:13 pm

Steve99 (post 1671, or #59468):

I have been camouflaging or avoiding any issues please point them out to me; I am really interested in this.

There seems little point, as when we have done that before, you have just ignored what we have posted. [snip]

You present a long list here, but it's too vague for me to do anything with it. Why don't you pick one particular issue and describe exactly what I have tried to avoid or to camouflage? Ah, here is an example. You write:

You show a deep misunderstanding of what 'explanation' means, when you try and answer 'how' questions (how does consciousness arise) with meaningless 'why' answers (because God wanted it that way).

You must understand, Steve, that when answering questions about my theistic worldview I need not respond in ways that a naturalist would find agreeable. I mean it's not like I have to give a naturalistic description of theism :-) In my worldview what causes change is personal will, so the answer to "how" something happens is normally "by that person's will". And in many cases the person in question is God. But, as I have often pointed out, to just say "God wills it" conveys little explanatory power, so in my worldview the explanation consists in showing why God would will that.

Finally, once more, let me point out to you that in a worldview in which consciousness is the fundamental constituent of reality the question of "how did consciousness arise" is meaningless. That question is only meaningful if asked about the naturalistic worldivew. Why? Because according to naturalism the fundamental constituent of reality is matter and here the question "So, how did consciousness arise from matter?" makes sense. The question that would make sense to ask about my worldview of idealistic theism is "How did matter arise?". And my answer beyond the obvious "because God wills a particular order in our experience of third-person data, an order we call the physical universe" is to explain why God wills that. Which I have in some of the previous posts.

Again, you can't possibly understand the hypothesis of idealistic theism (never mind test whether it works better than naturalism) if you insist to keep thinking naturalistically. In order to be able to compare worldviews you must first let go of yours, step back as it were, and compare them with a free mind.

When anyone gets close to actually convincing you that one of your ideas is wrong, you neatly sidestep the issue by claiming that all you are interested in is the debate, and whether the ideas are 'useful'.

I am not sure what you refer to here, but I have often pointed out that my objective is this thread is not to argue that God objectively exists (after all a naturalist can't argue that the physical universe objectively exists either), but rather to argue that the worldview of idealistic theism works much better than the worldview of naturalism. And that part of the reasons why I think it works better is that it is more useful in various contexts.

Anyway, feel free to insist on any one of the other points you mention and to which I do not respond to here, but please be more specific.

617. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59605 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 10:33 pm

Alovrin (post 1667, or #59342):

Well, Dawkins and Harris approve such a policy [of uprooting religion], don't they?

There is no atheist "policy" its the wrong word.

I never claimed there was. I only pointed out the fact that following Marx's dictum that religion is the opium of the people successive communist regimes had the policy of uprooting religion, and I was asking if Dawkins and Harris approve such a policy.

I think they do. So, what do you think? Do they?

And Hitler was NOT an atheist.

He most certainly was. He was born in a Christian environment but that's irrelevant. He chose to not directly oppose religious institutions but that's irrelevant also. And even though there is some vagueness over the issue, Nazi ideology itself was almost certainly atheist. For example Martin Borman (Hitler's private secretary and head of the party chancellery) flatly declared: "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable" Further he wrote: "When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest"

Other Nazi officials planned for the cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible. All that sounds pretty atheist to me.

618. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59599 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 10:02 pm

SharonMcT (post 1665, or #59321):

Some religious people persecuted others because of their religious beliefs.

Some atheists persecuted others to gain power, not because of their lack of beliefs.

What evidence do you have for that? After all what has happened in reality may be quite the opposite, namely:

Some atheist people persecuted others because of their lack of belief in God.

Some religious people persecuted others to gain power, not because of their religious beliefs.

So do you have any evidence to justify that the former represents reality better than the later?

Again, it's so simple, how can you not see it?

If it's so simple you will have an easy time giving me the evidence I ask above ;-)

If things were really simple there wouldn't be so many people (many of them good people) disagreeing with each other, don't you think?

619. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59597 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 9:46 pm

Lauregon (post 1664, or #59303):

To "trust" another person means knowing the other person well enough to have faith that the other person won't let you down in situations that have to do with common reality.

Sounds right to me.

To trust in "God" means continually making excuses for why "God" didn't do as one wished, prayed for, and wanted.

I am not sure about that. Why should God do as one wished? If I did what my daughter wished I would be feeding her only chocolate ice-cream. We must find in the reality of our God-given experience of life the signs of what God Him/Herself wishes, and I think it is childish when we protest that God does not wish what we ourselves wish.

It is, for instance, to say that "God" must have wanted one to learn a "lesson" of some sort when cruel things occur to him or her. For example, my granddaughter was born with cerebral palsy, and barring new medical discoveries, her life will always be very difficult. A believer might say, for instance, that "God" must have allowed her disability to occur in order for those around her to learn some virtue such as patience, or to have compassion for the afflicted---or for her to learn to rely on "God's goodness." I wonder how long that believer would have faith in a human friend who willfully allowed such a disability to occur in the first place.

Ok. This is an important point. Life in general and for most of us is sweet, but most people do experience some tragedies in their lives, and some people have a truly tragic life. I won't here discuss the issue of injustice – that's a secondary issue and the basic solution lies in the sameness of all people. What I want to discuss here is your main argument: How could God willfully allow such a tragedy to occur in the first place?

There are two answers:

One, the life transforming answer of faith, i.e. of trusting that "all manner of things shall be well" and of trusting one's all in God's hands. If we are to believe my friend's account of her experience, such trust has the power to transform tragedy into beauty. That's the visceral Dionysian answer. But to in effect answer that tragedy's justification resides in the splendor of overcoming tragedy through one's trust of God is I think an answer that will only be convincing to somebody who actually did decide and did experience what my friend experienced, and just maybe to someone like me who has spoken to her and is inclined to believe her.

So what about an Apollonian, thinking person's answer? Well, clearly if God's goal in creating our experiential environment is to give us an ethically challenging space for us to grow in virtue, then I think it's clear that such a space requires the experience of some evil things – both things that happen to us and things that we ourselves may cause. And the evil that happens to us must be random and not caused by God, first because God cannot cause evil and secondly because if we were to believe that the evil that happens to us was caused by God we would shy away from God. But your question is not why did God cause that tragedy, but rather why did God allow that tragedy to happen. The short answer is: Because if God did not allow such random tragedies to happen our experiential environment would not be optimized for growing in virtue. The longer answer is: What is the alternative? Suppose that God did not allow terrible tragedies as the one you describe to happen. So suppose that God would somehow disallow experiences that measure 100 or up in a scale that quantifies the intensity of tragedy, in other words suppose we experienced only tragic events that measure 99 or less. That being so, i.e. 99 being the worse possible tragedy we could experience, we might ask why did God allow level 99 tragedies to happen. You see where I am driving at? By thinking like that we fall into an infinite regression. If God should disallow tragedies of 100 and up to be experienced, by the same measure God should disallow tragedies of 99 and up to be experienced, and in the end God would have to disallow any painful thing to be experienced. We would then exist in a state that is equivalent to being eternally connected to the absolute happiness inducing machine I described in post 1607, and that's a state of affairs we all agree that we do not want. So, there exists some optimal point between the two extremes: the experience of so much evil as to make ethical thinking impractical on the one hand, and on the other hand the experience of no evil at all. The question is: Does our experience of life agree with that optimal point? That of course is a hugely difficult question to answer. What I can say is that I know of no argument that would count as evidence that the amount of evil present in our experiential environment is not optimal. In other words I know of no argument that would make me suspect that our experiential environment is not optimal and hence could not have been produced by an all-good and all-powerful God.

The most sophisticated non-theists concede that our experience of some evil is compatible with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God, but argue that the evils we actually experience are far too great to make sense. In other words they disagree with my last point above. But I observe that in my own life it was the experience of evils (the rather small evils that have as yet befallen me and the much greater evils that I observe afflicting other people) that have moved me to act ethically, so, again, even though I cannot positively argue that our experiential environment is optimal, I see nothing that makes me doubt it is. But then I have not experienced any great tragedy in my life – so I can only depend on the witness of other people who have. It does seem to be true that grave tragedy tends to increase peoples' goodness as well as their faith in God (in case they are theists), and how my friend described her experience points in the same direction. If you should care to answer, in your experience did the people around your granddaughter become better people because of her disability? (If they have, I do not mean to say that your granddaughter's tragedy was therefore a good thing – that's not what I am saying. Hers is a true tragedy, a terribly bad thing that any person would like her to have avoided - my heart goes out to her parents too. What I am saying is that maybe random tragedies like the one you describe can ultimately make sense within a theistic worldview according to which our growth in goodness will in the end join us all - including your granddaughter who is not going to be handicapped in the afterlife - with God, who is the ultimate good.)

There's a major difference: suicide bombers have actually blown people up. It's one thing to talk about permitting torture or suicide missions, but quite another to actually permit, finance, or participate in them. I haven't heard of Dawkins or Harris doing any of those things.

In his debate with Hedges I mentioned in post 1644, Harris argues that not all religions are equally evil and that Islam is a especially evil one, because according to some poll a majority of Muslims in many countries approve of suicide bombings in some circumstances, implying that this is sufficient evidence to condemn their religion. My argument in post 1661 that by the same measure we should condemn Harris's belief system that led him to approve torture in some circumstances.

Now above you change that context and argue that Harris did not actually permit, finance, or participate in torture. Well, he did not participate in torture of course (and I wonder what he would do if somebody brought to him a suspected terrorist and asked him to torture him). On the other hand by approving the torture of suspected terrorists Harris is certainly permitting such torture, and by paying taxes to a government that has actually tortured suspected terrorists he has in part financed that torture.

It's well-known that one of the last stages of impending death is the acceptance of its inevitability.

Yes, but my friend did not accept the inevitability of impending death, on the contrary she fought against her cancer and in the end she won. What we are discussing here is something else, something that converted her tragedy into beauty, so much so that now that she is healthy she misses some of that feeling. I don't know, I find that an almost unbelievably wonderful thing.

You can dress your friend's embrace of "God's goodness" by calling her acceptance an "active attitude of affirming" etc., etc., but death is seldom a person's ideal event, and no matter how you try to paint it otherwise, that so-called "loving God" decreed it---at least according to orthodox beliefs. Few people would trust a human friend who brought death upon them against their will, but believers will excuse "God" for every ugly thing that happens and call it "beauty." If that makes them feel happy, fine, but, in fact, few people would be as accepting of a human friend who treated them as their "God" treats humankind.

Well, I don't believe that God specifically decrees anybody's death or suffering any tragedy; these are random events that follow natural and therefore blind laws. I agree with you that those who do believe that God decrees individual peoples' death or suffering have a hard problem or paradox to deal with. And I think that your way of comparing God's behavior to peoples' behavior is the right way to think about God. The way to understanding God is by understanding ourselves and our experience of life. We are all persons, and God, if you wish, is the ideal person.

620. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #59583 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 29, 2007 at 7:27 pm

_J_ (post 1657, or #59233):

And he's quite certain that life is better when you're dancing.

Yes, I am quite certain about that. Aren't you?

Well, not really. As 'dancing' was standing for 'holding a religious faith' in my metaphor, it can't be a surprise to you that I'm not completely in favour!

Oh, right. I understood "dancing" as a metaphor for something wider than religious faith, namely the non-rational/emotional content of our life. Despite some naturalists' insistence to the contrary we all base everything we know on intuitive knowledge, but my point here goes beyond that: it refers to the fact that many of our desires and likes have nothing to do with cool reasoning, and the most important and defining part of our experience is qualitative and beyond objective/scientific analysis. Nietzsche wrote with amazing insight about this in his first book "The birth of tragedy". The main idea of the book refers to the so-called Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions of our life, Apollonian being roughly the intellectual aspects and Dionysian the emotional aspects of our life. For me, "dancing" is an excellent metaphor for that non-rational/emotional dimension of life, a dimension that many highly educated/brainy people tend to lack or shy away form. Indeed if you actually tried dancing (but you did try martial arts and I think it's similar) you'd find that first it's a beautiful and meaningful thing and second that thinking is actually an impediment for dancing well.

Coming back to religion, in this thread I have defended the thesis not so much that God exists but rather that it is more reasonable to hold a particular theistic worldview (idealistic theism) than any naturalistic one. (I am aware that I haven't convinced anybody that idealistic theism works better than naturalism, but just maybe I have convinced a few that theism is not necessarily as irrational and neither is naturalism as rational as many suppose – for example there exists no evidence in favor of the naturalistic worldview.) In any case, my project in defense of religion in this thread has been basically an intellectual/Apollonian project. Most religious people do not follow that path, but rather a Dionysian path towards religion. They experience religion viscerally, and, as my example of my friend who was stricken by cancer shows, that path may on the one hand make them more susceptible to holding some wrong beliefs about the properties of God but on the other hand, where it really matters, that path may be more useful (in the sense of experiential gains) than my more brainy path. I suppose the best path is to combine both the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions of life, but I am having trouble with the later. That's why I wrote that I am a very mediocre life-dancer.

At the minute, I'm failing pretty miserably to get any kind of a hold on life, because I'm terrible at making big decisions. Every time I come close to settling something, I just rip myself to bits with contradictions, so I end up going nowhere and being very frustrated with myself for it. How I would love to be able to be able to put the big decisions in someone else's hands.

I think I understand very well what you mean here, because I am like that too. It takes a world for me to make a decision, sometimes even a small one. I think too much you see, I am a damn brainy Apollo. Many religious traditions, especially Buddhism teach that one must experience life as it is and not as it is thought to be (Zen Buddhism goes as far as becoming an exercise of non-rationality). The same is visible in Christianity (e.g. in th