Saturday, May 12, 2007
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And in other news...
Dawkins says religion is "like sucking a dummy"
Must be a British thing.
I think ... I think "dummy" is a British word for "pacifier". Maybe? Let's hope so.
Speaking of Dawkins, though. You really should check out this review by Terry Eagleton of Dawkins's book The God Delusion. The fascinating thing about Dawkins is that he spends so much time arguing against the kind of religion that Christians have never believed in, the kind Christianity came into existence to abolish. (And the rest of his time is apparently spent arguing the sort of mystical scientistic, progressivistic crap that imagines that there's some kind of inevitable and Godless cosmic impetus in the direction of bestest bestness that will somehow deliver all the goods - moral and material - that mankind's been craving. Which is an impression I'm drawing from Eagleton's review. I haven't actually read Dawkins.)
I did, however, catch the last half of a Terry Gross "Fresh Air" interview with him about a month ago, and all I could think of was "This guy doesn't know what Christianity is." I would really like to be a fly on the wall at an intense discussion (but not an argument) between Dawkins and a really knowledgeable theologian who could set him straight on what exactly Christianity is.
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Comments (5)
The transcendence of God means that he is not a part of this system we call creation and that therefore he didn't have to create it. He willed it into being out of sheer love, and this purely gratuitous love is at the center of existence. It's hard to imagine in a world with war and starvation, etc, etc, that the ultimate cause of the universe is pure love, but there it is. That's what Christianity teaches.
Pagans thought of God as part of the universe. Aristotle didn't really believe in "God". He believed in an "unmoved mover" who was like the still hub about which the universe revolved but was still, ultimately, a part of it. The genius of Christianity was to take the idea of the "Logos" - that intelligence, that reasonable, meaningfulness of the universe - and locate it "outside" and completely transcendent to the universe. Pagans generally believe in gods who ultimately are part of the whole process of the cosmos. That's why nearly all the myths start with some primordial chaos out of which the "gods" sort of arise spontaneously and which they then begin to shape (as pre-existent matter) into planets and people and such.
If Christianity is false, then it means that we have "paid the universe a compliment it doesn't deserve" (as Lewis says), and that there is something inside of us (our understanding of goodness and love) that is bigger and better than the whole universe.