Well, I nearly made it a month
Yes, it's been over four weeks since I said I hoped I'd done the last big ranty post about religion "for a little bit". That being the case, I shall here respond to something in sambarham's latest entry....I was reading a book called The Salmon of Doubt, which is a buch of stuff by Douglas Adams collected posthumously on the plane. Some of it is so funny I was justs about crying, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Apparently he was a convinced athiest, by which he means that he saw no place for mere wishywashy belief in his atheism. There is a bit in Salmon from an interview with American Athiest magazine about this, which I read with a little bit of discomfort, since I’m a devout Christian. And then when I got off the plane some time later, a thought struck me. I think I’ve had this thought before, but this time I’m actually writing it down…
The thought is this; I think that athiests (or at least the ones I’ve had any contact with), seem to make an enourmous and horrible logical error in their arguments. They seem to ‘believe’ that anything that cannot be comprehended and understood by us, that is humanity is necessarily false and untrue. I can’t be bothered to look up what Adams said about it, but he basically said that he went from being a Christitan to and athiest because he realised that the logical arguments for religion were nowhere near as strict as those for, say, gravity. My answer to this is that this is the most astonishingly arrogant viewpoint I’ve come across in a while (I don’t exactly go looking for arrogant viewpoints, so there may have been others that I just missed). Out of the logically unprovable view that God exists, and the logically unprovable view that God doesn’t exist because I, personally, can’t explain him, which is more defensible, really?
"Athiests (or at least the ones I’ve had any contact with)" would be me; among others, I assume, but I'm quite likely the one most closely related to sambarham. I therefore feel somewhat obligated to answer the charge, which I shall do here instead of swamping his journal with what, going by experience, he would likely see as hostility.
The Douglas Adams interview in question is online here, and I think you'll find that sambarham doesn't quite address what Adams is saying. Suppose I were to summarize the above as follows: "Christians think anyone who disagrees with them is arrogant" would that be fair? Would it be an honest representation of the argument? No, it would be what's called a "straw-man", where you set up a ludicrous caricature of your opponent's position and proceed to pull that to pieces, instead of troubling yourself to answer what they've actually said. Neither Douglas Adams nor I would say that God does not exist because we, personally, can't comprehend or understand or explain him. No. What we both say ("we both" it sounds quite matey, doesn't it? "Old Dougie and I..." ) is that we do not believe in God because we have no evidence for him: a subtle but crucial distinction.
True story: last night, M and I were driving (all right, M was driving, I was passenging) along Princes St, past the Oval, in heavy rain and a cold wind. M suddenly spotted a young boy, about ten, standing on the footpath all by himself. Given the weather, she decided to turn the car around and see if he was OK not an easy proposition at just that point in the road, as Dunedinites will know. As we came back, we both saw him cross Princes St in our headlights, as if heading up the hill. He had a stripey sports jersey on, but no coat, so I agreed we should probably try and help him. We turned up the street he'd seemed to be heading for, but there was no sign of him. The only other place it seemed he could have gone was into the car yard on the corner but there was no sign of him there either. After several fruitless minutes of searching and wondering, we realized that, wherever he was, we weren't likely to find him, and reluctantly resumed our journey.
Now, despite such stories being well integrated into our culture's mystical and supernatural traditions, neither of us for a moment entertained the notion that he was a ghost, or an angel, or a demonic personification of malign spiritual forces, or an alien. I am quite as sure now as I was then that what I saw was a real, ordinary human boy. Certainly, he went out of our sight, but in the dark and rain that's not a big freaky mystery, just a small puzzling one. Is that an arrogant position to take? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was a ghost, and the logically unprovable view that he wasn't a ghost because I, personally, can't explain ghosts, which is more defensible, really? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was an angel, and the logically unprovable view that he wasn't an angel because I, personally, can't explain angels, which is more defensible? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was a demonic personification of malign spiritual forces... well, by now I imagine you have grasped the point I am endeavouring to communicate.
What's more, the general principle I've adopted here seems to be pretty much universal, even among people who believe in the supernatural, when discussing things they have personally studied in detail. When I studied geology back in the '90s, one of my palaeontology lecturers was a Christian who believed that evolution in general was a matter of natural processes but that God had given Nature a nudge when it came to the human brain. When I went on to study physical anthropology, one of my lecturers there was another Christian who believed the precise converse: that there was more to macroevolution than ordinary natural laws but that, a near-human anthropoid having arisen, the final step to humanity took no more than natural selection working on genetic mutations. My father, being a philologist, is (or was, last time I talked to him about it) quite ready to accept Noah's flood and the parting of the Red Sea, but not an instantaneous "confusion of tongues" at Babel. C. S. Lewis firmly believed in miracles and wrote an entire book just to defend that belief, but, being a literary critic by trade, he didn't believe, as many do, that God had preserved the Bible from accumulating copying errors through time. Is it arrogant to suppose that, in all those cases, those people's opinions carry more weight on the things they have studied than on the things they haven't? That, as a general rule, what looks miraculous from a distance turns out to be natural when examined up close?
The thought is this; I think that athiests (or at least the ones I’ve had any contact with), seem to make an enourmous and horrible logical error in their arguments. They seem to ‘believe’ that anything that cannot be comprehended and understood by us, that is humanity is necessarily false and untrue. I can’t be bothered to look up what Adams said about it, but he basically said that he went from being a Christitan to and athiest because he realised that the logical arguments for religion were nowhere near as strict as those for, say, gravity. My answer to this is that this is the most astonishingly arrogant viewpoint I’ve come across in a while (I don’t exactly go looking for arrogant viewpoints, so there may have been others that I just missed). Out of the logically unprovable view that God exists, and the logically unprovable view that God doesn’t exist because I, personally, can’t explain him, which is more defensible, really?
"Athiests (or at least the ones I’ve had any contact with)" would be me; among others, I assume, but I'm quite likely the one most closely related to sambarham. I therefore feel somewhat obligated to answer the charge, which I shall do here instead of swamping his journal with what, going by experience, he would likely see as hostility.
The Douglas Adams interview in question is online here, and I think you'll find that sambarham doesn't quite address what Adams is saying. Suppose I were to summarize the above as follows: "Christians think anyone who disagrees with them is arrogant" would that be fair? Would it be an honest representation of the argument? No, it would be what's called a "straw-man", where you set up a ludicrous caricature of your opponent's position and proceed to pull that to pieces, instead of troubling yourself to answer what they've actually said. Neither Douglas Adams nor I would say that God does not exist because we, personally, can't comprehend or understand or explain him. No. What we both say ("we both" it sounds quite matey, doesn't it? "Old Dougie and I..." ) is that we do not believe in God because we have no evidence for him: a subtle but crucial distinction.
True story: last night, M and I were driving (all right, M was driving, I was passenging) along Princes St, past the Oval, in heavy rain and a cold wind. M suddenly spotted a young boy, about ten, standing on the footpath all by himself. Given the weather, she decided to turn the car around and see if he was OK not an easy proposition at just that point in the road, as Dunedinites will know. As we came back, we both saw him cross Princes St in our headlights, as if heading up the hill. He had a stripey sports jersey on, but no coat, so I agreed we should probably try and help him. We turned up the street he'd seemed to be heading for, but there was no sign of him. The only other place it seemed he could have gone was into the car yard on the corner but there was no sign of him there either. After several fruitless minutes of searching and wondering, we realized that, wherever he was, we weren't likely to find him, and reluctantly resumed our journey.
Now, despite such stories being well integrated into our culture's mystical and supernatural traditions, neither of us for a moment entertained the notion that he was a ghost, or an angel, or a demonic personification of malign spiritual forces, or an alien. I am quite as sure now as I was then that what I saw was a real, ordinary human boy. Certainly, he went out of our sight, but in the dark and rain that's not a big freaky mystery, just a small puzzling one. Is that an arrogant position to take? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was a ghost, and the logically unprovable view that he wasn't a ghost because I, personally, can't explain ghosts, which is more defensible, really? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was an angel, and the logically unprovable view that he wasn't an angel because I, personally, can't explain angels, which is more defensible? Out of the logically unprovable view that he was a demonic personification of malign spiritual forces... well, by now I imagine you have grasped the point I am endeavouring to communicate.
What's more, the general principle I've adopted here seems to be pretty much universal, even among people who believe in the supernatural, when discussing things they have personally studied in detail. When I studied geology back in the '90s, one of my palaeontology lecturers was a Christian who believed that evolution in general was a matter of natural processes but that God had given Nature a nudge when it came to the human brain. When I went on to study physical anthropology, one of my lecturers there was another Christian who believed the precise converse: that there was more to macroevolution than ordinary natural laws but that, a near-human anthropoid having arisen, the final step to humanity took no more than natural selection working on genetic mutations. My father, being a philologist, is (or was, last time I talked to him about it) quite ready to accept Noah's flood and the parting of the Red Sea, but not an instantaneous "confusion of tongues" at Babel. C. S. Lewis firmly believed in miracles and wrote an entire book just to defend that belief, but, being a literary critic by trade, he didn't believe, as many do, that God had preserved the Bible from accumulating copying errors through time. Is it arrogant to suppose that, in all those cases, those people's opinions carry more weight on the things they have studied than on the things they haven't? That, as a general rule, what looks miraculous from a distance turns out to be natural when examined up close?