Giles Fraser tries to pwn Stephen Fry by telling us what god is *really* like

February 4, 2015 • 1:24 pm

Do you want some Sophisticated Theology™ today? I thought not. But I have some new theology right here, and boy, is it sophisticated!

First you’ll have to recall (or watch) the Stephen Fry video in which, asked by interviewer Gay Byrne what he’d say if he met God, Fry (an atheist) answered that he’d query God about the pervasiveness of evil in the world (see my post here, or watch the video below). Why, he’d ask, do innocent children die of leukemia? In other words, Fry, assuming that God had some control over the existence and nature of bad stuff on Earth, would ask God for the truths that theodicy has been seeking for millennia.

Well, the Guardian has published a piece in which Giles Fraser rebukes Fry and rejects the kind of God that Fry envisions. The piece is called, “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry believes in, either,” and the odd thing is that the writer who rejects Fry’s God is Giles Fraser, who happens to be not only a journalist, but the priest in charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral. In other words, he’s an Anglican bigwig.

So what, according to Fraser, were Fry’s big mistakes? There were two:

1. God doesn’t have that kind of power. He has, instead, the Power of Love! But how can God be powerless? Because, says Fraser, Jesus was powerless. Fraser:

Too many religious people actually worship power. They imagine the source of ultimate power, give it a name (God, Allah, Yahweh) etc, and then try and cosy up to it, aligning their interests with those of the boss. . .  the temptation is always to suck up to power.

This is why the Jesus story is, for me, the most theologically revolutionary story that there can be. Because it imagines God and power separated. God as a baby. God poor. God helpless on a cross. God with a mocking and ironic crown of thorns. In these scenes it is Caesar who has the power. And so the question posed is: which one will you follow when push comes to shove? You can follow what is right and get strung up for it. Or you can cosy up to power and do as you are told. By saying that he will stare ultimate power in the face and, without fear, call it by its real name, Fry has indicated he is on the side of the angels (even though he does not believe in them). Indeed, Fry is following in a long tradition of religious polemic, from Job to Blake and beyond.

Umm. . . .the last thing I heard, Anglicans—like their Catholic-Church ancestors—accepted the Trinity. That makes Jesus part of the Godhead, i.e., one with power!  And you are saved through your faith in Jesus. Is that power or what?

More important, Fry wasn’t asked to address Jesus, but to address God, or rather the part of the Trinity called God. And nobody doubts that God has power. Or, if Fraser is claiming that God simply can’t do anything beyond emitting Endless Love from above, let him be explicit about that.

What we see in the paragraphs above is simply a word salad that evades the big question: can God do anything about evil or not? And if he can, why doesn’t he? But Fraser goes on:

2. There is no such thing as the God that Fry imagines. That’s right—Fraser says so explicitly:

The other problem with Fry’s argument is philosophical. Simply put: there is no such thing as the God he imagines. It is the flying teapot orbiting a distant planet about which nothing can be said. Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense. Indeed, as no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas rightly insists, existence itself is a questionable predicate to use of God. For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives. Of course this is real. Frighteningly real. Real enough to live and die for even. But this is not the same as saying that God is a command and control astronaut responsible for some wicked hunger game experiment on planet earth. Such a being does not exist. And for the precisely the reasons Fry expounds, thank God for that.

Well, that settles that!  It’s comforting to know that at one human on this planet—Giles Fraser—knows exactly what kind of God there is. God isn’t a disembodied spirit with humanlike qualities, as many other Anglicans wrongly believe. No, he is a God who is really just the name that we give to our hopes and dreams and fears. But—he’s also REAL!

Of course Fraser cites Aquinas, who really did believe that God existed as a spirit with humanlike traits and could punish and reward people. And, indeed, no less an authority THAN NEARLY EVERY DAMN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN IN THE UNIVERSE thinks that God does indeed have the power to punish and reward people—that he is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t even have the Problem of Evil and the discipline of theodicy that it spawned. But apparently only Fraser and possibly Aquinas knows that the three-O God doesn’t exist.

I guess I’m sounding a bit grouchy, what with the capslock and all, but this kind of pronouncement angers me. How the hell does Fraser know what kind of God there is? What gives him the authority to pronounce that Fry’s God is a phantasm? How does he know what he claims to know?

Fraser, in fact, shouldn’t be addressing his remarks to Fry. He should be addressing them to all his Christian coreligionists—Protestant, Anglican and Catholic alike—letting them know that all of them are wrong about God.

h/t: Lenny

172 thoughts on “Giles Fraser tries to pwn Stephen Fry by telling us what god is *really* like”

  2. Lucky Giles. God has informed him of the secret nature of the divine while keeping the rest of us in the dark.

    And do you think that unto such as you;
    A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew:
    God gave the secret, and denied it me?–
    Well, well, what matters it! Believe that, too.
    Omar Khayyam

    2. Which of the versions was that? I’ve read the first and the fifth (I think) but I don’t recall seeing that verse.

      And those who husbanded the golden grain,
      And those who flung it to the winds like rain,
      Alike to no such aureate earth are turn’d
      As, buried once, men want dug up again.

      I love the dry cynicism of Omar.

      Oh, and a classic jibe at this august website:

      Myself when young did eagerly frequent
      Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
      About it and about: but evermore
      Came out by the same Door as in I went

      Take that, armchair philosophers! 😉

  3. Fraser:

    “…there is no such thing as the God he imagines. It is the flying teapot orbiting a distant planet about which nothing can be said. Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense.”

    Well, it’s a small problem relative to his argument as a whole, but Fraser obviously doesn’t understand what point Russell was making with the teapot analogy.

    1. Perhaps Fraser has a much more sophisticated understanding of what Russell meant. Him being in the sophistication business, as it were.

  4. Because it imagines God and power separated. God as a baby. God poor. God helpless on a cross.

    God defeating death. God self-ressurrecting. God creating wine from water. God curing disease with a word.

    If that’s powerlessness, sign me up! Especially that wine bit. More seriously, its absurd for any Christian to claim that their God is powerless given the role in their theology that he plays.

    1. I was going to make more or less the same point but you said it more succinctly than I could. The immaculate conception suggests God has at least one power.

      1. Just a bit of pedantry…the immaculate conception was of Mary by her own (unnamed) mother such that Mary herself could be born in the normal way without sin and thus be a worthy vessel for Jesus. And, no, I don’t think anybody’s ever gotten around to figuring out what it meant for the conception of Mary to be immaculate.

        Jesus’s conception isn’t described as “immaculate,” but rather as having been by the power of the Holy Spurt. Splurge. Sprite. Whatever.

        b&

        3. Not pedantry but teaching someone much more ignorant the correct version, for which I thank you because, unlike some (I won’t name Deepakity names), I value learning and welcome being corrected.

          1. This idea of the immaculate conception of Mary is, of course, not in the bible at all. It had been something thought very early on, but was only made official Catholic dogma in 1854 by the pope (Pius IX).

          1. That’s the great thing about being President-For-Life of the fan club of a bunch of ancient comic book characters. You can make up all sorts of stories about the imaginary figures and, first, nobody can do jack shit about it, and, second, you’re absolutely right by definition!

            The Poop could declare tomorrow that Mary was a transvestite transexual from Transylvania and he’d be every bit as correct in doing so as if George Lucas re-re-re-revised Star Wars such that it turned out that it was actually Jar-Jar who shot first.

            b&

        5. Just the other day I asked a friend who is Catholic if Mary’s mother also had to be immaculate so Mary could be immaculate so Jesus could be. He evaded my trap by waving his hands (literally!) and invoking “mysteriousness”.

          1. This could go nearly anywhere on this thread; I chose here:

            “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” (Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love)

        6. If I remember correctly, the “Immaculate Conception” idea was needed once the invention of the microscope revealed that a woman’s egg made her an equal partner in the act of procreation. The womb was no longer a field where a man sowed his seed. No more humunculi.
          Heh.

          1. I’d never heard that explanation. That’s fascinating. It does make sense that the timing of the “Immaculate Conception rewrite” was the result of specific scientific advances.

          2. No kidding?! That’s a riot. Once more, religion making a virtue out of scientific necessity.

    1. Not much difference, but generally speaking priests are better at bilking people and convincing them that they like it.

  6. If you brought this up to him, no doubt he’d express that humans can’t truly comprehend the nature of God, but of course he won’t apply that premise to any of the other inferences his religious beliefs are based on.

  7. Reading Fraser’s comments, I conclude that the only basis for any type of morality is subjective and not objective. But religion is all about having a source (god) of objective morality, and, more importantly, without that source of objective morality, there would be no morals. According to theists, atheists just do whatever they want and have no basis for moral actions. With his excess verbage is Fraser mixing all of this in one religious pot and calling it theological?

  8. Maybe Mr. Fraser can enlighten us as to why God doesn’t even bother to call 9-1-1 from time to time…?

    …no…? Too unsophisticated a question?

    Thought so.

    b&

    1. Oh because you’re thinking of the wrong kind of God. You see Fraser somehow knows the kind of God this creature is. My challenge to Fraser is prove it! I’ll put aside the proof for God and for this exercise we will assume there is a God. So, how do you know that is how God is? What makes this explanation of God more valid than the Popes or anyone else’s?

      1. I do believe he’s on record somewhere as explaining how he knows that this is the nature of God with, “Shut up you stupid strident atheist girl, Diana, can’t you see I’m a man of great authority and you have no idea what dizzying heights my intellect soars to?”

        …granted, I might have misquoted him in there somewhere, but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of it.

        b&

          1. I have to agree; seems like Ben nailed it, even if he might not have cited Fraser’s ipsissima verba.

    2. For a start, calling 9-1-1 would be completely pointless.

      Calling 9-9-9 might work, though, as long as services in that area haven’t been outsourced to Serco.

      2. Ah — that must be it! Jesus has the European emergency number on the speed dial on his American phone and vice-versa! Explains everything….

        b&

  9. It always ends up the same with these believers:

    God gets credit for the good stuff; not responsible for the bad stuff. The longest of long cons.

  10. For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives…

    Oh wow, God is like, everything dude…

    Let’s sing a song, boys and girls:

    [God], a deer, a female deer
    [God], a drop of golden sun,
    [God], a name I call myself,
    [God], a long, long way to run,
    [God], a needle pulling thread,
    [God], a note to follow [God],
    [God], a drink with jam and bread,
    That will bring us back to [God] (od-od-od)…

  11. I’ve always been rather fond of the Church of England, though I was never sure why. Maybe because it isn’t really a religion?

    1. Because it’s so utterly useless.

      The CofE equivalent of a fatwah is a ‘concerned’ letter to The Times.

    2. Well today’s C of E is relatively benign. It may even fulfil a useful function in satisfying its members’ herd instinct in a fairly harmless way while inoculating them against more rabid forms of religion. A bit like cowpox vs smallpox…

  12. I was going to see what the comments on the article said but…almost 5,000 already. Holy hand grenades!

    Anyway, more silliness from the article:

    if we are imagining a God whose only power, indeed whose only existence, is love itself – and yes, this means we will have to think metaphorically about a lot of the Bible – then God cannot stand accused as the cause of humanity’s suffering

    Nor can such a God create a soul in you. Or send that soul to heaven, or save it from hell. Nor does such a God demand worship. Congratulations Mr. Frazier, you’ve just undermined great honking chunks of Christian theology.

    1. Not to mention the problem of reconciling large parts of the bible with Love Itself no matter how genius one is with metaphor.

  13. The only way they stay relevant is to keep moving god further into mystery, further into the rolling tides and wind in our hair and a beautiful sunset. If a member of the upper parts of the church hierarchy talks like this, I can only guess there’s an unconscious movement to start seeing god as poetry. Perhaps as Joseph Campbell may have argued.

    As a kid, I didn’t want to give up on Santa. So for a year or two, I admitted Santa wasn’t real. But I believed in the Spirit of Santa. I think this might explain a lot about what’s going on here.

    1. My cynical side thinks that they only move god further into mystery when atheists make cogent public complaints about it.

      Sophisticated ground of being God is “Monday morning Christianity.” Its what you pull out when talking to critics.

      Nicene Creed God is “Sunday morning Christianity.” Its what you sincerely swear you believe when the skeptics aren’t around.

      Any thought that it might be hypocritical to promote these two to different audiences at different times will not occur to him.

      1. Yes. The capacity of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time is a great gift of faith. God transcends logic at the same time you do!

      2. I’d have to agree considering the Ground of Being seems to only be trotted out to atheists rather than presented to other theists who supposedly have it all wrong. It’s little more than a shell game god used to avoid criticism. I’m sorry atheist, our god is in another castle.

        Hrmmm.. Grounds of Being sounds like a brand of coffee.

        2. When the grounds of beans are brewed with reverence, a transcendent beverage come into
          existence.

          1. My cups of coffee have never given me the answers to the Big Questions. They must not be sophisticated enough. Or maybe I’m asking to wrong questions. Can I replace handling snakes with handling cats?

  14. In effect, as a result of ‘Sophisticated Theology’, we are actually witnessing the evolution of g*d in our own time. Oh! The irony!

  15. I wonder if Fraser realizes his argument points squarely to the “why call him god” part of the Epicurean trilemma. He can fill up as many pages with words as he likes. There’s just no way of escaping any of those horns.

  16. g*d is really a slippery nonexistent somebody, isn’t he. I was just going to ask him to get out there and plow this snow off the drive and road, since he put it there. But now, maybe he doesn’t have the power to move a snowflake.

  17. “…the Jesus story is, for me,…”

    The escape hatch much favored by Sophisticated Theologians™. As if what something is to him matters to anyone else. He might as well just say “Ignore everything I say from here on…”.

    1. Good point. It’s a sly move because once they’ve invoked their personal interpretation it’s churlish in the extreme to disagree — as well as useless.

      “The Jesus story is, for me, the most theologically revolutionary story that there can be.”

      “The Jesus story is, for me, the solid proof and foundation of what we’ve always known to be true. ”

      “The Jesus story is, for me, great encouragement of and for the styrofoam packing industry.”

      FOR ME. It is. So there.

      1. The Jesus story is, for me, the most batshit fucking insane and childish nonsense a purported adult could pretend to swallow.

        …what do I win…?

        b&

  18. I quite like Fraser. IIRC he quit over his bosses (St Paul’s) policies towards the camp during the Occupy protests. He’s got to be quite well-known in the media, a kind of go-to guy for the more progressive end of the CofE.

    He’s not an Anglican bigwig, but he does have a louder voice than many in that organisation.

    This doesn’t stop his article from being absolute nonsense though!

    1. He’s fairly progressive, but he says some very silly things on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze and he absolutely loathes new atheism(not that the latter makes him stand out). He’s also surprisingly aggressive.

      Politically he’s pretty liberal but he’ll still argue against assisted dying, etc. and I think he’s a prat.

      I respect his position on the St Paul’s row though, yes.

  19. Fraser seems to have missed the fact that it wasn’t Fry who imagined that sort of God; it was Byrne who posed the hypothetical: what if it’s all true?

    1. Hear hear! I was browsing the comments to see if anyone noticed that Fraser totally missed the point. Stephen Fry was responding to a question which implicitly posits the kind of god you could have a cup of ambrosia with, or could boil you in oil for that matter.

      Fry’s response was eloquent and necessary.

  20. The powerful God of Fraser. Fraser cannot begin to guess what my concept of God would be. If he did, it would horrify him.

    With or without a moral center, no proposed definition of a theological God remotely provides a definition of a God that has more knowledge than a rubidium atom.

  22. This is motte-and-bailey. The motte is generalized goo about god is poetry in our lives and what we owe children. The bailey is the galactic mafia boss doling out forgiveness or eternal torment.

  23. Because god is going through a bit of a moody emo phase for the last 2000 years ago he is no longer the all-powerful creator of everything from the old testament?
    Giles Fraser just avoids every question he brings up. He mentions that his god created everything like this but god suffers through it too. I don’t really care if god is suffering through it too. This god is acting like a child, he made a mess and is crying about. Giles is sure his god told him that he’s going to clean up the mess he’s, but so far he’s just relying on others to fix everything while god wallows in his own filth whispering to Giles. Giles Fraser’s god is still a bastard, but also a pathetic whiney god.

    1. I don’t really care if god is suffering through it too.

      In the movie god on trial, one of the believers in defense of god says god must be suffering too and he asked by those on the side of the prosecution, who cares about a suffering god?

  25. I hold it to be self-evident that a being infinite in love, knowledge and power cannot exist. But what it’s only possible to have a finite amount of those attributes? If that were the case, it’s theoretically possible that there could be more than one god who was maximally possessed of those; even humans advanced sufficiently could reach that level in theory. The whole premise of ‘infinite’ is that no matter how powerful, knowing, and loving a being is, it’s always possible to be even more so. But that means that no one will ever be able to know the full nature of God, so there is no way of knowing whether he has attributes unknowable to us that are not in our best interest!

    1. The simple fact that none of those hypothetical gods ever bothers to call 9-1-1 pretty much puts paid to any empirical possibility of their existence, even if we grant logical coherence to the notion.

      b&

      2. Ben:

        “The simple fact that none of those hypothetical gods ever bothers to call 9-1-1 pretty much puts paid to any empirical possibility of their existence, even if we grant logical coherence to the notion”

        Could you elaborate? What do you mean by ‘calling 911’?

        1. You’re walking down the street. You see something bad that you yourself can’t deal with — maybe an armed robbery in progress, maybe somebody in need of emergency medical attention. Nobody else is around. If you’ve got even the slightest ounce of moral compassion, you grab your phone and dial 9-1-1 to summon emergency help. Takes a trivial amount of power (in the theological sense), nothing compared with walking on water or raising the dead. Takes no special awareness whatsoever — let alone omniscience. Just some random schmuck with a cellphone and a conscience, and somebody’s life is saved.

          So…what’s Jesus’s excuse when nobody else is around? No cell towers in Heaven? Can’t be arsed to stop peeking in on little Suzie in the shower long enough to make the call?

          Cheers,

          b&

        2. In the USA 911 is the universal emergency help number to call, in cases of ‘life-threatening’ emergency.

    2. Infinity is a wierd mathematical concept that does not behave the way most of us intuitively think it behaves. For example, there are many different infinite sets, and some are bigger than others.

      So, by analogy, I will assert that there can be many infinitely powerful beings…and some of them will even be more powerful than others. 🙂

      2. Sounds Orwellian; “all gods are created infinite, but some are more infinite than others”.

      3. Patrick Grim (a nonbelieving philosopher of religion, IIRC) has a paper which shows that omniscience is logically impossible because it requires a “collection” of all truths, which by a simple diagonal argument, does not exist. (At least in any set theory worth the name; NOTE: it doesn’t require the collection to be a set: it works even if it is a class, etc.)

        1. A simple ditty, which is mine, can illustrate that fact.

          “Tell me, God, ‘Yes,’ or, ‘No,’ will you answer, ‘No’?”

          The faithful will object to holding their imaginary friends to “Yes / No” answers, but those who understand set theory will realize that the point is the diagonalization and that such can be expanded to any range of possibilities.

          Or, to cut to the chase: an omniscient deity would constitute a solution to Turing’s Halting Problem, and that’s on ground as firm as squaring the circle. Might as well suggest that maybe the Sun won’t rise in the East tomorrow….

          Cheers,

          b&

        2. Like a well indoctrinated Catholic, I immediately thought of the chant, “The mystery of faaaaaaaith…”

          If only the day would come when humanity realizes the big mistake. Mystery was used in place of logical contradiction. No one would chant that and we’d be done with this institution.

          1. Not much mystery about it, alas. Faith, in one form or another, is at the heart of every confidence scam. Indeed, the two words, “faith,” and, “confidence,” are synonyms….

            b&

            >

  26. Rev 1v8 claims the Lord God is “Almighty”
    Matt 19v26 has Jesus say that “with God all things are possible”

    James 4v17 says, “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins”

    So then what excuse could an all powerful God have for not preventing the suffering on Earth ? The O.T. claims God intervened many times to do real stuff on Earth. A God who could see what was going on and who had the ability to do something about it but who stood idly by would have sinned, according to James 4v17
    Often humans have the desire to alleviate or prevent suffering but lack the means to do so, we have an excuse.

    Think of all the things a perfect loving God could have done to prevent suffering down through the ages but didn’t do.

    Even giving the knowledge of germ theory would have helped prevent suffering yet Matthew 15 does not have Jesus show any appreciation of germ theory. Jesus could have said to the Pharisees and teachers of the law, “I agree that it is important to wash your hands in boiled water (cooled) before eating or helping with child birth or injuries, that would be quite a good tradition. What goes into your mouth can make you ill and giving food contaminated with e-coli could cause permanent damage to peoples health. We do have a duty of care to others.”

    Romans 10v13 saysm,” Love does no harm.” but is contradicted by
    Acts 17v24 which claims that “God made the world and EVERYTHING in it.” Oops that verse should have blamed Satan for making the pathogens.

    An imagined Almighty God who played a part in the evolution of life on Earth could have influenced the genetic make up of insects to make it impossible for them to be vectors of the pathogens which harm humans or to cause the extinction of insects such as mosquitoes or parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus

    The theory of evolution by natural selection suggests that each surviving species of mammal has kept just ahead of the parasites and harmful bacteria, predators etc which would cause the extinction of the species. There is a constant struggle for survival. Maybe it is surprising that life can be as good as it is.

    Humans now have the knowledge to give ourselves an increased edge. With the benefit of modern technology we can dramatically lengthen our life and have far less pain & illness. However if we enter a post antibiotic age or if agri-chemicals become less effective due to resistant weeds & diseases then we could lose some advances.

    At any rate an imagined real cosmic God should be able to do infinite miracles to ensure 100% health from 0-70 years old then instantaneous death without suffering but we do not see this. Why not if Jesus had won a victory over sin and death ? Why not even for ‘the chosen ones’ ? Because the scripture writers were misreading their experiences & just making stuff up.

    1. I think it is either Plantinga or Richard Swinburne who argues that god could have a good reason why he doesn’t stop any particular evil. We may need to ask them if that particular verse applies universally or it applies only between men and men?

      1. Maybe Plantinga or Swinburne will just quote the Don Moen song -” God is good, all the time” and say that settles it?
        A possible defence to “God created everything (including stuff which makes humans suffer)” is the fantasy that all the animals which are now parasitic were originally created symbiotic but adapted once God went in the huff and stopped micro managing every detail after Eve ate the apple. However reality shows insects like mosquito in amber long before modern mammals evolved. Fossils show carnivorous animals around long before Homo sapiens came on the scene.
        Another excuse is that the random life shortening conditions were to prevent humans becoming so numerous that they would wreck the habitats of the world, much reducing biodiversity and thus endangering their own survival. Maybe god didn’t like the idea of constantly having to decide who was next for termination to prevent over population so he outsourced the task in a way that allowed him plausible deniability. However the tale of Noah’s flood shows that god didn’t mind wiping everything out. The idea of new heaven & Earth (Revelation 21v1) also shows no concern for present life forms.

  27. If God is love. Then why did he let people torture him and nail him to a cross and kill him. How did that teach them love?

    Jesus resurrected after three days. What happened to the souls who he used as chess pieces to torture and kill him?

    1. In the Old Testament, the Israelites had to burn animals on the Temple alter for reverence to God (He really got off on the smell of a Barbeque). One such rite of sacrifice was for the forgiveness of sin.

      He didn’t use power to save himself, because Jesus’ main mission was to sacrifice himself as a blood offering for the forgiveness of everyone’s sin (if they believe in Him). So, he was following his (or God’s?) OT rules.

      Jesus did have super powers: Raising Lazarus from the dead, curing several blind and deaf folks, restoring a crippled guy to walking, stopping the storm at Sea where the Apostles were scared in their fishing boat, walking on water, stopping a woman’s 10-year blood flow, stopping Peter’s mother-in-law’s headache, and driving out demons. Most of all, driving out demons. That’s what he did almost everywhere he went.

      The resurrection and ascension, that was probably his Daddy that helped with that.

  28. One of the most common objections against gnu atheism was actually labelled (possibly iirc by Dawkins himself) as the “I Don’t Believe in That God Either” defense. I see Fraser has joined the tired, weary choir of people willing to deny God’s omnipotence in order to emphasize its omnibenevolence.

    … we are imagining a God whose only power, indeed whose only existence, is love itself

    Yes, “we” are indeed “imagining” that for as long as it’s convenient, aren’t we? Let’s reify an abstraction (love) and give it a capital letter (Love) and play let’s pretend this makes sense. Is God a kind of energy, a vitalistic field of compassion and suffering who whispers (vibrates) that “all will be well?”

    No, of course not. That would be silly. You can’t reduce it or explain it. God IS the explanation which is beyond explanation. God is on the same level of significance as “existence” so that its existence is also beyond existence — meaning question and doubt by the people who think too hard about this (and thus fail to feel as deeply as those who love God (love Love) surely must feel.)

    We don’t want to be the ones who don’t get it because they think it ought to make sense, do we? I thought not.

    God is beyond comprehension. Therefore, the more dishonest, disjointed, distorted, and distended Fraser’s God is, the more godly it becomes. Atheists who try to disparage such shenanigans and dispense with the resulting mess are ignoring not God, but the attempt to distract us from the main point.

    “God isn’t a hypothesis: God is love.”

    Nice try. It’s getting old, though. No, not ancient — tired.

    1. The next time Stephen Fry gets asked what he will ask God at the Pearly Gates, I’d like to see him say: “God, it’s all well and good that you share our suffering but wouldn’t it be better to get off your arse and do something about the suffering?”

      1. What he should ask is “which of the many hundreds of thousands of gods invented by humans are you?”. After all, if you’re not sure which god you’re talking to, how can you know what else to ask it?

  29. God and power are separated? How the hell did ‘it’ create the universe then? ‘Creativity’ and ‘Love’ can’t be enough…

    1. I’m voting for god was so miserable in his lonesome existance that he blew himself up and became galaxies, stars, planets, animals, and humans.

      God is in all of us, and we’re all God.

      Now, wouldn’t that make a religion. Unfortunately, no afterlife, so it be a hard sell, I guess 🙁

  30. “Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense.”

    He’s right, so far as this goes. But no other one exists, either, except the made-up character(s) of fiction.

    Of course, the good priest is in Sophisticated Mode™, so he spews forth:

    “For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives. Of course this is real.”

    And of course nobody in their right mind would say that poetry and stories don’t exist. And who would argue that respect for the planet isn’t a good thing?

    This is classic ST™ bullshit. List a bunch of real-world things we all agree are good. Call that set by the name “God”, then go off and work for an institution that asserts miracles and all manner of laughable “truths”. These guys never change.

    1. It seems to follow from Giles’s quote that God could only exist if humans also exist. Given that most C of E people believe in evolution (I don’t know whether Giles himself is a young age creationist),this would mean that God himself is a relatively recent arrival in the universe. Seems to me that Giles may be fighting a tendency to atheism.

  31. Powerless?!?!
    Able to walk on water? Check.
    Able to transmogrify stuff? Check.
    Able to resurrect himself? Check.
    Able to fly? Check
    Able to turn his friends into goats? Check.
    Able to lengthen boards for his carpenter dad? Check.
    Able to kill (at will) kids who slight him by bumping into him? Check.
    Able to blinds crowds of people who tell on him for killing? Check.
    Able to cure blindness? Check.
    Able to raise a kid from the dead just so they can get him off the hook?Check.
    Able to raise people from the dead in general? Check.

    If this guy is powerless, I wanna know what I am…

  32. Giles has a regular spot on something called “Thought for the Day” which is on BBC Radio 4 every morning at around 07.45 GMT.

    In this 3 minute or so radio spot that has been around since jesus was born, a speaker for each of the world’s major religions gets to give you an inspirational piece of guff that is meant to shed some light onto the futility of your existence as you eat your cornflakes.

    All the speeches follow the same general pattern;

    1. Something happened in the news recently
    2. allah/god/jesus/jehovah/buddah etc has something pertinent to say about this.
    3. therefore allah/god/jesus/jehovah/buddah exists

    Pretty much exclusively it’s enough to make you want to throw your radio out of the window. There has been a decades long campaign to have humanist speakers included but this is resisted by the BBC’s Department of Religion.

    Giles is a regular CoE contributor to the slot and his pitches are invariably incoherent tosh. When I listen to him I start to form the opinion that he is a deeply troubled man who likely realises that he has spent his entire life believing in something that is clearly false but he seems incapable of stepping away from it. Sometimes he sounds as if he;s about to make the leap but the next time there is an audible sound of the rubber band snapping him back into his delusional world.

      1. I posted a link, in a reply to comment 18, to a blog that picks apart these little homilies every day. The link goes to the discussion on Giles’ most recent contribution.

    2. Yup. I don’t listen to ToTD but agree with you. He seems to be making excuses for Christianity to himself rather than the rest of us.

      1. “Been around since Jesus was born”, that’s good. Over here in the colonies they would say — since Christ was a corporal.

    3. The pool of “thought for the day” speakers is quite odd. One or two seem to be actually decent people, but the rump are generally foolish and sometimes actively malignant people. Giles is the only one who leaves you thinking “I hope he is OK”. If you are lucky enough to have a job its main function is to remind you that you should be out of the house by now.

    4. Fraser is often on The Moral Maze – PCC did that a couple of years ago I recall as a witness.

  34. If I could create universes out of nothing, promulgate moral law, and have simultaneous intimate personal relationships with billions of sentient beings, than these things would certainly go on my C.V. During job interviews, I would certainly bring these skills up (along with excellent time management skills and proficiency with Office) and would even describe them as evidence of considerable power.

  35. This is a short article confirming Fraser’s atheism, afaics. Welcome to the new atheism club, Giles!

    And a typo in the title: it should be ‘telling us’ not ‘telling is’.

  37. Ahhh – I love it. Providing background music to read the post! Is this a new thing?

  38. This topic should keep us going for weeks now that, as reported by ‘The Independent’, the incoming head of Ireland’s Presbyterian Church, the Rev Ian McNie, has accused Stephen Fry of “spiritual blindness”. I don’t think he has much an opinion of atheists generally: “I felt sorry for the man that his understanding of life is simply confined to the here and now and from his position of atheism there is no hope for the future.”

    And as an aside, given religious power was mentioned in some comments, did people see the story of the Texas school kid suspended for promising another child he’d render him invisible with his l “one ring” from the Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

  39. “God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives.”

    God is the toilet that flushes when we shower. God is the html that displays on a webpage. God is the meniscus that depresses the angst in our lives/beer. God is the hashtag of hashtag activism. God is adding +2 cold damage resistance to your battlemage armor rating. God is the emanation of the radiance of the eminent. God is the restaurant that serves breakfast food 24/7. God is the required fields on an online form. God is the classified document that mistakenly ends up on your unclassified machine, making it a defacto classified machine because you read an article about Edward Snowden on your lunchbreak. God is the ergonometric keyboard of our spiritual typing class. God is the humorous misspelling of your name by the Starbucks barista. God is the fulcrum of pompous wordsalad.

  40. Your comments were right on, Jerry. The logical twists and amazing nonsense these “theologians” come up with keeps getting nuttier.

  41. After liking a link to the frye video on Facebook, my Christian mother in law sent me the messages below. How do I even respond to this craziness?

    HI Trevor,
    I read and listened to the interview with Stephen Frye. As a Christian it isn’t easy to listen to what Frye wants to say to God. But it is also important that we listen to each other and try to understand differing perspectives on life. It did make me sad and I found myself wanting to say, “yes, this is how you think about God, but what does God have to say? Not what people say he is, but what does God say He is?” That is the question I would ask.

    2. Not what people say he is, but what does God say He is?”

      You could ask her: how do you tell the difference? Particularly since the bible is just another type of ‘what people say he is.’

      1. Don’t know where this is from, but I first saw it about 20 years ago:
        ”
        And Jesus said unto them, “And whom do you say that I am?”

        They replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed.”

        And Jesus replied, “What?”
        “

      1. Or you could always reference the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, particulary verse 38, “Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.”

        Rather than Baal, the god I choose for this little contest will be Poseidon. He shall use the power of the sea to extinguish the fire of the Lord. Now, if the Lord fails to light the fire, obviously Poseidon will need only stay silent. All praise Poseidon!

  42. “There is no such thing as the God that Fry imagines.”

    I think the good theologian forgot the original question that got asked, “what would you do if you died and met a god?”

    Based on Giles Fraser’s description of god; I’d say, “Hey, I know were trying to stay hidden. I did my best to keep you that way.”

    1. Pronounced like own but with a “p”. It means to defeat someone. It probably originated in online gaming where people taunt that they “own” you when defeating you but misspell it due to the closeness of the “o” and the “p” on the keyboard.

      Yes, I’m ashamed I know this.

        1. Now you’ve confused me again. Is it because I’m not a gamer? Is it because I’ve lived outside the US for the last 40 years? For whatever reason, I have absolutely no idea what that meant.

          1. Sorry for the belated reply. I’m not a gamer either but the phrase [All your base are belong to us] has become famous for its ‘Japanese English’.

            It comes from some early video game. Wikipedia even has a page on it.

      3. Are you sure? I assumed the word was from harpooned & was pronounced as if Welsh – ‘w’ like ‘oo’…?

  45. Reminded me of this:

    “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus!”

  46. Even after all these years, I’m still amazed at the human capacity for self-delusion, especially in the area of rationalizing religion. Guess SkyDaddy can do some things some days and can’t do others?

  48. A well written and well thought out article, unlike the rambling and almost incoherent piece presented to us by Fraser. Part of the problem, as evidenced by other articles in The Guardian, Fraser is simply out of his depth. He was rocketed to prominence in opposing the church related to protests outside St Pauls, and hailed as some kind of liberal, but his lack of intellectual rigor in presenting arguments either how they are written, but more importantly basing them almost entirely on a lack of or ‘creatively used’ evidence shows him up for the fraud he is. On the plus side, this allows atheists to pull apart the cobbled together theology of the modern church and to show it up for the sham it really is. Good article.

  49. Fraser is not really a bigwig, as he upset the established church over the anti-capitalist protests & had to leave St.Paul’s, but he is everywhere these days – the ultimate ‘trendy vicar’. He gets on my tits with his essays on Thought of the Day eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02htxpq

  50. Giles Fraser appeared on Christmas University Challenge in December, as part of the University of Newcastle graduates team, and they recorded the joint lowest ever score by a team of alumni. His performance clearly demonstrated his abysmal lack of knowledge of this world. And his woolly, incoherent, Guardian article demonstrated that – despite being a vicar who is paid to preach Christianity – he doesn’t believe that there is a next world. I suppose he can’t admit to no longer being a Christian because if he lost his job, and had to go searching for alternative employment, a CV consisting of ‘I scored the least points ever on University Challenge’ wouldn’t get him very far.

  51. And in other news, from Northern California where I live (yes, home of the fruits and nuts, I know), the Roman Catholic Bishop of Oakland and the RC Archbishop of San Francisco have both issued new “morality” guidelines to teachers in schools in their dioceses. The idea that Salvatore (“DUI Sal” – check this for yourself, he pleaded to reckless driving) Cordileone, as the local rep for the “Protect the priests and church at all costs against complaints of pedophilia, even if it involves declaring bankruptcy” RC church, should presume to dictate to the teachers whether they will be fired if they support gay marriage or Planned Parenthood, just flabbers the gast, if it hasn’t already been flabbered enough. Fortunately, the locals mostly seem unimpressed: even the local papers report pushback.

    1. Basically Fraser admitted he is an atheist. Why? Because of this paragraph:

      “God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives.”

      Or in layman’s terms: God is something that some people use in order to feel better and go on with their lives. Which IS true, because even though the omnipotent creator of the world is an imaginary character, religion DOES exists, and many people use it to feel better and go on with their lives.

      One of my objection to Fraser is: why bother with the name “God”? Why don’t we just call human dreams and fears, the shape of our lives, the respect to the planet, and poetry and imagination with their own names, instead of cling to an old imaginary character that symbolizes all of that?

      Another objection is: what about those people who do use religion in order to make other feel worse? There’s still plenty of them around. Why give them an excuse to justify their behavior with the name of this imaginary character?

  52. Seems to me if God created heaven and earth in 7 days and can make it pour for 40 days and 40 nights and give Noah power to build an ark in record time with no help other than family, he must have some power.Then theres the moses story of all the deadly crap he did in God’s name you would think God would be able to recreate that power now wouldn’t he? Oh wait, I forgot only in the fairy tales.

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