Painting Fakes

I am not a Christian because it makes logical sense or because I can prove the message to be true.  I am a Christian because the teachings and life of Jesus seem to me to be the best and most compelling guide to living a good life. A few years ago I read lots of apologetics of various sorts. It started with me reading some of the New Atheist writers - Dawkins , Dennett , Harris , Shermer - who were getting a lot of airplay.  With the exception of Shermer, these learned gentlemen all have a great certainty that religion is an ancient anachronism.  However, their efforts to refute religion are compromised by their failure to actually learn anything about the religions they are attempting to disprove.  Nuanced, mature faith just seems like a mystery to them - Harris even suggests that religious 'moderates' are dangerous because they provide cover for fundamentalists.  Dawkins seems to believe that if he can disprove young earth creationism he has therefor...

At the end of the 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything.  He was in the prime of his life and in excellent health.  He was the owner of a hereditary title and a large, profitable estate. He was happily married with a growing brood of children.   War and Peace and Anna Karenina  had made him one of the most celebrated novelists in Europe. Yet he was profoundly unhappy.  He detested his great novels almost as soon as he had finished them.  He felt uneasy about his title and his wealth.  He felt that his life had no value and no meaning and if this was the case, what was the point of bringing children into the world? The result of all this dissatisfaction was three years of intense, harrowing soul-searching which he describes in A Confession .   He scoured the works of contemporary philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life.  Nothing helped him.  The only conclusion h...

Thanks to a recommendation from my cousin Luke I've just finished reading a book by Merold Westphal called Suspicion and Faith.   It's the most refreshing and challenging Christian analysis of atheism I've read for some time. The hinge on which the book hangs is the idea that there are two sources of atheism, and that they require two radically different approaches from Christians.  The first he calls "evidential atheism" and is based on a sceptical approach to religion.  When Richard Dawkins asserts that the theory of evolution removes any need for a creator, he is engaging in evidential atheism.  The second is what he describes as the "atheism of suspicion".  This atheism does not arise from doubts about the evidence for belief, but from doubts about the motivation of religious believers and the function religion plays in our societies and our individual psyches. Scepticism is directed towards the elusiveness of things, while suspicio...

My search for a decent Christian apologetic has had mixed results so far.  I have read many fascinating books, as well as some disappointments, and seen some very silly claims made in the name of the Christian faith.  The search has recently brought me to Dinesh D'Souza's  What's So Great About Christianity, the lack of a question mark providing a most eloquent summary of the author's views. I was nervous before I picked up this book.  D'Souza is an unlikely person to write something I would enjoy.  Born in Mumbai, India, he moved to the USA as an exchange student in 1978 and stayed to become a professional right-wing nutter.  He worked as an advisor in the Reagan White House, and has written books with titles like What's So Great About America (also without question mark), The Enemy At Home: The cultural left and its responsibility for 9/11 , and most recently The Source of Obama's Rage in which he suggests that Obama's foreign policy is driven b...

When I asked the question a few weeks ago about atheist world views , my relative and favourite atheist Roo referred me to AC Grayling's The Good Book: A Secular Bible.   AC Graying  was until recently Professor of Philosophy at London University, and is a prominent advocate of secular humanism which he equates with atheism.  The purpose of The Good Book , it seems, is to provide humanists with their own guidebook which could take the place of the sacred texts of the religions he sees as obsolete or discredited.  This book reminded me of those high-functioning autistic savants who are able to translate their singularity of focus into works of obscure and unusual genius.  Sometimes these works are merely brilliant curiosities, like Stephen Wiltshire , who produces lifelike paintings of real cityscapes based on the briefest of observations, or Gilles Trehin, the creator of Urville , an incredibly detailed imaginary city. On the other hand, some h...

The bit of atheist apologetics I enjoy the least, and find the most absurd, is the evolutionary explanation for religion.  Daniel Dennett wrote a whole book on it, and Michael Shermer has written several.  The point is generally that religion developed because it, or the bahavioural basis behind it, has survival value.  Shermer says our ability to attribute intention to things that have none (like the sky) is a by-product of our ability to predict the behaviour of predators.  Dennett says that religion builds social cohesion in small hunter-gatherer groups and hence helps them to survive by working together.  EO Wilson says altruism grows out of our drive to care for our offspring and hence ensure our genetic continuity. The thing about all these explanations is that they seem plausible, and could even possibly be true,  but the evidence for them is almost non-existent.  This is because the science of evolutionary biology has fe...

Reading Tom Frame  has got me thinking again about the idea of atheism.  When someone says they are an atheist, what are they saying about themselves?  What do the words "I am an atheist" tell you about a person's world view? If you were to ask me my worldview, I would say I am a Christian.  I might qualify that - I am a progressive Christian who has been strongly influenced by liberation theology. From this, you would be able to deduce a lot about my worldview.  You would know that I believe there is a god, although I don't claim full knowledge by any means.  You would know I place a high value on the teachings of Jesus and try to follow them, that I am particularly driven by concern for social justice and for the elimination of poverty.  You would know that I value compassion and empathy, that I have a more or less traditional Chrisitan view about what is right or wrong. The same would be true of someone who said they were a Buddhist, or...

It's interesting how you can live in a society, and yet know so little about it.  You have an intimate circle of friends and relations and you have a reasonable idea what they think and how they react, but you have no way of knowing, without detailed research, if what you and your friends think and experience is typical. Tom Frame is a former Anglican Bishop to the Defence Forces and current Director of St Mark's National Theological Centre in Canberra.  His book  Losing My Religion is an attempt to lift the veil on one aspect of our society - the level and nature of religious belief and unbelief in Australia.  Has unbelief increased in Australia?  If so what are the causes of this growing unbelief, and what are its consequences?  Sadly, his attempt to answer these questions is at best only partly successful.  There are two reasons for this.  One is that the available evidence is insufficient to answer such a complex question. ...

It's been said that to us an alien of sufficient power and complexity would be indistinguishable from a god.  It's also been said that if we had enough knowledge we would be able to prove, one way or another, the truth of religion.  However, if we could do that its character would change completely.  It would no longer involve faith and belief, it would simply be another branch of science, the gods other beings who could be studied and communicated with, heaven and hell realms of exploration and even conquest.   I'm not sure what Iain Banks' religious views are.  From his novels I would be surprised if he was not an atheist, or at least an agnostic.  Yet he has arguably the most fertile imagination of any living speculative fiction writer and he is certainly more than capable of imagining heaven, hell and all manner of gods or demons to inhabit them.   Many of his science fiction novels are set in a Galactic-scale civilisation kno...

When I was writing about John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious I concluded that he had misread the mood of the times, and that "the growing churches of our time are not the intellectual, post-theistic churches of the likes of Spong and his fellow progressives. They are the booming fundamentalist megachurches of the pentecostal movement, and the bastions of conservative Catholicism promoted by John Paul II and his followers." Then I read Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.  Wicker is a religious affairs reporter who spent 17 years writing for the Dallas Morning News, during which she wrote this book.  It was published in 2008, conceived in the wake of George W Bush's re-election as US President supposedly on the votes of evangelical Christians who made up 25% of the US population. These figures are Wicker's first target.  Using data published by evangelical churches themselves, she finds that the true number of active ...

Following on from my review of John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious , here's something more.  I had always thought that atheism and Christianity were incompatible belief systems but  Spong has confounded me by proclaiming himself to be both an atheist and a Christian.  He cites three arguments in support of his atheism, each of which would be worthy of our most radical 21st century atheists.  First of all,  he asserts that science has disproved theism.  The evidence of cosmology shows that there is no God above the sky.  The evidence of paleontology shows that life on earth developed gradually by natural processes.  Our understanding of science in general shows that the processes of physics, chemistry and biology are driven by natural laws which are not amenable to random divine intervention.  Richard Dawkins would certainly be pleased to read such a clear statement of his own views, although a large number of other scienti...