Once again, CBC's "Tapestry" program flushes an hour down the crapper, this time gifting it to the vapid and useless "theologian" Karen Armstrong. I'd waste a few minutes intellectually gutting her like a mackerel but, luckily for me, that's already been done. Over here, PZ Myers systematically feeds Armstrong's philosophy through the meat grinder while, here, Richard Dawkins exposes Armstrong's embarrassing lack of anything resembling meaningful content, particularly in his scathing conclusion:
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."
Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
Put more concisely, if the best defense you have for your particular deity is that, it doesn't matter if he really exists as long as he exists for you, well, that's what modern medications and therapy sessions were pretty much invented for, wouldn't you say?
2 comments:
When you write about religion, you start to sound like a cherry-picking AGW denialist.
How the question of the existence of God not irrelevant? The whole thing with faith is that it's based on faith, not scientific proof. It's a completely pointless avenue of debate. More important is the question of what the existence of God ought to mean, if anything. That is, if one accepts that there is a God, is "because God said so" an acceptable justification for any given position? No.
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