Thank God for evolution?

Faith & Science Conversation
8

Mr Totti,

Thanks for this message. I was able to read it better. I’m not really going into each point because it’s late, but if you like, please bring up individual ones and we can discuss them.

I’m going to start with things I agree with him about:

  1. in some ways, we do find the divine everywhere. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God; /But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;/The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.” So I think he sees that too. But how we parse that out is different.

  2. He correctly identifies that we use religion and abstract thought (see the thread on myth; where Dawkins runs awry, I think, is that he thinks we can do without myth to understand) to comprehend the universe. C.S. Lewis on the Bible: Myth, Truth, Fact, and Genesis | Brick by Brick The necessity of myth - #8 by Christy What Richard Dawkins could learn from Goldilocks and the Three Bears | Fairytales | The Guardian

  3. He is right to question whether there is anything other than what we can test with the senses. And I do believe that the “gospel” he quotes of people going to hell because they could not accept a hard-to-believe fact is mistaken. Those who think that God sorts the saved from the damned so arbitrarily do likely impose and deal with their own fears this way, rather than believing in justice. I truly believe that you can be earnestly seeking truth to the point you reject an idea of God based on what you see; and still be closer to God than someone who, for example, ascends the stairs of a lectern at church to be admired. Rauser observes something like that about Barth and Bultmann here: Open a window: Fundamentalism and the thoughtful heretic - Randal Rauser

The following are some questions I have for him

  1. Religion is trying to figure out how to deal with reality, true–and that is what we’d expect. If it didn’t deal with reality, we’d be in big trouble. We would have another reason to reject it. But it’s more complicated than that. In some ways, it’s an idealized, better view of reality. Some of that has to do with justice. If you told a man whose wife, the mother of his children, just died that he didn’t have to worry about the afterlife–that she was snuffed out–he would be stricken to the heart. Religion doesn’t stop with accepting death; and we can go into the significance of that later.
  2. Christ is a really different view on life in that, as Praveen Sethupathy says on this video, Are we more than our biology? Praveen Sethupathy, Assistant Professor of Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill - YouTube, he chose Jesus above his Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic alternatives because He turned reality and success on its head–the first was last, the last first; God becoming man and dying for no reason other than love. That doesn’t quite fit in with most folks’ view of reality.
  3. It’s actually not the reality that entrances us, but the super-reality of God that improves mortality. That’s why Lewis was fascinated by the idea that this world is not our home–that we were made for something else.
    He talks of this frequently and clearly, as only he can
    –Till We Have Faces–the liberal priest says everything divine is a metaphor for the spring, summer and fall, with the death of winter; but Orual, the pagan queen, comes to know the real gods (emblematic of God) (one of his best books).
    –The Silver Chair, where the witch tells Puddleglum, Eustace, Jill and Rillian that they only imagined Aslan (Jesus/God) and Overworld with the sun, because they knew the Underworld with its lamps and cats, and looked for something bigger. “Surprised by Joy” also talks of his search for something more
    –Now here’s where I reason from wanting something to be true–which is only a reason to look, not to believe: Reality doesn’t deal with our responsibility and sin. Once we know that we are guilty and responsible, we realize that other mortals can’t take care of our deepest needs.
    –Justin Barrett of Cambridge (now Fuller) investigated the “Chinese Problem” and other reasons that Dawkins and other atheists thought would explain why we believe in God evolutionarily. He found that while it explained functions, it didn’t rule out God.EXPLORATIONS - Does Cognitive Science Make Religion Redundant? - Justin Barrett - YouTube

I do want to point out that I’m not a philosopher or theologian. My latter arguments are sort of arguing from want–that I want there to be such a thing as justice, or a home that our current universe only points us to. However, I think he misses some key points here in dismissing faith (as many skeptics do when they limit the reasons to one or the other).One of the things I get most frustrated with Christian apologists (and some skeptics, too) is when they argue from the point of “I think things should be this way, so I will believe that way,” rather than giving a good reason for believing that way. Maybe my writing above is more of a musing of ways to start reasoning.I do think Justin Barrett has some interesting directions in his link in which to assess cognitive science of religion. I also think that Randal Rauser has a great set of books that arise from his discussions with atheists he holds as friends–you’d enjoy him. His usual approach is to argue at least 50% of the time from his opponent’s point of view, so as to understand him better and be a person that you would want to agree with! He even debated the kindly atheist Michael Ruse on “Unbelievable” (a good website) by switching sides with him. You searched for 50/50 - Randal Rauser

I’m sorry–it’s 1218 am and I know I can put a better discussion together, but it can develop over time. Please be assured that I don’t think that Michael Dowd is condemned for honest, good questions–and these are good ones. God “knows our frame’ he remembers that we are dust.” The best scenario is that we learn from each other as time goes on.

God bless :). Please call me out on these points as you like.