My Absence

Dear all,
I will be away in Russia on an academic trip for the next three weeks, returning on August the 13th. To that extent I will be unable to post: and I apologise. However in the mean time rest assured that I am planning and writing a new series of pieces outlining and critiquing various different philosophers’ views on the essence of religion. I am very excited about it, and believe it will be highly insightful. To that extent please do return to the blog when I come back to pick up where we left off! Whilst I’m gone please do continue commenting, especially on the readers’ debate, (I have asked someone to moderate comments in my absence) as it really is proving to be a very exciting venture. I will also try to update the title whilst I’m away. Anyway off admin related things: it has been a great first few weeks with this community, I have learnt a lot and have thoroughly enjoyed all our discussion, so thank you very much! I hope the God-Debates will have a long and enthralling future.
See you all soon,
Hugo

Faith: Rational?

To the dispassionate onlooker it might seem strange that many dedicate themselves so fully to a life of religion when there is no objective evidence proving that their beliefs are well founded: yet is it as irrational as it might at first appear?

Schools of great thinkers, philosophers, theologians and debaters, have all rejected religion on the grounds that they cannot accept a claim unless it is thoroughly backed up by evidence and truth: this is in their opinion is the only satisfactory and logical approach to living and understanding our universe. Faith is deemed archaic and irrational, with no place in our new modern and intelligent ways of pursuing knowledge.

I beg to differ. In nearly every conclusion we reach and in nearly every decision we make we have to use our memory of previous experiences and capacity for thought to make sensible assumptions about things we cannot prove; we perform an act of faith. The joke goes that many philosophy students have skipped lessons, not even bothering to leave their home in the morning, because they did not know whether or not their classroom remained standing: it is perfectly plausible that an earthquake has ruined that side of town, just as it is possible that school is still open as usual. Of course until the student is presented with objective evidence either way they must just wait; as a rational mind could never act on faith alone. This is clearly absurd and the pupil should have followed his intuition and headed to school on time. Faith is a sensible and necessary part of our thought processes.

So what is the difference between the taking of a basic decision and the making a choice over ones’ religious views? Very little, both are made based on reasoning: be it the probability of a natural disaster occurring, or the cosmological argument; and on experience: “the classroom was there yesterday, so it most likely is today.” Or “I genuinely felt touched by the spirit, maybe God does exist?” The only real difference is that whilst the student will soon find out if his conclusion was the correct one, it is near impossible to demonstrate which, if any, religious views reflect reality, we will simply never know until our death. To that extent it seems very foolhardy to scorn others for having faith in a God; is it really that unbelievable?

Free Will, An Addition to the Readers’ Debate

First off let me just say how impressed I have been with all the comments you have made so far on the Readers’ Debate of the week: Does free will exist?

I have noticed that there is an overwhelming consensus that free will does not exist, and to add to that the camp that suggest otherwise tend to argue with the assumption, correct or not, that God exists. There has been little or no debate from a secular point of view declaring that there is such a thing as independent choice, grounding their claim in credible philosophy or science. I believe a convincing case can be made to that extent and I will do my best to outline it.

The view I will present is the one called compatablity, and I have chosen it because it seems to be the consensus of many that we live in a “predetermined” universe and so I will attempt to show that we can be ‘free’ in such conditions.

Before begin I must quickly explain how we can view time as being like a landscape: the terms there, here, to the right, to the left, become relative to the particular hiker on his trail, they are anything but absolute. To that extent time is the same; terms like present, past and future become relative to the person’s position in the continuum. There is an implication associated with this: future, present and past can all exist simultaneously, why: because they are all in effect the same. The only thing that divides time is the artificial divisions that we, people, force it into. Just as an area of land is neither right nor left, though it may appear either to different hikers, time cannot be past or future. Time cannot be intrinsically separated into what has happened and what is yet to happen, that is an illusion caused by our particular perspective: all of time is one course of events that is entirely fixed and has, in effect, already been decided.

Now the hard determinist would say: “indeed, everything has been decreed already, all of the future sealed” and then he might add, almost humorously, “Yes, you see I was destined to say that!” But the determinist has leapt to the conclusion that he spoke because it was so ordained on this unchangeable timeline of eternity, but what if the unchangeable timeline of eternity was so because he spoke? This may at first seem ridiculous: after all, if what I have told you is true and everything has been predetermined; then how could his decision have been freely made seeing as he was simply playing his already ordained role in this grand scheme? Perhaps the best way to explain how our determinist was, in fact, free is to quote a short story on the matter of the future.

Suppose a time traveller named Nick, convinced that a fixed future and human free will are incompatible, decides to strip Max of his free will. Nick shadows Max on June 1st, taking detailed notes on Max’s actions, decisions, utterances, and such, and then travels back to May 31st with his notepad. Nick then attends a social gathering (Max is absent) and recounts for his friends the course of Max’s life on the ‘next’ day, June 1st. After he has finished reading from his notes, Nick proudly proclaims that he has successfully eradicated any ability on Max’s part to act freely the next day –after all, Nick’s notepad will dictate Max’s actions, decisions, and such, and Max is powerless to resist.

However it is clear to me that it is not the notepad dictating Max’s day and his decisions, but Max’s freely chosen decisions determining what is on the notepad. Just because the notepad existed ‘before’ the day began does not mean that it has shaped Max’s future.

Consider the grand scheme of events I have referred to in this essay as the notepad, and remember that because of the strange manner in which we perceive time it is possible for this scheme to gather details of our ‘future.’ However, despite this it is in fact us who exerts a sort of power over our predetermined lives, and decides our fate, just as Max does.

I believe this quotation sums up beautifully the free will which I have tried to prove humans do in fact have:

“I think, to acknowledge that while whatever happens happens inevitably, free-willed beings are free within reason to determine the nature of ‘what happens,”

Hugo

Readers’ Debate

Dear Readers,

Please do take a look at the site’s new initiative: Readers’ Debate. It’s an exciting new program where our followers can all get their opinions heard and challenge others on important philosophical questions. I’m convinced that if you head down there soon you’ll see some fascinating discussion; and if you’re up for it please do take part and post!

A Cause?

Please check out the new Weekly Quotation (link at the top)

An Atheist’s Proposition:

It is simple: a universe can, and most importantly will, create itself out of nothing; ex nihilo; end of statement. This fact is undisputable; and to question it would be to question arguably the greatest physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking: go on – I dare you.

So what of a cause? The answer: a notable absence of any God, be it Allah, Zeus or He himself. We have been told that a law such as gravity can create an entire universe with its billions of galaxies each with billions of stars from what is literally emptiness. We have a why, and we can even answer how it was created: all it took was a bit of probability to swing our way, and our reality became reality. The God of the Gaps argument is no longer even necessary, in my opinion there are no gaps. Human life is not the work of a creator, but the blind system of evolution; and the universe burst forth due to gravity. Both of these conclusions are tidier and more plausible than the alternative; either we must believe that the complex phenomena of our universe were self-constructing; or that they are the masterpiece of  a paradoxically all-powerful God lurking somewhere unidentifiable and through all ages. I know which of these makes more sense to me.

Why will this amazing discovery go by with only a handful of religious followers realising that it is in fact an atheistic reality we live in? Because it is a discovery too amazing to contemplate: that all of the wonders that stretch for light-years beyond Earth are not down to the work of an intelligent creator. Of course it is hard to get one’s head around it, but soon enough you too will realise that science has the only rational answers.

A Christian’s Response:

Starting where my colleague left off I too would like to point out the mind-blowing scale of the universe with its inconceivable diameter of 156 billion light-years. To claim that such a thing could be created out of nothing seems absurd. If I were to find a rogue trolley lying in my field as I was strolling through it I would naturally expect an answer as to why it was there. The response ‘it just appeared causelessly’ is to say the least unsatisfactory, and clearly wrong. If we think about it everything requires a cause; as nothing comes from nothing; either it is so through necessity like the reality of the number system, or because someone or something triggered it. Reconsidering the field scenario: the larger and more impressive the object which inexplicably has appeared on my land the more unlikely it is that it is there solely by chance. Consider if I were to suddenly find a jumbo jet parked there? Things become most absurd when we reach the scale of the universe: how on earth could something like that feasibly spontaneously appear? There has to be a cause.

Furthermore despite claiming that the universe came from nothing my atheist opponent then goes on to explain how it is all the work of the law of gravity. Excuse me if I’m wrong, but gravity is something, isn’t it?

Assuming therefore that my fellow debater does believe there is a cause, and it is to be found in gravity, I would like to challenge his conviction that he with this single ‘logical thesis’ has answered the great problem of how the universe began. In my opinion scientific discoveries like these can only partially explain the wonders of creation, and my colleague has only taken a step in the long journey to understanding them. I believe Dr John Lennox demonstrated this best when he explained how, although a scientist could explain the way in which a cake was baked, he or she could not explain why it was baked.

Defining Religion

As Keith Ward, one of my favourite Christian Theologians, often points out: it is almost impossible to successfully pinpoint what religion is: yet that doesn’t stop people passionately defending or attacking it.

This, as you might expect, leads to widespread confusion in discussion. It is no wonder that disputes about the merits of ‘religion’ or the evils committed in its name never seem to reach a satisfying conclusion: one debater is most likely supporting an entirely different interpretation of the word to the one their opponent is attempting to undermine!

So what is the perfect and clear cut definition of religion which we should all learn by rote? The answer is that no-one has come up with one, as there are innumerable pitfalls that one can fall into when trying to reach a satisfying definition. As a result most attempts have serious shortcomings, but later in this essay I will give you my favourite variant, reached by the anthropologist Geertz.

Well, how bad is the problem? The answer is very; in fact we reach an issue before we even start trying to craft the ultimate definition: is defining religion a good thing?

This may sound like an absurd question because everything we can observe needs its own dictionary entry with a clear meaning attached: but by accepting that religion is a separate entity to society and human nature we allow it to appear to be a discrete cultural ‘choice’. To that extent anyone who wishes to can claim to ‘reject’ this said ‘choice’ and therefore state that religion has no influence over them. Indeed the ability to reject religion completely is something our increasingly secular society believes in; and this, in my opinion, is nothing less than absurd. Indeed I challenge anyone who disagrees with me to forever pretend that the art, music and literature they love; and the wars, laws and kings that shaped their history haven’t been and weren’t seriously effected by religion.

So am I suggesting that religion would be better without a definition?

It would seem that way, but let me elaborate on why that too is a terrible idea! Let’s say we do arrive at the conclusion that religion is integrated with society to such an extent that it no longer warren’s distinction from it; then it can be just as easily falsely undermined. Clearly a claim could be made that seeing as ‘religion’ has become practically non-existent its influence must be minimal, allowing me to ignore and reject it. That having been said there is a clear advantage to not defining religion, and that is allowing it to constantly evolve and change. As it is religion has been forced into some static almost historic form, when in reality it could be very dynamic and adaptive. Despite this it is apparent that religion is damned if it isn’t defined, and damned if it is: I for one have no idea what the best cause of action is to take, but part of me wishes that English might become like Chinese and Indian and have no word ‘religion.’

Suggesting we do attempt to define religion, are there any problems there?

It is clear that when a theologian crafts a definition of ‘religion’ it tends to uncannily resemble his or her belief system, and thus more often than not, the doctrine accepted by the majority of the society in which he or she lives. To that extent when Europeans in the early Middle Ages first set about defining religion, they effectively decided its essence was a simplified version of Christianity. Perhaps an example would show this best, so I have chosen Edward Herbert’s (3 March 1583 – 20 August 1648) five pillars of religion: the existence of God, the duties of worship, moral conduct, the repentance for sin, and its punishment and the rewarding of the righteous in the afterlife. Anyone else detect a hint of Christianity there?

Can God Be Good?

An acceptance that God is entirely good is a key aspect of numerous religious traditions: yet for many the undeniable prevalence of suffering in our world draws them to the conclusion that an all-powerful creator could not be omni-benevolent.

I’m going to attempt to prove in this essay that God can be both entirely good and omnipotent.

I see and experience pain, sin and death; I don’t believe that God is kind and loving, yet you believe you can persuade me that despite this God is, in a sense, good?

It is important to remember that when someone or something is attributed with ‘goodness’ we could interpret that characteristic in a number of ways. I for one believe that a Beethoven sonata is exceptionally ‘good;’ I similarly declare that St Francis of Assisi was ‘good;’ yet both are very different in their respective ‘goodness.’ One describes how prefect in form the sonata is, the other how moral the historic saint was. If I tell you now that I know a good architect I assume that you will picture a man who designs elegant buildings in a competent fashion; but how can you be sure that I wasn’t describing an architect who is morally good, and designs buildings more ugly that those of the Brutalists. Just because the architect is ‘good’ in one sense doesn’t mean he must be in the other. This reasoning can be applied to God: even if one could never accept that He is good in the moral sense, surely to create such an immense universe with its awe-inspiring structures and its finely tuned laws of nature He must be perfect in ‘form,’ a being unparalleled in ability and power; and thus absolutely good.

So you believe that God is good, but amoral?

Whilst I do think that that is a very convincing position to hold I do not believe it myself: I personally consider God to be omnibenevolent and loving. It is a much more difficult corner to fight, but I will try to outline counter-arguments to the most convincing reasons showing that God is unlikely to be moral.

Many people find it near impossible to accept that the human race, just a speck in the vast expanse of the universe and history, could be of any importance to God. They favour the idea of a creator who is completely neutral towards us: hardly aware of our presence. I would like to stress that this school of thought specifies, for the reasons above, that God acts in an entirely disinterested way towards us and thus is not charitable towards us. I believe this logic is flawed, and I will explain why. Evil is acting to reduce someone’s quality of life, causing them pain or death, and so a good deed must be the opposite: restoring all those who are suffering to a life of happiness. The act does not require the benefactor to be interested in the beneficiary, and indeed the chances are the benefactor is acting in this generous fashion because of a duty, for example a religious one, or because it is built into their nature.