The Rage Against God
Diane Ellis ·
Jun 18, 2010 at 12:46pm
Peter Hitchens:
My brother wrote a book attacking God, Christianity, religion in general -- and there are things that he says that are wrong.
In response to what he would call Christopher's "rage against God" demonstrated within the pages of the incendiary book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Peter Hitchens has just published The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith.
Hitchens family reunions must make for interesting affairs.
- Comment (13)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (4)
Comments :
Jun '10
Re: The Rage Against God
What has always interested me is the faith that it takes to be an atheist. Normally, when the word faith is used it is applied to the religious person, who in the absence of proof, falls back on accepting the unknowable, in large part helped out by the idea of an omniscient God, Who is to mere man a mystery. The Atheist on the other hand claims that all is knowable, or will be knowable, in the fullness of time. Where the deist substitutes a faith in God for a dearth of knowledge, the atheist places his faith in the ever, and possible infinitely expandable, mind of man. Atheist and deist rage against each other across this great divide only because neither has now, now will ever have, incontrovertible proof for his position. It is this lack of proof that forces us, both deist and atheist, to live by the slimmest of all hopes. I leave it to readers to divine what that hope might be.
Jun '10
Re: The Rage Against God
Should have been "...nor will ever have..." please accept my apology.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
I don't know about that. I think it is quite possible for things to be unknowable, and I would imagine an atheist would have no difficulty believing that.
In fact, quantum mechanics requires is.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
It's true that a respect for the unknown generally leads one to be an agnostic, rather than an atheist, if one sees no evidence of God. But it is possible to become an atheist by simply favoring the theory that an idea of God is a pyschological attempt at comfort and understanding. Believing that theory can take a leap of faith, but one can also believe it for purely pragmatic reasons without any claim to certainty. I was raised Catholic, was an atheist for years, and came to believe in Catholicism again; so I've been on both sides of the argument.
I agree that all people, religious or not, act on faith throughout their lives. Few things annoy me more than the claim that science does not involve faith. Likewise, the attempt to place science and religion, or logic and faith, in opposition to each other.
People often reject religion based on popular misconceptions or because their only experiences are with religious folks who don't have a solid foundation for their beliefs.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
By the way... When someone complains to me that we can't see God, I respond that we can. We witness God's presence in the same way we witness the wind. You don't see the wind, but you know it is there by the seeing the things it moves. A sound faith is founded in both logic and experience.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
Aaron, can you elaborate on that?
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
I elaborated in this thread (strangely enough).
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
I think what you're describing is an appeal to authority rather than faith. Accepting as a fact something that is documented and proven by a known method, is in agreement with the predictions of a self-consistent theory, has been reproduced and documented multiple times independently, and can be proven again, is not analogous to religious faith.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
Faith is simply a choice to trust. When you place faith in any account on any subject, are you not treating that person (insert Ph.D.) or book (textbook) or organization (AMA, USGS, etc) as an authority?
You can say that a certain scientific principle is proven and the proof has been documented, but the vast majority of people using that principle as a basis for further logic and experiments take that on faith. They do not see the evidence with their own eyes or reenact the experiment. If I believe something can be reproduced without actually reproducing it myself or witnessing it done, then I'm am trusting. Am I not?
Why does it matter if hundreds of scientists claim to have performed a particular experiment, but it doesn't matter that millions of Christians and Jews claim to have witnessed angels? Numbers are irrelevant. If you do not experience proof first-hand, scientific or otherwise, then you can believe it only by asking if it seems a logical possibility and choosing to trust (place faith in) the accounts of others.
The Catholic faith, incidentally, appeals to many precisely because it is a self-consistent "theory".
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
But the numbers do matter, and the rigor. That's why the scientific method makes meticulous use of mathematics, statistics, confidence intervals, and has all kinds of provisions to prevent measurement error, instrument bias, systemic bias, selection bias, etc. A good scientific experiment doesn't just tell you that a theory is probably right or wrong, but how likely it is to be right or wrong, and how likely the experiment was to generate the same results by random chance.
The decision to "trust" scientific results is an informed appeal to authority based on a high likelihood that they are correct--that is, not the results of a widespread conspiracy of book publishers and journal articles who coordinate their deception to make sure they all get the same results. Don't equate that with a collection of widely varied personal anecdotes about subjective spiritual experiences.
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
My point was merely that scientists and philosophers must rely on trust, too. Is "an informed appeal to authority" not a choice to trust that authority? You seem to be saying, in effect, that the leap of faith is smaller, rather than deny that faith is indeed involved.
Regardless of how well placed that trust may be, it is still trust. One may decide for oneself if centuries of collegial thought and experience on spiritual subjects is as trustworthy as the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Jun '10
Re: The Rage Against God
An example of scientific faith:
At last count there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and with every improvement in our equipment more galaxies farther away come into focus. We can easily say that space is vast, but as our scientific equipment improves we might argue that it is even infinite. Science tells us that all this stuff, enough to form 100 billion galaxies—perhaps infinitely more— was created between thirteen and fourteen billion years ago from a point with no physical dimensions. The question is: Do you belive?
May '10
Re: The Rage Against God
Aaron, I think it's misleading to just say that faith is trust and trust is faith. Faith in a religious sense is absolutely life-altering and comes with a whole set of corollaries. For many religious people it is the single most important decision in their lives. Most faithful religious people probably maintain their faith or strengthen it in the face of challenges, and their are also deep spiritual and emotional aspects to that faith.
A scientist trusting authoritative texts really has little spiritual nor emotional attachment to the speed of light. If it were convincingly shown that the speed of light had been measured improperly, or that it changes as the universe ages, he would readily accept the revision. It is possibly one of the most important facts in his research, but not in his personal or spiritual life.
My point is that there are enormous quantitative and qualitative differences between the two types of "trust" that you are trying to compare, and it's misleading to do so.