I like this point that people must start where they are. Any discussion (in the broadest sense possible) of the possibility of god, much less God, or anything about god/God has to take place with the person as she is, in the understanding that people are complex, and there are a great many reasons for belief and disbelief. The feeling that one is coerced into belief all the while being told they are free will eventually become clear. And that kind of “belief” is likely rather compliance than any kind of faith.
However, I think sometimes the response, “Ok, I give in, there is a God,” comes as one wrestles with one’s own dis- or different belief. I think this would be particulalry true for someone who had experienced any sort of abuse in conjunction with the practice of faith. In such a case, disbelief could be a defense, a protection, or a rejection of what was presented as God and used as a tool of abuse. “God cannot be like this monster. If this is what God is like, I will do without!” We see today that it is no hard thing to grasp existence without reference to God, particularly an abusive one. After having developed that scaffold or paradigm, returning to a belief in God might be entirely surprising.
Sometimes people simply become convinced in spite of themselves that there is a god or even God, and that something about that god or God can be understood, at least a little. “Ok. I give up. You exist!” (now what?) could be a legitimate response to the whole situation.
@Merv and @Kendel you’ve encouraged me whether deliberately or otherwise to share another. I often find myself reading a section in the book forward and then, paragraph by paragraph backwards. This next excerpt from p 1947 precedes the last one.
The constant emphasis on the ungraspability of God may have left the impression that God is something remote, intellectual, and abstract. But everything is paradoxical here: because God is also the least of all these things. One of my favourite sayings, because it answers to experience exactly, is from the palaeontologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. 230
You cannot get less remote, intellectual or abstract than that. The divine is not a realm transcending life, but an aspect of life itself. When Jacob awoke from his dream, he realised that God was ‘in this place, and I knew it not.’231 Once again, it is a matter of seeing exactly where we are, but with different ‘eyes’
Once again, it is a matter of seeing exactly where we are, but with different ‘eyes’
That we can be a real world disruptor once you see how “ye will be like God…”
"…anxiety betrays the legerdemain, the comical self-deception, of every speculative attempt to sleight the difference between God and human beings; and, as such, it is at bottom an existential category, as it would be for Heidegger.” John Betz
I am going through an interesting book that some may like (we all have so much to read). I have provided a few quotes:
FAITH AND SPECULATION An Essay in Philosophical Theology containing the Deems Lectures for 1964
BY AUSTIN FARRER
This book is a continuous reflection on theistic belief, in its double aspect of working faith and rational conviction. The discussion develops out of itself, moving on from a consideration of the religious phenomenon into suggestions for the revision of philosophical theology.
RIGHTLY or wrongly, the contemporary mind sees something almost comic in the old rational theology. We find it absurd that anyone should pretend to discount both the fact and the form of religious belief, while he rakes the universe for signs of a First Cause.
But if a neutral approach to the grand question involves a fiction, there is fiction equally to be guarded against in an approach from the side of religious conviction. What is the philosopher’s programme to be? Taking the conviction as human fact, he is to look into the grounds that might justify it. But in what field is he to look for them? Surely in the field of religious thought. The philosopher’s concern is whether any theology is true. But if it is true, it will not surely be true by accident; it will be true because the grounds or motives for such belief have been sound. So it is actual motives or grounds for religious believing which demand the philosopher’s attention.
Another reflection on the nature of God from TMWT, continuing backwards from the last two most recently entered above retracing my steps to this one that precedes them both from page 1934:
…if God has initiated a process that generates what is genuinely new, genuinely free – a process of truly creative evolution – why would God destroy it by omniscience and omnipotence? That the divine mind contains all possibilities, does not imply knowledge of which particular possibilities will be actualised.
God is not like a human agent performing acts of will. The sun does not will to shine, nor can we will it to shine: it always shines, and it is only the presence of cloud that obscures it. We need, then, to be in a state of highly active passivity, or ‘active receptivity’197 – what Freya Stark calls, in an even better phrase, ‘fearless receptivity’.198 So it is that Meister Eckhart says:
Do not imagine that God is like a human carpenter, who works or not as he likes, who can do or leave undone as he wishes. It is different with God: as and when God finds you ready, He has to act, to overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure the sun has to burst forth and cannot refrain.199
As always I’m interested to learn what of what I’m reading can be accommodated by Christianity as practiced by those of you who are still still thinking about and actively working out your own approach to theology.
Just realized I hadn’t actually responded about this but I did try to look into it. Any chance you can say more?
At $288.98 for the hard cover that is one pricy essay. I looked online for an article or video of a discussion on his work but found only this. Not surprising given the state of media in the 60’s.
Frankly that video didn’t engage me but this one looks much more promising and of more interest for this forums.
This thing cannot keep on going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other.
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
This is another striking quote that immediately came before:
We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that is known, but disagree in its prediction somewhere, otherwise it is not interesting.
Then he stood up again and, now on autopilot, finished going through the steps of Peaslee’s argument. But the mistake kept sticking in his mind. “By the way,” he said when he was done, “a few minutes ago I got what I think is the right answer:”
George Johnson, writing about Gell-Mann’s clever accident
Murray would later wonder if the idea had been in his head all along, the result of unconscious machinations that hadn’t yet surfaced. Maybe the random misfiring of a neuron had caused him to misspeak, jogging his brain out of a rut and down this new avenue.
I haven’t finished listening to your whole video yet (the 2nd one), but I already ran across this quote from him that I really like:
“Science is not trying to prove something is true. Science is trying to prove something false, and failing so many times that you accept it as true.”
And he goes on to remind us about science only being about what is falsifiable.
And in a bizarre sort of way, conspiracy theorists (such as a flat-earther we’ve recently begun engaging with) manage to take stuff that is in the very middle of what science can and has addressed, and manage to spin it in a way that makes their claim about it non-scientific. I.e. - no matter how well you explain to them, they automatically dismiss it as conspiracy, because they’ve already decided that the science establishment must be wrong, their their own little cohort must be right - so therefore they imagine that any question they have raised must be fatal to the side of the other, and any explanation given by the other is either incomplete or else just lies. And thus they turn themselves out from actually doing any real science.
I only came across it while looking for info about Austin Farrer and his article. I haven’t finished it either but it’s message seems to dovetail nicely with what I often read here. Science is a practical means for sorting out claims regarding nature. I liked the play with words he did with title, changing the second line from “Limits In Faith” to “Faith In Limits”. I like that because unless we can acknowledge our limits there is no need (or possibility) of faith. Fundamentalism destroys faith.
I don’t know where else to put this, but I expect it will have some pithy quotes in it! Not doing any FaceBook to speak of (mostly just checking Andy Borowitz one-liners ; - ), this was at the top of my feed from our friend @Michael_Callen (we all need more on our reading lists, right?)…
(The image is a link to Amazon.)
Oh, and the first essay is by our friend @Sy_Garte.
Thanks for mentioning this. I know a group of atheists where this can be quoted and it may find some real traction.
@Paulm12 you may find this book interesting as well
“This is a truly fascinating book. Many people, including nonbelievers like me, have found Dawkins’s strident atheism upsetting to the point of offensive. I would never have thought—as Coming to Faith Through Dawkins shows in wonderful detail—that, for some, Dawkins’s rantings were the spur to Christian faith. One can be forgiven for feeling a strong element of schadenfreude.” —Michael Ruse
