Thought for the Day

No man truly has joy unless he lives in love.
--St. Thomas Aquinas

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God and the New Atheism, Chapter 2

The second chapter has the title, "How Atheistic Is the New Atheism?" Haught isn't impressed with this new wave of atheism. First he harkens back to Sigmund Freud and his book The Future of an Illusion where Freud claims that the only reliable road to knowledge is science. He calls this belief scientism and notes that not only is it a belief, but that it is self contradictory. He writes, "scientism tells us to take nothing on faith, and yet faith is required to accept scientism. What is remarkable is that none of the new atheists--what he calls soft-core atheists-- seems remotely prepared to admit that his scientism is a self-sabotaging confession of faith" (17).

In addition to his basis in the self-contradictory belief in scientism, Haught argues that "the authors...want atheism to prevail at the least possible expense to the agreeable socioeconomic circumstances out of which they sermonize" (20). He notes that this is precisely the kind of atheism that so irritated the three atheists--what Haught calls hard-core atheists--Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre. Haught writes

Atheism at the least possible expense to the mediocrity of Western culture is not atheism at all. It is nothing more than the persistence of life-numbing religiosity in a new guise. Please note that I am not promoting Camus's absurdist philosophy or Nietzschean and Sartrean nihilism either,. But these more muscular critics of religion were at least smart enough to realize that a full acceptance of the death of God would require an asceticism completely missing in the new atheistic formulas...The blandness of the new soft-core atheism lies ironically in its willingness to compromise with the politically and culturally insipid kind of theism it claims to be ousting. Such a pale brand of atheism uncritically permits the same old values and meanings to hang around, only now they can become sanctified by an ethically and politically conservative Darwinian orthodoxy (21).

Haught also castigates the soft-core atheists for their "evangelical zeal" of condemning people who believe in God. He notes their intemperate and passionate style, one that he suspects embarrasses most philosophers. But the question that he wants to ask these soft-core atheists is upon what do you ground your values? He writes,

With the hard-core atheists one has to ask this newer breed: What is the basis of your moral rectitude? How, in other words, if there is not eternal ground of values, can your own strict standards be anything other than arbitrary, conventional, historically limited human concoctions? But you take them as absolutely binding. And if you are a Darwinian, how can your moral values ultimately be anything more than blind contrivances of evolutionary selection (25-26)?

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Thought for the Day

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
--Thomas Merton

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Thought for the Day

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love of goodness or joy worth having.
--C. S. Lewis

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Back Home

I made it back home from Ft. Myers safely and in a timely manner yesterday. When I made my airline reservations I didn't pay attention to the connection times. It turns out that on my return flight they gave me 30 minutes to make my connection in Cincinnati. When I went online to get my boarding pass, the website had in red letters a warning that I only had 30 minutes to make my connection. When I called the airlines, the woman with whom I talked said, "Ooo, that isn't much time, but its legal."

She said that the Cincinnati airport isn't too big, so that's probably why they did it. Given the airlines track record I didn't expect to make it. But my flight was on time, and while it wasn't a stroll (I was actually winded) I made the gate at the different concourse 10 minutes before take off.

I want to thank those of you who have been praying for my mother. She has a long road of recovery ahead of her, but she is doing a lot better, has adjusted to the medications, and has a good attitude.

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Thought for the Day

When I consider how many and how great mysteries men have understood, discovered, and contrived, I very plainly know and understand the mind of man to be one of the works of God, yea, one of the most excellent.
--Galileo

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Sunday's Prayer

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

Of all mad faiths maddest is the faith that we can get rid of faith.
--Harry Emerson Fosdick

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Delayed

I was supposed to fly to Ft. Myers this morning to spend a long weekend with my parents. However, the weather didn't cooperate: my flight out of Boston to Newark originated in Newark which was experiencing heavy snowfall and was delayed. My flight to Ft. Myers was supposed to leave Newark mid-morning and arrive around 2:00 p.m. We were informed that all the afternoon flights out of Newark were canceled.

Naturally many people wanted to see if they could get other flights that didn't go through the New York area and got in what was to become a very long line which moved very slowly. I stood in line about a half hour (I was pretty close to the front) and finally had my turn with the ticket agent. She was a bit brusque, but efficient and not impolite. I was at the counter a long time, so I can imagine that my lengthy stay trying to figure out my next step just added to the frustration of people standing behind me. The only option available was to try for tomorrow. Fortunately, there is a nonstop flight to Ft. Myers tomorrow morning and am scheduled to arrive before noon.

I do not consider myself a particularly patient person so I felt God was giving me the opportunity to learn patience and that the world does not revolve around my schedule: "It's not all about me." I must admit that an internal conflict broke out inside of me as for one stretch of time the line did not move for 20 minutes. I had fantasies of screaming for people to move or going to the ticket counter and throttling the person who had been up there forever. All this while reminding myself that God was trying to teach me patience and trying to thank God for giving me this opportunity as a reminder that the world does not center on me and my plans. I was able for the most part to maintain a fairly quiet and trusting attitude after the this fairly intense internal skirmish.

I'll bet God had a good laugh at me. Thank goodness He doesn't record these things and send them to America's Funniest Home Videos.

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Thoughts for the Day

The important thing is to begin again, humbly and courageously, after every fall.
--Dom Helder Camara

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Thought for the Day

The love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self.
--George Macdonald

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Thought for the Day

Someone has said that though the aisles of any church are dirty, only a man on his knees can clean them.
--George A. Buttrick

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God and the New Atheism, Chapter One

Haught organizes chapter one of God and the New Atheism around the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism modified to fit Sam Harris' argument. He writes, "Envisioning himself almost as a new Buddha, Harris resolved to share with his readers--and with the whole world--something like a new version of the ancient Buddha's Four Noble Truths. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens make essentially the same set of claims" (2).
1. First Noble Truth: Buddhism: All life is suffering.
First Evident Truth: Harris: The purpose of human life is to find happiness.
As Haught notes, many philosophers including Immanuel Kant and many spiritual masters all note that happiness comes as a by-product in the search for something eternal. The almost sure way not to find happiness is to pursue it directly.
2. Second Noble Truth: Buddhism: The cause of suffering is greedy desire.
Second Evident Truth: The cause of suffering is faith, particularly faith in God.
According to Harris the mind's fabrication of God by faith is "intrinsically dangerous."
3. Third Noble Truth: Buddhism: The way to overcome suffering is to find release from clinging desire.
Third Evident Truth: Harris: The way to true happiness is to cleanse our minds of faith.
As Haught writes concerning this evident truth, "Here they begin offering something startlingly new, at least outside the reach of atheistic dictatorships. It is not just faith, they say, but our polite and civil tolerance of faith that must be uprooted if progress toward true happiness is to be made" (8)
4. Fourth Noble Truth: Buddha: The way to find release is through the Eightfold Path.
Fourth Evident Truth: Harris: The way to true happiness is to follow the path of the scientific method.

Haught writes toward the end of the chapter, "The invitation to join them in a world without faith will sound to most people like a petition to shrink our world to the point where we can all be suffocated (13).

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Thought for the Day

It is neither possible for man to know the truth fully nor to avoid the error of pretending that he does.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

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God and the New Atheism

I started reading the book, God and the New Atheism, by John F. Haught last week. Haught is Senior Fellow in Science and Religion at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and is one of the world's leading thinkers in the area of science and theology.

I am almost halfway through this short book of only 107 pages and am thoroughly enjoying it. Haught takes on the new fundamentalist atheism of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (and indirectly Dennett). It is written for the everyday person and his argumentation is accessible.

In the introduction he writes, "I have decided to write the present book in order to expose the fundamental flaws and fallaices that make the new atheism much less impressive than it may initially seem to be." He then describes scientific naturalism, the philosophy to which Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens subscribe as well as a host of other scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals in order to understand the current mindset that leads the "new atheists" as he calls them, to their conclusions.

The main tenants of scientific naturalism are:

1. Apart from nature, which includes human beings and our cultural creations, there is nothing. There is no God, no soul, and no life beyond death.
2. Nature is self-originating, not the creation of God.
3. The universe has no overall point or purpose, although individual huiman lives can be lieved purposefully.
4. Since God does not exist, all explanations and all causes are purely natural and can be understood only by science.
5. All the various features of living beings, including human intelligence and behavior, can be explained ultimately in purely natural terms, and today this usually means in evolutionary, specifically Darwinian, terms.
to these tenets of scientific naturalism the new atheists would add the following:
6. Faith in God is the cause of innumerable evils and should be rejected on moral grounds.
7. Morality does not require belief in God, and people behave better without faith than with it.

He informs us that he is going to address five important questions: 1. Does theology matter? 2. Is God a "hypothesis" that science can confirm or reject? 3. Why are people inclined toward religious belief at all? 4. Can we be good without God? 5. Is the idea of a personal God believable in an age of science?

I intend to blog through this book over the next week or two.

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Thought for the Day

A man in a passion rides a wild horse.
--Benjamin Franklin

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Sunday's Prayer

O Christ, you are continually worshipped in heaven and on earth, in all times and at all hours; you are patience, compassion and mercy; you love the righteous, you have mercy on sinners, and you call all men and women to salvation, promising them all things to come; receive our prayer this day, and make our life conform to your will; sanctify our souls and our bodies, order our thoughts, and give us victory in all trials and sadness; protect us and bless us, so that we may come to unity of faith and knowledge of your glory, for you live and reign, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God now and forever. Amen.
--Prayer from Taize

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Thought for the Day

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
--Thomas Jefferson

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Thought for the Day

Vanity is the polite mask of pride.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

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Valentine's Day

As the middle brother in a family of three boys, Valentine's Day was basically a "no show." It meant virtually nothing to me. I certainly didn't give cards to my brothers, and I don't think I gave a card to my mother--I don't think she expected one.

Now that I live in a family with three women, I do buy cards and enjoy giving them to my daughters and my wife. It's not a big day, other than that. When my daughters were younger I think that we bought them small presents, but we no longer do that. I wonder how you might celebrate or not celebrate Valentine's Day. There is an interesting article in the 2/18/08 issue of Time in the Essay section by Nancy Gibbs with the title, "A Day to Forget."

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Thought for the Day

A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions (in Pascal's sense) is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.
--Thomas Merton

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Thought for the Day

Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
--Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Reflections about Kenya

I have been trying to follow the events that are going on in Kenya. It really is heart breaking to see this African nation that was one of the most stable dissolve into internal chaos. I especially find troubling the fact that many Christians, when push comes to shove, end up opting for their tribal identity rather than their identity in Christ. The massacres in Rwanda occurred in spite of the fact that Christians from different tribes joined in killing of different tribal members.

In the Praise Service on Sunday one of our parishioners asked for prayers for Mark, a Kenyan pastor whose life and the lives of his family were threatened several weeks ago. The parishioner's parents were missionaries in Kenya and had met Mark and his family and are very concerned for them. They left their home and church and fled to another area in a lower elevation where two of their daughters have now contracted malaria (their village is at an elevation where the virus-bearing mosquitoes cannot survive). It has been a heartbreaking trip for them as you can imagine. Please keep Mark and his family in your prayers.

I do not say this to condemn the people--I do condemn the violence. I often wonder about my own faith and imagine various violent and frightening scenarios and wonder how I would respond. Would my trust in Jesus trump the violent and vengeful side of myself? I don't know for sure, and hopefully won't be put in a situation where I will have to find out.

But clearly the message of the gospel, the import of the Jesus Creed is that all divisions have been broken down through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus: even that between Jew and Samaritan, which was about as great a division as their could be in Jesus' culture. But of course, know this in our heads as some detached fact is not the same as having it in our hearts and living it in daily life.

The New York Times has two articles in the OP/ED section that you may want to read: one has to do with some of the tribal problems and one recommending what needs to be done to help end the violence and return to stability.

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Thought for the Day

God might grant us riches, honors, long life and health, but many times to our own hurt: for whatsoever is pleasing to us, is not always healthful for us.
--Michel de Montaigne

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Thought for the Day

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
--Native American saying

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Sunday's Prayer

O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept my prayers; and because in my weakness I can do nothing good without you, give me the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments I may please you in both will and deed; through Jesus Christ my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Science and Religion: An Interview with John Polkinghorne

The January 29, 2008 issue of the Christian Century had an interesting interview with John Polkinghorne, an ordained Anglican priest and a quantum physicist. In fact his work contributed to the discovery of the one of the basic elements of matter, the quark. He is a prolific writer and served as the first president of the International Society for Science and Religion. I have read his book, Exploring Reality, which I thoroughly enjoyed and have yet to read on my bookshelf, Science and the Trinity.

I want to share a bit of the interview, things that he said that I found helpful. At one point in the interview he said,

Symbolism is indispensable to theology, because the mysterious infinite reality of God cannot be caught within the finite nets of human thinking in the way that the physical world, or large aspects of it, can be caught. The precise language of mathematics, which is so natural to physics, has to be replace in theology by a different form of discourse.
The secret weapon of science is experiment. If you don't believe what somebody says about someth9ing, you can in principle and sometimes in practice try to replicate the experiment. That's very persuasive. In the whole swale of human experience, we can't do that. You can't put God to the test. God is not a subject to be manipulated but a subject to be met and ultimately to meet in awe and worship.
That's why revelation is an important category for theology. By revelation I don't mean some ineffable propositional communication which you have to take or leave, but God's act of self-disclosure in individual lives to a small but real extent and, of course, in the history of Israel and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

At another point the interviewer asked this question: Darwinian theory gets a lot of press in the U.S. because natural selection remains controversial. You've written that a good deal of human achievements go beyond what natural selection would call for. To this he responded:

Just take our ability to do science, for example. We're able to understand the world in a deep way--not just the everyday world in which we have to survive but also the subatomic world of quantum theory, which is remote from our direct experience and requires ways of thinking which are totally different--counterintuitive, one might say--from our everyday ways of thinking. I can't believe that our ability to understand and probe and enjoy the structures of that quantum world is simply a spin-off of our ancestors' learning to dodge saber-toothed tigers. It's something more profound than that.
Or consider humans' ability to explore noncummutative algebra. That goes vastly beyond anything that's so central to evolutionary explanation, unless the context in which it was developed is a richer and deeper context than simply the physical, biological context that conventional Darwinian theory would lead us to suppose.

It's a great article.

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Thought for the Day

A near-hit bolt of lightning can create a lot more Christian thinking than a long-winded sermon.
--Duane Dewel

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Thought for the Day

Rabbi Eleazar used to say: One whose wisdom exceeds his deeds may be compared to a tree whereof the branches are many and the roots few, so that when the winds come it is uprooted and turned upon its face.
--Talmud

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Thought for the Day

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Prayer for Ash Wednesday

O Lord,
The house of my soul is narrow;
enlarge it that you may enter in.
It is ruinous, O repair it!
It displeases Your sight.
I confess it, I know.
But who shall cleanse it,
to whom shall I cry but to you?
Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord,
and spare Your servant from strange sins.
St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430)

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Thought for the Day

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
--Thomas Carlyle

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Protestant Monks

The Boston Globe had an interesting article on Sunday with the title "The unexpected monks." The author, Molly Worthen, writes,

There is now a growing movement to revive evangelicalism by reclaiming parts of Roman Catholic tradition--including monasticism. Some 100 groups that describe themselves as both evangelical and monastic have sprung up in North America...many have appeared within the past five years. Increasing numbers of evangelical congregations have struck up friendships with Catholic monasteries, sending church members to join the monks for spiritual retreats.

I have noticed this phenomenon among mainline protestants as well. I think the Protestant reassessment of monasticism is a good thing, and that tailoring it to our own traditions of worshiping and serving God is positive. I think that I first was introduced to Protestants going on retreats at monasteries some 15 to 20 years ago. Kathleen Norris' book, The Cloistered Walk, recounted her retreat at a Benedictine monastery and the spiritual growth that she experienced as a result.

I think that much of Protestant spirituality can be like fast food--going to McDonald's--which leaves people with a deeper hunger for something both more nutritious and better tasting. I have read The Rule of St. Benedict a seminal book which was instrumental in reforming and setting the standard for monastery life for much of Christian history. I have benefited from it.

Interestingly, at our UCC Weekend Away, our guest speaker, Scot McKnight, shared his own experience of engaging in what is called "fixed hour prayer" and the positive benefits he has received in his own spiritual life as a result. Fixed hour prayer is using a prayer book like The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle or the Book of Common Prayer, and praying in the morning, at noontime, in the evening, and before retiring to bed. It helps create a rhythm to praying, reminding us that we belong to God, which does not rule out our own free form prayers. It is a way of working prayer and love for God into our inner lives, almost by osmosis. I have been practicing fixed hour prayer for about nine months now, and have found it helpful in my own spiritual life.

I wonder what thoughts/experience you have with the new monasticism and with fixed hour prayers.

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Thought for the Day

The whole universe is but the footprint of the divine goodness.
--Dante

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Thought for the Day

Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.
--William Penn

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Sunday's Prayer

Set me free, O God, from the bondage of my sins, and give me the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to me in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

If you do not hope. you will not find what is beyond your hopes.
--St. Clement of Alexandria

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Thought for the Day

To know a little less and to understand a little more: that, it seems to me, is our greatest need.
--James Ramsey Ullman

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