At last! After years of assailing our ears with the wet smacking of faith-osculation and the unbearable blather of Krista Tippett, National Public Radio (NPR) has published a piece defending atheism and dismantling one of the commonest criticisms tendered by the Unthinking Faithful: atheism sucks the meaning out of life.
And I’m proud to see that the piece, “An unkillable myth about atheists,” is by a faculty member at my alma mater William & Mary: Barbara J. King. She’s a professor of anthropology and author of several books, most recently How Animals Grieve. More good stuff: here’s her picture from her website (the caption is mine), which also includes the statement, “Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.”
But onto King’s short piece on Cosmos & Culture (she writes there frequently), which was inspired by a new book written by accommodationist Alister McGrath. McGrath is a professor of Science & Religion (!) at Oxford, an ordained Anglican priest, and a man whose writings I’ve slogged through with great distress. According to King, McGrath says stuff like this:
“Since science discloses no meaning to the universe, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is no meaning to find.”
By now all of us can respond to this as King does:
Here, yet again, is the unkillable myth, the persistent blind spot about atheism that apparently no amount of explaining can make go away. No matter how lucidly atheists explain in books, essays and blog posts that, yes, life can and does for us have meaning without God, the tsunami of claims about atheists’ arid existence rolls on and on.
. . . First is the understanding, emergent from evolutionary theory, that neither the universe as a whole, nor we humans within it, have evolved according to some plan of design. Cosmic evolution and human evolution unfold with no guiding hand or specific goals. Most atheists do accept this, I think.
Second is to embrace as a logical next step the idea that our own individual lives have no purpose or meaning. Do you know of any atheists who believe this? I don’t.
. . . An anthropological perspective teaches us that we humans are a quintessentially meaning-making species. We create love and kindness (hate and violence, too), and also work that matters. We recognize and protect (or, too often, harm) our sense of connection to other animals, to plants and trees, to all of nature’s landscapes. What are those acts if not ones of meaning and purpose?
. . . I’m yet another atheist voice chiming in to say that my life, thanks very much, is full of meaning.
Now, how to make this unkillable myth about atheism into a moribund myth?
I’ve often agreed with King, arguing that we nonbelievers imbue our lives with our own meanings—things like satisfying work, hobbies, raising a family, communing with friends, helping others, drinking good wine, and wearing cowboy boots. But after thinking about King’s essay, I’m not sure if I could really answer the questions, “What is the meaning of your life?” or “What gives your life meaning?”
I won’t get into the tedious and perennial philosophical argument about “the meaning of meaning” here. But what I want to say is this: what nonbelievers see as the “meaning” of life is simply what we like to do and prefer to do—the things that give us satisfaction.
Thus I much prefer the question, “What gives you satisfaction in your life?” That sounds a lot less portentous than the word “meaning”, for I’m not sure what it means to say things like “studying evolution gives my life meaning.” I enjoy studying evolution, and it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to learn the diverse ways plants and animals have evolved, but I don’t walk around imbued with the feeling that those endeavors have given my life “meaning”. I’m just doing what I like to do. In fact, I’d prefer that nonbelievers entirely avoid the notion of “meaning” because of its religious overtones. Why try to ape the faithful? Saying what gives our life “meaning” is like trying to create secular churches so we can satisfy a supposed need.
Now “purpose” is a different issue, for atheists can argue more credibly that we do give our lives purpose. And that purpose is to do those things that bring us satisfaction. Usually, though, “purpose” isn’t taken to mean pleasurable activities like reading or traveling. Rather, it denotes satisfying activities that seem “higher” because they help others. But again, I’d be hard pressed to say what the “purpose” of my life is. Can you tell us what yours is?
As an example of the idea she opposes, King discusses When Breath Becomes Air, the popular new book by the late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, diagnosed at age 36 with terminal cancer. Here’s one of the book’s passages she criticizes:
“To make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life doesn’t have any.”
But in some sense I agree with that. If you construe “meaning” as “something given from the outside,” then yes, for the faithful that kind of meaning comes largely from God. (Not entirely, though, because others can also imbue you with a “purpose”.) But I wonder, when Kalanithi makes the following statements (as described by King), he’s not just justifying his profession the same way nonbelievers do: it gives us satisfaction. He dresses up his words with religious overtones, but that may just be a trope:
Kalanithi describes the “sacredness” of his work as a neurosurgeon, the burdens that make medicine “holy.”
Well, you could say the same thing about many professions, especially those that help others, even when practiced by atheists. I haven’t read Kalanithi’s book, but I’m not sure he means here that God has endowed medicine—as opposed, to, say, plumbing—with sacred overtones.
By and large, though, it’s great to see such an unrepentant defense of atheism, especially on the NPR site. I’d love to see King interviewed, for instance, by Krista Tippett. Imagine Tippett squirming when she can’t get King to accept anything “spiritual” or “numinous”!
As lagniappe in her piece, King proffers this tidbit, a criticism of accommodationism (as I said, McGrath is a vociferous accommodationist.):
Let’s return to McGrath. His central theme in The Big Question revolves around “the ultimate coherence of science and faith.” I’d like to say that open dialogue about the interweaving of scientific and religious narratives that McGrath champions — dialogue asking if that interweaving is really a possible, or even a desirable, goal — is the way forward. At the same time, I find intriguing and persuasive the perspective of physicist Sean Carroll, who explains why he takes no money from the John Templeton Foundation by saying it is because its underlying goal is to further this very notion of consilience. [JAC: Add me to that no-Templeton list.]
“Intruiguing and persuasive”, indeed. For that is the underlying goal of Templeton. Yay for Carroll! Yay for King! And boo to Templeton and McGrath!
OMG! Sub!!!
At the risk of appearing totally stupid, can someone explain what ‘sub’ means?
Sometimes it could mean ham and cheese, and other times it could mean meatball, but in this case it means subscribe.
Nice point, but the last time I was in LA, and that is quite a while ago, I was having a sandwich in a coffee bar just off Venice Beach and two doors down from a Subway, when the Subway staff came in and ordered there food. Apparently this was every day.
There must be a moral there somewhere.
Sorry, ‘their’ food, not ‘there’ food.
I’ve been trying to figure this out myself but was too ashamed to ask!! So thanks for asking, Geoff 😊
Looks like you’ve been subshamed (as I was not so very long ago) 😎
I know but it gives meaning to my life.
I know exactly what you mean.
It should probably be further explained that you can’t subscribe to comments (i.e. getting all comments e-mailed to you, by ticking the appropriate box when submitting your comment) without commenting.
You can type anything you like, or even nothing, but “subscribe” has become usual.
Or whimsical emoji.
🐜
Is the singular of “emoji”, then, “emojus”?
Since it’s Japanese, it’s both a singular and a plural word.
Oh. Well, while we’re on the subject, is the plural of Lexus Lexi?
Yes!
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Whew! (I never studied Latin.) Thanks, Ant!
No … but you just made me think of Emo Jesus.
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Is there an emoji for that? (What is an Emo Jesus, anyway?)
You know what an Emo is, right?
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I think it’s an emotion indicated by a cartoonish face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo
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Wow! I must have conflated Emo with emoji, because I didn’t know what Emo was. Thanks, Ant!
I think if you try to submit a comment with nothing, Word Press sends you to your room without any supper.
sub
To me, ‘meaning in human life’ is a post-events superimposition of story on chaos and entropy.
It is no coincidence that King, an anthropologist, talks about meaning creation, while McGrath, a religionist, talks about “finding meaning”. It reminds me of the old psychological metric ‘locus of control’. For those of us who understand that “meaning” is what we assign to objects and events, not some Aristotelian essence inherent in them to be observed, the matter is simple. People like McGrath who think that meaning exists out there independently of us and is just waiting for us to stumble upon it, or not…, are incapable of crediting meaning creation with any significance. So what if you “create meaning” in your life… that’s not the “real” meaning that pre-exists that you are supposed to find out… For them, the meaning we create is inferior and illusory. Which explains why the “myth” is unkillable. No matter how often we explain that we create meaning for ourselves, they will scorn us because we haven’t “found” the same meaning they have. Of course, they are also assigning meaning, just like we are, but they refuse to recognize that. Such people swim in the confused and murky waters of Platonic ideals, not the material world the rest of us inhabit.
Great comment.
The creation of meaning is strong in that one.
+1 to “Great comment.”
This is just one of many absolutist arguments used by theists. Meaning has no meaning(‽) if it is not ultimate. Morality doesn’t count unless it is absolute. Nothing counts for anything unless it is perfect/absolute/infinite/eternal.
William Lane Craig, like many other apologists, uses these absolutist arguments. If I ever debate him, I will demand that he reveal how much money is in his wallet. Then I will point out that the value of that money is not absolute and eternal. Therefore, it can have no meaning for Craig, and I will insist he should give it to me, who can appreciate the imperfect and the ephemeral. After all, $10 won’t feed me for eternity, it won’t even feed me for a lifetime. But it will buy me lunch today, and that truly is better than nothing.
Yes! Absolutely!
That was ultimately a decent pun.
Yes, I’m reasonably happy with penultimate meaning.
I have found antepenultimate meaning in my life …
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You guys, always trying to one-down each other…
Very astute analysis.
I often wonder how the person wading in Platonic ideals would deal with the idea that they might find the True Meaning and assign no worth to it themselves. If that entails a logical contradiction for them but possibly not for others, there’s a problem.
I thought PCCs purpose includes writing web site entries and my purpose includes reading them. Satisfaction spread around.
An excellent post, rich with ideas.
When it comes to atheists trying to justify our still having meaning and purpose without God, I continually see us running into the same problem, especially when talking to theists: It rarely seems to make a dent in their intuition about meaning and purpose.
They say “Yes, I know that. I know we can still have the type of meaning and purposes that we make…but THOSE aren’t ‘real’ meaning and purpose. They are subjective and illusory meanings, not objective Absolute Meaning of the kind I mean, and which God would bring to life. So, they just don’t seem to be an adequate substitute
to the GREATER meaning and purpose God brings.”
This is why, instead of an “I can have meaning in my life TOO” response, I prefer to drill deeper into the nature of meaning and purpose, to show the theist that her very intuition and objection is based on a blind-spot error.
If you ask a theist what type of creator entity is required in order for the universe to have meaning/purpose, you get “A Personal Being.” And when we unpack this, it entails a Personal Being is (as Plantinga would put it) “one that holds beliefs; has aims, plans, and intentions; and can act to accomplish these aims.”
And where in the world did we get this example of personal beings with such traits?
From US of course. We have all the very traits required for purpose and meaning.
So it turns out that God would HAVE to have OUR already existing traits of person-hood in order to produce “real” meaning and purpose. As usual, theists have it the wrong way around.
Once a being has those traits, you can’t get “deeper” than that – those are the fundamental substrate of characteristics from which meaning/purpose must arise. Which means God’s purposes, even if he existed, could be no more authentic or fundamentally “real” or relevant than our own. God simply adds another opinion to the mix, that we could agree with, or reject.
You can point out to the theist that if a being appeared who proved He was our creator, this would not entail His aims for us make sense for us to adopt. If this God said he’d created us all to stare at a cardboard box until we die of starvation, or to wantonly kill one another…who would think “Thank goodness we now have a REAL meaning to our lives!” One can easily show how the theist is using his own judgement as to “what is meaningful” in order to choose which version of God “gives us meaning.” It’s the one which they think would be meaningful (“I like the idea of love being the meaning of life”).
Getting to the bottom of how meaning and purpose actually arises explains why so many
different versions of “meaning/purpose” seem to make people motivated and fulfilled. It’s inherently subjective, not objective.
The theist can’t explain this with his incorrect assumptions about meaning an purpose: he can only look on in puzzlement as to why atheists or others not in his religion can seem to get along fine. The only recourse is to say “Well THEY must be laboring under some personal illusion.”
The theistic theory of “objective” meaning and purpose is empty for both understanding how meaning/purpose arises, and for explaining how it seems to work among personal agents like human beings.
Great exploration of the imagined distinction thrusts make between “real meaning” and “illusory meaning”.
In the same way we can respond to theists with “if you don’t need to explain the existence of god and can say he just is, why don’t we cut out the middleman and say the universe just is” we can respond to the meaning question with “if having goals and desires is what allows god to create meaning why don’t we cut out the middleman and acknowledge that our goals and desires also engender meaning?”
(Is that sentence too long?)
yeah, thrusts=theists
Lord. Are. Are what allows.
No, you were right with, “is”; the subject is “having”, not “goals and desires”.
Yes, my purpose is to be a grammar pedant. (Hey. I just won a company award for being one of the best peer reviewers.)
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Grammar pedantry is one of my favorite things; no apologies necessary! I must learn to be less hasty in reviewing what I’ve written. (And congrats!)
Good grief. For instance, if “are” had been correct, I should have also changed “allows” to “allow”. I’m altogether to eager to hit “post”.
to = too. There is a universe of pedants out here. It gives our lives “meaning”.
I give up. Alert circumspection seems to require ever more cups of coffee as I age.
I’ve often had similar thoughts. If you’re looking for an intrinsic meaning for life or the universe, it’s just not there, and Christianity doesn’t change that. Just to say that God wishes something doesn’t make it any more objective. It’s the same as the Euthyphro Dilemma, only applied to meaning instead of morals.
I think this website gives meaning to your life, Jerry, in that it causes me (and I believe many others) to think hard about subjects that we might otherwise dismiss.
Having said that, I agree with your alternative question, “What gives you satisfaction in your life?” In my case, too many things to list, and in any case too personal to list here. Suffice to say that it has so far given me plenty of satisfaction (as well as a few character-forming setbacks), and I hope it continues to do so for many more years. If doctors told me today that I have a week to live, I’d be able to say, “It’s been a good life!”
Good for you, Colin.
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To keep it short and and sweet – All life inherits purpose from those that preceded us and continue to add to this objective until we die.
I can understand why those committed to an established religion or to a numinous Tippettian mound of spiritual cotton candy will look at atheists and decide that their lives must be less meaningful. If one really thinks for example that god has a plan for you and that you are obeying that plan, then that does seem more meaningful than the atheist life plan of [insert what you like to do and hope to achieve in your life]. But of course the atheist way is based on living in reality and making personal choices. It is not a life imbued with delusions and trying to live up to the expectations of someone who never actually calls you.
Many years ago I read several books by the psychologist Erich Fromm. His views helped me to reject religion and accept atheism. In this one sentence, he shaped my views on the “meaning of life.”
“There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”
Is it just me, or is Jerry braining superlatively lately!? Of course it may be just that I agree, I squirm over the religious overtones in ‘meaning’.
My “purpose” is partly constrained by the 12 k alleles that is adamant that they should procreate, directly by me and family but also helped by social cooperation/competition. But there is also that biochemical machine epiphenomena of, yes, maximizing pleasure and satisfaction, and learning and using strategies for that.
One of the many things that annoys me when religious claim that they have taken themselves a monopoly on “purpose” is that it would take a very long time to list all kinds of purposes, all that has been in play under a skeptic’s (say) lifetime.
I don’t much like Alister McGrath, but he is clearly a highly intelligent guy, being professor of theology at Oxford, and a well qualified micro-biologist.
The trouble, for him anyway, is that he still can’t turn the hopeless confused mess that presently marks out Christian apologetics, into something coherent. He debated Richard Dawkins some while ago, and got badly mauled. Rather than accept that he needed to go back to the drawing board he, and his supporters, fell back on the argument, or rather sly, insidious, suggestion that Dawkins was out of his league as he isn’t philosophically qualified. They are trying that one on with Jerry over Faith vs Fact.
The reality is that you can quickly glean the arguments needed to get into meaningful theological debate. It isn’t hard. The apologists really hate that.
McGrath is also an awfully good historian of religion, but still a fairly shallow philosopher/apologist.
McGrath may very well be an excellent apologist — in the same way someone might be a splendid astrologer or a terrific kazoo player. You have to take into account the limitations the poor thing is working under.
LOL.
My basic problem with McGrath is his excessive appeal to “I used to be an atheist, so I know what I’m talking about”.
The religious apologists I personally like best are the ones that are fairly tentative in their conclusions (a 2 or 3 on the Dawkins scale) and as such fairly empathic to non-believers, and then opt for some non-Pascalian sort of wager. These tend to be ones with a somewhat modernist reading of Christianity or Judaism.
It amounts to apologetics for the choice to be religious (as a working hypothesis) in the face of uncertainty, rather than smugly insisting on the undeniable truth of religion and saying if you don’t follow me you are being willfully blind. The most extreme example of this is William James.
Demographically, many of the apologists I like are creative artists who at some point embraced religion at some point or another, for what might be termed meta-aesthetic reasons. Same folk tend to subscribe to heavily non-authoritarian versions of Christianity. Their arguments are rarely convincing, but they themselves fully admit this. (The conversion to Christianity of actors David Suchet and Jane Fonda and jazz musician Dave Brubeck are quite intriguing.)
Of the various descriptions of an afterlife in heaven, they all seem to suggest as much meaning as a fence post. Perhaps ruminating upon such wishes and fantasies in this life makes one as steadfast as a fence post, with just as much meaning, and possibly making one just as useful.
Theist, atheist, non-theist… are partially meaningful labels… every life has meaning…
It’s the cat… 😉
If they weren’t so self-centered, I’d feel sorry for theists who cannot imagine finding meaning without god. After all, their lives have meaning only because they are part of a divine plan that, in order to achieve its entirely mysterious goals, requires children to die horribly and genocides to be unleashed against innocent people. Can you imagine feeling that you simply must be connected to such a plan to feel happy that you have a purpose?
Wouldn’t it better to just focus on the same things that give meaning to the lives of atheists: Family, nature, and the goings-ons of human kind? Too bad theists evidently derive so little meaning from life that they can’t imagine being happy as an atheist.
I especially like that last sentence of yours.
You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for theists really that they need an imaginary external force to give their lives meaning.
I am sure we have all met theists who live with one or both feet in their imagined afterlife. These seem distant and detached from this world.
Ah, a nice way to start the morning. A little vindication for NPR.
I think “meaning” can give “satisfaction” for theists because they believe (the arrogant ones say they know) they are doing g*ds will and it makes them feel special and bigger than they actually are. I think “satisfaction” can exist without “meaning”, and I agree with Jerry that this is a better way to establish a way of living that is…well, satisfactory. Since becoming a full-blown atheist in my 20’s (though not yet strident), “life’s meaning” has meant less and less. For this I am grateful, for it is a silly word that creates a burden for those who think life must have a meaning. To simply be satisfied with life and know what it is to be satisfied is to take off the bondage that religious meaning fabricates.
How healthy is it to live a life with the belief that g*d is always there, like Santa Claus, watching what you do, judging you, blessing or cursing you, guiding you with his holy meaning so that you may die and then live in eternity with him? Because ultimately, what is a religious person’s ultimate “meaning” of a life on earth; it is to go to some sort of heaven and live forever. You can distill it into this; the fear of death is what really gives the religious meaning. This site has made me understand more and more that this type of delusional thinking is not healthy at all.
Its seems to me that the word ‘meaning’ as its always used in this sort of discussion can, in the end, mean nothing short of; the value that some other person or entity puts in our lives. I’d have to say that King’s main point is wrong in that theists really are correct in saying that atheist’s lives don’t have meaning. I would say it degrades the value of our lives to say they have meaning – our lives transcend the crude notion of meaning. The only people whose life can have meaning according to the theist definition are slaves.
King, Jerry, Hitchens among others have been very eloquent in describing what gives value to their lives…but I just don’t think this should be called ‘meaning’
What “meaning” to their lives do the religious have? Many say atheists have no meaning but I can’t detect a single homogeneous meaning that theists claim.
Or is that meaning simply God? If so, which one? Where is he/she? With so many religions and sects each professing a different method of living ones life, how can they possibly know they following the right one, or if any of them are correct?
They say we can’t know the mind of God, so unless your a biblical literalist, there is no way to know what God wants. If you are a biblical literalist, God appears to want slavery, stoning of adulterers and other things which I cannot fathom any rational person could agree with.
I simply can’t find any evidence for heaven or an after life although the theists do glom onto those absurd books, even after the author admits it’s hokum.
At the end of the day I don’t see much changing in the way of accusations of atheists not having a purpose to life. Too many theists simply turn off or ignore any skeptical parts of their brain. I can see no other way to explain how they ignore the many contradictions, lack of evidence and absurdity of religions and faith.
I don’t know why we would be surprised at this, I’ve seen this behaviour from theists and non theists alike. It’s so much easier to not question. Questioning takes effort, requires research, reading and investigating.
It’s much easier to turn on the TV and watch Oprah, the 700 club, or read your horoscope or listen to and pass on gossip and rumours.
The issue of life’s meaning must have a fairly recent history. Did Australopithecus sit around discussing meaning of life? Even H. Erectus was too busy. (It was probably not until the Everly Brothers or David Lynch that the discussion got any traction). So, we can say for sure that life goes on pretty well without any need for belief in an outside source of meaning.
We say now, we humans create our own meaning, and in a very real sense, the belief of religionists that meaning comes from God is just as much a human creation. Religion fits well into a meaningless universe.
It seems strange to me that the religious conjecture about outside meaning pretty much says meaning it imposed, thus removing human autonomy. Are we to be enslaved to get our meaning? How much more noble to roll your own.
Oh…and congratulations to PBS. I knew they had it in them.
From the NPR article:
But why the Christian God specifically? Other people chose different gods to satisfy their deep yearnings and intuitions – other gods which have different requirements of their believers. Sounds more like picking a favourite than an universal absolute.
“we need more than science to satisfy our deep yearnings and intuitions.”
He is setting himself up for wishful thinking.
“But why the Christian God specifically?”
My two cents’ worth – because Christianity is ubiquitous in our (Western) world, so that’s what we read about; and because Christianity is perhaps THE religion that proselytizes/praises itself/pick your word. Islam converts, but mostly at the point of the sword; Judaism will accept converts, but doesn’t seek them; and I understand that some religions (I’m recalling Jainism, but I could well be wrong) won’t even accept converts. Scholars write books about Shinto, but I’ve never seen a popular one about how Shinto gave meaning to someone’s life in the way many Christian books are written.
I’m sure you are right – but he went to a Methodist church as a child, then became an atheist, and finally became an Anglican Priest in Northern Ireland. That’s his cultural background but did he pick the specific (Anglican) Christian god for a reason, or just familiarity?
I have no problem admitting that my life has no meaning or purpose. As Mencken once put it, “We are here and it is now. All else is moonshine” (or something to that effect). I do, however, enjoy my particular moonshine, as do all Homo Significans.
“Homo significans” — how perfect!
“The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
– Robert Green Ingersoll
“I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist upon it.”
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
Barbara King’s book “Evolving God” remarkably combines strong empathy for religion without mental assent.
In the photo, she vaguely reminds me of singer Carole King whose 1972 hit album “Tapestry” also had a cat on the cover.
77.239.105.175/images/prodimages/0886974886525.jpg
However, since Carole King’s real name is Carol Klein, it seems unlikely the two are related.
Prof. Coyne gave a cryptic hint of that (probably cryptic to him too)at the end of his post:
“Yay for Carroll! Yay for King!”
I’ve read one of McGrath’s books (I’ve often seen him touted in online forums as making amazingly good arguments for faith and against atheism), Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. (He has two books which titles begin with “Dawkins’ God”!)
It was spectacularly dire.
I thought, well, if this is the best the faith crew can do, then it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
There is no individual who better represents the mushy thinking of the “sophisticated” liberal Christian, than McGrath! None!
When it comes to defending belief in Christianity his communication becomes like a nebulous mist of vagaries and generalizations. He epitomizes the type of debate opponent who drove Hitchens crazy, who just refuses to state their beliefs with any specifics or clarity. Which is why Hitchens started his debates first pleading with the audience to demand his opponent state his beliefs clearly to defend them.
I remember McGrath being asked specifically which miracle claims he believed in Christianity, for instance did he believe in Christ’s Resurrection? All he would say was, to paraphrase “I can’t say for sure but I do think *something* happened happened at that time that motivate Jesus’ followers to great lengths…”
It’s like nailing jello to a wall.
To liberal Christians like McGrath, Clarity and precision when thinking about religion aren’t admirable – instead they are the obsessions of small minds. Wisdom is defined by taking a broader view, within which many specific ideas can live. Generalizations, ambiguity and metaphor are appealed to as the richer source of wisdom.
Clarity and precision of thought being his enemy, he goes after Dawkins and the New Atheists with much vigor.
In religious faith, the value of clarity, curiosity, and consistency are outweighed by the invented virtues of confusion, credulity, and compartmentalization. The more rambling and vague your descriptions of God, the closer you must surely be to divinity … since a God we can understand is simply not a God worth worshiping at all. I’m babbling nonsense? Yay! I must be getting close!
Mr. McGrath is also known as “Mr. Avoid-the-Freakin’-Question.”
Yes, that’s another good way of putting your finger on it: God is greater than any narrow description we might have of Him. Hence, the more precise one becomes, the less
we are likely talking about the “real” God.
And that’s why – per the most liberal Christianity – God can accomidate the apparent contradiction of many faiths. Get precise enough and the faiths are clearly in contradiction. But become imprecise enough and “we are all worshiping the same God” who can’t be adequately described.
Except on Sunday in the confines of church, when the atheists aren’t listening.
I don’t see any reason to deny the numinous. Hitchens, I think, wrapped it up very well in his appeal to the cosmos as viewed through the hubble space telescope.
No. I don’t agree. The word and concept of “meaning” are not and never were intrinsically religious (unlike, say, the term “spiritual.”) I have no problem with using synonyms, but in my opinion abandoning it to the religious would be ducking into the punch.
It would be like agreeing that atheists are incapable of “love” because love is a spiritual idea: we feel affection.
The religious are greedy. They’ll try and rope in love, meaning, purpose, joy, happiness, morality, virtue, and anything and everything good they possibly can, insisting they’re all inherently, intrinsically, logically, uniquely and definitionally coupled with GOD — so atheists can’t use those words. And from there it’s a swift sidestep to atheists can’t feel or experience the concepts either.
No. Once you start ceding semantic territory they’ll only make louder claims on your next preferred term. It won’t stop till atheists admit that we’re not human because “humanity” is a religious concept involving being made in the image of God. Far better to battle over clarity in meaning so we hang on to meaning. I mean, they’re mean. Don’t trust ’em.
I could not agree more Sastra !!!!!!
Ditto. If only commenters like Sastra could know when I find their writings so compelling that I save them on my computer…
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The true believers waste the one ride they have in this fantastic, improbable universe chasing a holy ghost, and then wring their hands because they imagine our lives are so devoid of meaning. As usual, they’re putting the cart before the horse. Isn’t it first necessary to consider whether there is a god before one goes on to answer the question of whether that god provides “meaning?” Rationally, what they’re arguing is that we must invent a god whether one exists or not to avoid “meaningless” lives.
I have to agree with the great political thinker Milovan Djilas on this one. He was a Marxist who rebelled against Tito and his other fellow Communists when he realized they had betrayed the ideal they fought for. In his “The Unperfect Society” he recounts how his cellmates in prison were all old peasants who were serving time for murder. In spite of that, they were bitter defenders of their Christian faith. He said that he remained a staunch atheist. However, if it turned out that there was a god, he would certainly rebel against that supreme tyrant the same way he rebelled against Stalin and Tito. He was a great admirer of the character of Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” I can understand the attraction.