Painting Fakes

Some of my family have been having a heated Facebook argument (as you do) sparked by recent troubles in the support base for Catherine Hamlin's Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia.  Sadly, there appears to be a dispute about the religious affiliations of supporters which is interfering with funding for this important work.  This charity is dear to the hearts of a number of family members and they are shocked.  I don't really understand the dispute and the ABC report of it is not all that enlightening. Still, my favourite and much-loved atheist relative's instant emotional reaction was to blame the Christian faith for the problem.  Religion poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens would have said.  Of course Hamlin herself is also a Christian, but what are such details before the power of confirmation bias ? Anyway I know I shouldn't let my caustic wit get the better of me, but here goes.  Our current crop of New Atheists like to view religion as...

In my reading of various works of apologetics I noticed that quite a few Christian writers refer in approving tones to GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, so I thought I'd have a read. Chesterton was one of those archetypal English "men of letters", a high-class journalist who churned out books on a massive range of subjects.  He was a jack of all trades and master of none, an eccentric individual famous as much for who he was as for what he wrote.  Most of his works are rarely read these days, but the Father Brown   mysteries are still popular, as is this little book.  It was published in 1908 when Chesterton was 35, and explains his reasons for converting from agnosticism to orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity. I find it interesting not only that this book is still read, but that it is beloved of more or less orthodox Protestants like CS Lewis and Philip Yancey, who wrote the foreword to this edition.  It's interesting because Chesterton is quite ...

I first heard of Francis Collins in Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , where his faith journey served as a contrast for Shermer's own journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism.   The Language of God is Collins' own telling of that story, along with his reflections on the relationship between science and faith. Collins is famous for his role as the director of the Human Genome Project, in which a host of geneticists pooled their efforts to develop a complete map of the human genome.  He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and this makes him something of a poster boy for the idea that Christianity and science can be compatible.  After all, if such a distinguished scientist is also a believer then faith must be smart. The Language of God opens with his own description of his conversion.  Brought up in a non-religious household, he more or less drifted into atheism as the default option for a budding scientist, before his switch to ...

Oxford mathematics professor and Christian apologist John C Lennox has recently acheived a high profile in Australia due to an appearance on the ABC's Q&A .  He has also debated noted atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer .  All of which means that sooner or later I was bound to check him out. God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is Lennox's summary of his arguments against the "scientific atheism" of the likes of Dawkins and Shermer.  Its central question is whether the evidence of science has really killed off the idea of God.  His main antagonist in this debate seems to be Dawkins, and a number of chapters in this book are direct refutations of claims made by Dawkins - that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain the origin of life, that an interventionist god violates the laws of nature, that David Hume's arguments are a conclusive philosophical refutation of the possibility of miracles. ...

To make sure I don't just get trapped in a single viewpoint, I've been reading John Ortberg's Faith and Doubt.   Ortberg is an American Presbyterian pastor and also coincidentally a former clinical psychologist.  His overall outlook seems to be basically orthodox, conservative Protestantism but he is not really in the "fundamentalist" camp in that he is not a believer in the literal seven day creation, nor in premillenialism.  He has written this book to deal with the question of doubt.  Why do Christians doubt, what should they do about it, and how does doubt relate to faith?  He deals with the issue in a chatty, anecdotal style, keeping it light and easy and leaping from story to story, topic to topic, with the agility of a grasshopper.  Although he doesn't say so, I suspect that the material in this book started out as a set of sermons, and it still sounds like something meant to be spoken, peppered with jokes that are often quite funny ...

William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."  Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail. I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things , a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient.  Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence.  The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology.  What it is about our brains, S...

My atheist friend and occasional fellow blogger Roo told me I should read Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain   as part of my series on atheism.  While I wait for the lovely people in the Brisbane City Council library service to buy it and lend it to me (yes I am a cheapskate, and besides, I pay my rates!) I've been whetting my appetite with one of his earlier books, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and other confusions of our time. It's a little unfair in some ways to include Shermer in a series on atheism given that he makes it clear in this book that he is an agnostic.  Nonetheless, it's worth looking at the light he sheds on various belief systems and why they come into being.  Shermer is something of a minor celebrity in the US, a regular guest on TV chat shows where he appears as the token skeptic in episodes about the various "weird things" he discusses in this book.  He has degrees in psychology and the history o...

I have heard that while authors provide the content for their books, publishers choose the titles.  Karen Armstrong's The Case for God might be an example of this.  The title sounds like she is defending God against atheism.  In fact, the book has a good deal to say about religion, not much about atheism (although the advent of atheism is clearly part of its context) and is fairly ambivalent about the word "God". Karen Armstrong  has written widely on religious subjects and has a strong bent for comparative religion.  After a stint in a Catholic religious order as a young adult, she initially abandoned faith altogether before coming back to a more open and inclusive spirituality, embracing lessons and practices from a variety of sources in a manner reminiscent of Joseph Campbell . The Case for God   covers similar territory to Alister McGrath's   The Twilight of Atheism , but it both travels back further and delves more deeply into the ...

One of the things that struck me in Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism   was the link he makes between the Reformation and the rise of atheism.  He says A distinctive feature of the Reformation, particularly associated with the leading reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, is the "desacralisation" of nature....The declaration that the natural world was not in any way sacred opened the way to its scientific investigation.  There could be no religious obstacles to the analysis of the world.  The world increasingly became seen as a machine or an instrument - of divine origins, of course, but increasingly distant from God.  The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence.... ....in popular Catholicism sacred and secular times, events and places were so closely associated that they were often indistinguishable....The individual had a strong sense of place within the cosmos that radiated the glory o...

And now for something completely different - a book about atheism by someone who is not an atheist.  Alister McGrath is currently a Professor of Theology at Kings College, London and at the time of writing this book was Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford.  Prior to that he had a scientific carreer with a doctorate in molecular biophysics.  He is clearly no fool and just as clearly no atheist. I have to admit that  The Twilight of Atheism  was not the book I was expecting to read.  I picked it up expecting to read an educated refutation of atheism.  Instead, I got something equally fascinating - a historical analysis of the rise of atheism and of what McGrath sees as its subsequent decline.  In his reading, modern atheism gained strength and influence in the latter half of the 18th century, in the events leading up to and surrounding the French Revolution.  In this context, atheism was seen as a force for liberation, with the chur...

I used to think that Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett all had a bit of a grudge against religion.  Then I read Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto and changed my mind.  Dawkins and Harris are mere pussycats compared to Onfray. Michel Onfray is a French philosopher, and I have to admit he's a random pick on my journeys in atheism.  His book has been staring at me from my library shelf since it reopened in May, so finally I brought it home and read it.  I'm not sure how our better known Anglo-American atheists view him.  He shares with them a negative, jaundiced view of religion, especially the major monotheistic religions which are the focus of this book.  On the other hand, whereas the core of their critique is scientific, grounded in the works of Charles Darwin, his is almost wholly philosophical, grounded particularly in the works of Neitzsche and Freud. Onfray claims to have made a close study of Judaism, Chri...

I first encountered Richard Dawkins through The God Delusion, his tedious and ill-informed rant against religion.  Like Christians around the world, I shook my head ruefully and said, "no, I don't believe in that god either".  So I thought I'd try again with his most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I have to say it's much more pleasant to encounter Dawkins on his own territory.  While his religious knowledge is patchy at best, he has a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology and a passion for the subject that really shines through.  Unlike Sam Harris , he even holds out an olive branch to moderate religious believers, opening the book with a discussion of his joint lobbying with various Anglican bishops on the subject of the teaching of creationism in school science classes. The motivation for this book is Dawkins' horror that over 40% of Americans, and over 20% of Britons, believe in young earth creationism .  Dawki...

Sam Harris, an American neuroscientist and CEO of Project Reason , wrote a book called The End of Faith .  He argued that religion is not only completely unreasonable, it is so dangerous in a world where there are weapons of mass destruction that it is no longer safe for us to keep it around.  I haven't read this book, but apparently many Christians did, and some were so incensed they wrote him abusive letters. (Note to my fellow Christians: writing abusive letters is definitely What Jesus Would Not Do!) Harris replied not with personal abuse by return mail, but with a booklet called Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he responds to his correspondents with more grace than they deserve, restating his arguments simply and briefly. He is primarily addressing fundamentalists, and I found I agreed with him on a lot of points.  He is right to be horrified at some aspects of the Old Testament punitive law, like the stoning of adulterers and disobedient ...

It's interesting how over the past decade some of our more militant atheists have taken to using the techniques of religion to promote their cause.  Not that they've become religious - that would be absurd - but they hold conventions, they promote atheism on the backs of buses, and they write works of atheist apologetics.  The advent of Islamic terrorism, and their belief that this is a sign of the deeply dangerous nature of religion (though Stalin's atrocities were somehow not similar evidence of the dangers of atheism), has made them militant. Like Christian apologetics, these works are not really written for those outside the tent.  They are written for those within to give them ammunition with which to defend their belief, or lack thereof.  The best known work of this sort may be Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, in which the western world's crankiest atheist fires his shotgun furiously at religion.  However, because he knows very little about...

Of the books I read while I was away on holidays, the one that got my brain moving the most was Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson.  The chapters of this book were originally a series of lectures given as part of the wonderfully named  Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy .  Her subject is what she calls "parascientific writing" - that is writings, generally by scientists, which attempt to apply scientific insights to subjects such as religion or human culture which are strictly beyond the bounds of those sciences.  Obviously uppermost on her mind are those we think of as "scientifics atheists" - the Dawkins, Dennets and EO Wilsons of this world - but she also delves further back to the writers of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, not to mention a whole chapter on Sigmund Freud.  One of the key aspects of this kind of thinking, she says, is that its authors ...