I think the main thing you will find in my refections upon chapter 2 is that I approached and answered these question addressed rather differently than Collins did.
Isn’t the idea of God just Wish Fulfillment?
When I first encountered the philosophy of Pragmatism (the only 100% fully American philosophy) founded by Charles Sanders Pierce, I agreed completely. This should make perfect sense considering my thinking about God in my childhood reflections above. Not for me was any pretense at an objective consideration of whether God existed, but only in finding what role and benefit was there in a belief in God? What else is life about in the first place if not wish fulfillment? Trying to live your life as if your desires have no value seems totally absurd to me.
So while I was always an extremely intellectual person and also valued the objectivity of science a great deal, it never really ocurred to me to limit my thinking to objectivity alone. Our emotions and desires are as much a part of reality and life as anything else and it only seemed natural to me that I should incorporate such things into my understanding of reality. I guess this is part of what lead to my ultimate conclusion that there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality itself.
What about all the harm done in the name of religion?
From the reflections of my childhood, it should be clear that I was raised knowing rather well all the harm done and continuing to be done by religion in the world. But one of the things that struck me in reading the Bible was how much of it was about precisely that – all the harm done by religion in the world and warning after warning about the dangers and messed up thinking that could be found in it.
So I guess the main point is that all this harm done by religion is all in the old news category for me. And so the question that would always be a great deal more interesting to me is why then do so many people see so much value in religion? And after all, why should the failure of people to live up to their highest ideals mean that the ideals themselves are wrong? Wouldn’t it be even more hypocritical to judge religion by such standards and then turn around an make that a reason for discarding them?
Why would a loving God allow suffering in the world?
In high school AP english we read “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, and while my classmate (mostly mormon) could not relate to either the main character or the ideas of existentialism, I certainly did. I didn’t have have to struggle with the criticisms of religion as they did, and my main takeaway was how Meursault valued even the worst experiences of life.
I went on to read more of Camus: The Plague, The Myth of Sysyphus. The Plague was most focused on dialogue between a doctor and a priest over a child suffering agony while dying of the plague. So it was all about this question of how a loving God could allow such a thing. Of course I didn’t buy into the inane justifications and explainations of the priest any more than Camus did. But instead of leaping to the atheist response, perhaps conditioned by my reading of “The Stranger” it was more in the direction how such experiences could be of value despite how meaningless and abhorrent it might appear at first glance.
In the Myth of Sysyphus, I found the integrity to defy and condemn the frequent concepts of God found in religion that were unjust, unloving, arrogant, and even sadistic. This speaks more to the previous question about harm found in religion. It only reinforced my conclusion that one of the principle tasks of religion was to fight against bad religion.
But I found my ultimate answer to this question (about how a loving God could allow suffering in the world) in the theory of evolution. Evolution demonstrates that suffering is an essential part of life itself. Without suffering there would be no life at all. Life only exists as struggle against the threat of suffering and death. How ironical that we have atheists and theists leveling almost identical cricisms about these two theories of origin, each complaining how cruel and uncaring it is. It seems hilarious to me. As for evil rather than suffering the same answer applies except that it is the possibility of evil which is a necessity rather than evil itself. It is again part of the very nature of life itself (the very essence of which is free will) that we are confronted by this perverse choice to act against life itself.
How can a rational person believe in miracles?
My first instinctive reaction to this question is to ask: How can a human being who values life not believe in miracles? At first I thought Collins’ view might be at odds with my own because he talked about them as something which are (seemingly) inexplicable by the laws of nature in contrast to the “cheapening” of the word in modern parlance. But when he began to speak of probabilities, I began to have second thoughts – especially since he did insert the word “seemingly” above. It looked to me like the real question in his mind might simply be whether the improbable might ultimately have a supernatural (i.e. non-physical) cause. For me the simple fact that the laws of nature are not a causally closed (i.e. deterministic) system because of quantum physics means that having an ultimately divine cause doesn’t mean something has to be scientifically inexplicable.
Collins speaks of a healthy use of skepticism for claims of miracles. But this seems largely derived from the identification of miracles with the inexplicable. He thinks calling the blooming of a flower a miracle treads upon an understanding of plant biolgy. While for me this simply points the the highly subjective nature of miracles in the first place. I do not expect miracles to be inexplicable, unless you mean that science must ultimately resort to statistical anomalies in such an explanation. I don’t see either case as being a reason for excluding an ultimately divine cause or for not using the word “miracle.” Instead I would say this is the difference between real miracles and the magic in fantasy stories. For me the irrationality is not the idea that science cannot explain everything but the idea that God would break the laws of nature which He Himself created just to impress a bunch of ignorant savages who wouldn’t know the difference anyway.