Real-life and non-classic arguments for the existence of God
Simon Pan taught and had us listen to a real life discussion on whether God exists. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath debated this issue earlier this year in March. McGrath is the general editor of our textbook. Dawkins is the "most famous" atheist. (Start at index 24:25 of part 1 of the podcast at this website) We analyzed the discussion which focussed mostly on the moral argument. Discussions on beauty feed back to the teleological argument and the cosmological argument is implied when they discussed ultimate cause. A handout with discussion questions on the debate is posted as the first comment to this post
We then looked at "tacit knowledge": things that we implicitly know and no amount of study and analysis can help: riding a bike is a typical example. Many of us "intuitively" know God through our understanding of tacit knowledge. A detailed handout is posted as the second comment to this posting.
God is "in here" is a related avenue of thought that God is manifested within us. A detailed handout on this avenue of thought is posted as a third comment to this posting.
Tacit knowledge and "God is in here" lead to the Christological argument for the existence of God: very few people believe in God for purely rational reasons. So why bother studying theology or any of these rational arguments for the existence of God? Because we have "faith seeking understanding". Our faith is not blind and that there are reasonable justifications for our faith.
5 Comments:
Handout 1: Discussion questions on the debate between McGrath and Dawkins
Other than the questions “Does God Exist?” what other questions are they raising? What question(s) do you think are most relevant for you? How come asking the question “Does God Exist?” often raises so many other questions?
What classical proofs were Dawkins and McGrath referring to and what arguments do you think are most appealing on either side.
Does this dialogue relate to some dialogue you have with either yourself or other? In what ways is this dialogue similar or in what way is this dialogue differ?
Do you see other approaches to the God and religion questions or questioning?
Reference:
Richard Dawkins and Alistair McGrath Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival March 2007 (audio)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/podcasts/books/article1570989.ece
Summary and discussion on “The God Delusion”:
http://www.jesuscreed.org/index.php?s=The+God+Hypothesis+
300 proofs of God Exist
http://www.tektonics.org/guest/300proof.html
“The Blind Watchmaker” download
http://www.terebess.com/keletkult/The_Blind_Watchmaker.pdf
A lecture by Phillip E. Johnson who is a retired UC Berkeley American law professor and considered to be the father of the intelligent design movement
http://www.apologetics.org/articles/founder.html
Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”, Mariner Books 2007.
Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, “The Dawkins Delusion”, SPCK 2007.
Hans Kung, “Does God Exist – An answer for today”, (Vintage books, 1975).
Leslis Newbigin, “The Gospel in a Pluralist Society”, (Eerdmans, 1989)
Handout 2: Tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge (from The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Religion by Walter Van Herck
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Reli/ReliVanh.htm)
Our first attempt at describing tacit knowledge was rather negative: tacit is what we know but cannot tell. Now we are in a position to give a more positive account: tacit knowledge is interiorized knowledge.
What happens when one tries to make tacit knowledge explicit? When what is proximal is placed at a distance and scrutinized carefully, one witnesses the destruction of the meaning the proximal had. Think what happens when you repeat a word with great attention for the movements of lips and tongue, when a piano player focuses his attention on his fingers in the middle of a concerto, or when you, while writing, suddenly stop worrying about what to write and in stead start looking at your moving pen. The word loses its meaning, the piano player has a black out and the writing turns into scribbling. But still, this is the way how instruction starts. We learn to pronounce difficult words by paying attention to movements of tongue and lips, to play the piano by paying attention to the positioning of our fingers and to write by thinking how to write and not what to write. Surely, what is tacit can and must be made explicit. There are manuals for fingering at the piano, for pronunciation, for writing. One could even write a book about how to drive a car. Only, the necessary interiorization of this knowledge will not to be achieved purely on the basis of this explicitation. The piano player will not play any better because he has read about fingering, but because he has practiced it. And nobody can drive a car because he has read a book. The same holds for mathematics, physics, philosophy, morality and religion.
…
Someone who tries to find his way in complete darkness for the first time with a stick, feels the impact of the stick in his palm and fingers and hasn't got the least idea what the stick is touching. Only after a lot of practice is this sensation in the palm of the hand transformed into a feeling for what the point of the exploring stick is touching. So, in the beginning of this learning process our attention is focused on the sensations in our hand. At the end of this process our attention has shifted to the objects the stick touches. We feel - or see, if you like - the slippery rock, the furry dog, the threshold... The sensations in our hand and precisely how they tell us something about the objects we meet, however, remain tacit. We decode, as it were, tacitly the sensations in our hand into three dimensional objects.
In this way the stick becomes something from which our attention proceeds, and not something which attracts our attention. Polanyi call this process a process of incorporation. He writes:
"we incorporate it in our body - or extend our body to include it - so that we come to dwell in it".
Someone who has true knowledge of something (as opposed to having it memorized), has interiorized the object of his knowledge. A physicist cannot suffice with memorizing physical theories. When we say that he has a thorough command or mastery of his subject matter, we mean precisely that his theories have become instruments to him.
(summary added)
We cannot and need not proof God exist because such knowledge is always incomplete. Even if we have the objective proofs of certainty we still do not know how to know God. On the other hand if we do know God we do not need the proof of God because we know through tacit knowledge that he exists. Using “the stick in the dark” analogy in the context of our ‘Does God Exist?” context, does it matter if we can prove the stick exist? Assumed that we can, if we do not know how to work with the stick, does it matter?
Handout 3: God is "in here"
God is not up there but in here. (Extracts from “Honest to God”, John AT Robinson)
For in place of a God who is literally or physically 'up there' we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically 'out there'. p. 13
God is not 'out there' at all. In other words, that God as a separate Being - as Creator, for instance - does not exist. Instead, Robinson suggests, the idea of God is just a religious way of talking about the depths of human nature, in particular our capacity to love. He says that if 'God is love' then it follows that 'love is God'.
"But suppose such a super-Being 'out there' is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the 'existence' of some entity, even a supreme entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? Suppose the atheists are right-but that this is no more the end or denial of Christianity than the discrediting of the God 'up there,' which must in its time have seemed the contradiction of all that the Bible said? Suppose that all such atheism does is to destroy an idol, and that we can and must get on without a God 'out there' at all? Have we seriously faced the possibility that to abandon such an idol may in the future be the only way of making Christianity meaningful, except to the few remaining equivalents of flat-earthers (just as to have clung earlier to the God 'up there' would have made it impossible in the modern world for any but primitive
peoples to believe the Gospel)? Perhaps after all the Freudians are right, that such a God-the God of traditional popular theology is a projection, and perhaps we are being called to live without that projection in any form."
God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like ... Thus, the fundamental theological question is not in establishing the 'existence' of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls 'the ground of our being'.. p. 29
In Tillich's words: The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Eriggena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. p. 31
God is not 'out there'. He is in Bonhoeffer's words ' the "beyond" in the midst of our life', a depth of reality reached ' not on the borders of life but at its centre', not by any flight of the alone to the alone, but, in Kierkegaard's fine phrase, by ' a deeper immersion in existence'. For the word 'God' denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence. ...Tillich warns us that to make the necessary transposition, 'you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.' p. 47
... Bonhoeffer insists ... 'The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand.' p.53
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright, blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of 'what you take seriously without any reservation', of what for you is ultimate reality. p. 55
(summary added)
So of course god exists, by redefine the meaning of God. The manner we pursuit the ultimate reality of love, faith and hope,(as indicated in the scripture, that is God.
I was thinking about the moral arguments from today's class and i think the problem with the arguments from both sides is that they have very different assumptions as to how morals are derived.
The atheist argument is that morals are not a RESULT of religion but rather by consensus among the people. However, the Christian argument is that morals ORIGINATE from God i.e. God defines what is good and evil, doesn't matter what the consensus is.
People in the society may or may not follow morals set by God even if they say they believe in their religion and hence being in a religion doesn't necessarily reflect God's morals - so the atheist is right. However, the atheist argument is not valid using the Christian assumption. Since God is the one who defines morality, it doesn't matter what the consensus of the people is.
Susannah
As indicated the week before, I don't expect an atheist to accept any of these arguments. From a Christian perspective though I find these arguments to be sources of encouragement. Morals as merely the result of majority rule is too bleak.
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