Thought for the Day

Pride is a kind of pleasure produced by a man thinking too well of himself.
--Baruch Spinoza

Read more!

Thought for the Day

This is our highest reward that we should fully enjoy God, and that all who enjoy Him should enjoy one another in Him.
--St. Augustine

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
--Georges Bernanos

Read more!

Thought for the Day

All too often a clear conscience is merely the result of a bad memory.
--Proverb

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe of the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "the least of these my brethren." Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
--Wendell Berry

Read more!

Thought for the Day

It is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge...and another to tread the road that leads to it.
--St Augustine

Read more!

Sunday's Prayer

Grant to us, O God, to know that which is worth knowing, to love that which is worth loving, to praise that which can bear with praise, to hate what in Your sight is unworthy, to prize what to You is precious, and above all to search out and to do what is well-pleasing to You, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
--Thomas a Kempis

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Let all the world learn to give mortal men no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will...It is necessary...that all power that is on earth be limited, church-power or other.
--John Cotton

Read more!

Thought for the Day

The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the musician. I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.
--Hildegard of Bingen

Read more!

Uganda Reunion

This evening I will be meeting with the group with which I traveled to Uganda and haven't seen since arriving back home. We are having a dinner together to share stories and pictures. Uganda and the plight of the people in northern Uganda are still much on my mind. I went back and looked at some of the pictures and have posted a few on the blog.

This is a picture of an AIDS clinic that we visited in the Gulu area and the other picture if of girls planning soccer at a secondary school.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

If everything is coming your way, you are probably in the wrong lane. Adversity and defeat are more conducive to spiritual growth than prosperity and victory.
--John Steinbeck

Read more!

Thought for the Day

What is repentance but a kind of leave-taking, looking backward indeed, but yet in such a way as precisely to quicken the steps toward that which lies before.
--Soren Kierkegaard

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Justice is that side of love which affirms the independent right of persons within the love relation.
--Paul Tillich

Read more!

God and the New Atheism: Chapter 6

The question that Haught addresses in chapter six is, "Can we be good without God?" Dawkins and the other fundamentalist atheists want to make the case that for people who believe in God religion is necessary for their moral understanding and conduct. Then by demonstrating that moral behavior can be explained with purely naturalistic explanations, they disprove theism.

Because Dawkins and the others are so ignorant of religion and how it functions, they get it wrong from the get go. As Haught writes, "The main point is to have faith, trust, and hope in God. Morality is secondary, and the principle underlying biblical ethics is that our conduct should be shaped with respect to others by the trust that God's promise of ultimate liberation will eventually come to pass" (67). In some ways it is difficult to seriously address Dawkins' argument because he is both ignorant of even a rudimentary understanding of religion and theology, and he uses "foolish sarcasm." (As Alistar McGrath notes in another book on The God Delusion, Dawkins announces the fact that he was chosen in a survey conducted by Prospect magazine in November of 2005 as one of the world's three leading intellectuals. In a review of his book, this same magazine wrote that the book was "incurious, dogmatic, rambling, and self-contradictory.")

One of the main points of the chapter is that while promising to give a naturalistic account of religion as evolutionary, he basically abandons this approach because he can't raise a credible argument with it and bases his argument on speculation. Haught writes, "Dawkins's argument, natural selection has become about as explanatory of human virtue as the chemical laws that bond ink to paper explain what I am writing on this page" (71).

Read more!

Thought for the Day

The universe construed solely in terms of efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction.
--Alfred North Whitehead

Read more!

Sunday's Prayer

Almighty God, you have surrounded me with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that I, encouraged by their good example; may persevere in running the race that is set before me, until at last I may with them attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one god, for ever and ever. Amen.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

He that would pray with effect must live with care and piety.
--Jeremy Taylor

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Don't confuse fame with success. One is Madonna; the other is Helen Keller.
--Erma Bombeck

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
--Marin Luther King, Jr.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

God cannot endure that unfestive, mirthless attitude of ours in which we eat our bread in sorrow, with pretentious, busy haste, or even with shame. Through our daily meals He is calling us to rejoice, to keep holiday in the midst of our working day.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Read more!

Neural Buddhists

Today's New York Times has an interesting Op-Ed piece by David Brooks with the title, "The Neural Buddhists." The most public conflict between science and religion has been driven by the fundamentalist atheism of people like Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens, to name a few of the more visible.

But Brooks suggests that this debate is going to end up being a sideshow to what he terms "neural Buddhism. He writes,

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universals human traits . It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

I have found in the field of psychology a Buddhist religious orientation is cropping up more frequently in conferences and seminars.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Prayer should be the key of the morning and the lock of the night.
--Owen Felltham

Read more!

God and the New Atheism: Chapter 5

In chapter 5, "Why Do People Believe?," Haught examines Dawkin's argument about the origins of religious belief. Following the lead of E. O. Wilson of Harvard, Hawkins argues that evolutionary theory can explain the human phenomenon of religious faith.

Dawkins maintains that because belief in religions is so durable, it goes deeper than cultural influence and must involve an evolutionary biological explanation. He argues that our genes cause us to believe in gods but acknowledges that how religious faith is adaptive is not clear. Sometimes religion aids individuals, groups, and genetic survival, but sometimes is does not as for example celibacy and martyrdom. But as Haught points out

Dawkins suspects that kin selection and other factors associated with gene-survival theory are also too simple to account for faith. They do not explain adequately the arbitrariness and utter insanity of so many religious fantasies that people believe in without any evidence. So how is the evolutionist going to account for the persistence of gods in an age of science? Doesn't the evolutionary explanation of religion break down completely at this point? Apparently realizing that it does, although without admitting it, Dawkins hands over the task of fully naturalizing religion to other experts, one of whom is the anthropologist Pascal Boyer. The effect of passing the buck to Boyer is deeply ironic. After promising to provide a fully naturalistic account of religious faith, Dawkins ends up breaking almost completely away from Darwin. Together with Boyer he speculates that the brain does not have any specifically religious character after all. Wok the, what is religious faith" It is an accidental by-product of cerebral systems that evolved for other purposes. Religious faith is "a misfiring of something useful," a Darwinian mistake! Here then we leave Darwin almost completely behind. The only important evolutionary thing left to be said, as Dawkins theorizes, is that religion is like a virus--parasitic on cognitive systems that had earlier been selected because of a survival value that had nothing to do with their capacity to be carriers of truth (57).

The unlinking of religion from a Darwinian explanation, Haught writes, demonstrates just how difficult the modern atheists have of completely debunking religious faith.

Haught also observes the position of outrage that Dawkins and company take when discussing religion. Other scientists and scholars who have been influenced by evolutionary theory like, for example, Michael Ruse, and far more measured and not nearly so judgmental and embittered toward religious faith. This is certainly an indicator that something more is going on with these fundamental atheists than rationally assessing the phenomenon and understand it.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

An expert seaman is tried in a tempest, a runner in a race, a captain in a battle, a valiant man in adversity, a Christina in temptation and misery.
--St. Basil

Read more!

Sunday's Prayer

Grant, we beseech thee, almighty and merciful God, that the Holy Spirit may come upon us, and by his gracious in-dwelling, may make us a temple of his glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Read more!

Thought for the Day

The only way we can brush against the hem of the Lord, or hope to be a part of the creative process, is to have the courage, the faith, to exceed--to abandon the middle road and aim for the heights.
--Madeleine L'Engle

Read more!

God and the New Atheism, Chapter 4

I haven't blogged on God and the New Atheism since March 18, but I want to pick up where I left off and finish reviewing it. The title of chapter 4 is, "Is God a Hypothesis?" He begins the chapter by noting that one of the underlying pillars of scientific naturalism is the "claim that science alone can be trusted to put our minds in touch with reality" (41). It is this claim that he addresses in the chapter.

The strategy that the new atheists use in their arguments are "to seduce readers into tacit agreement that faith in the existence of God is a 'hypothesis,' one that functions for believers in the same way as a scientific hypothesis does for scientists" (41). He then reviews the definition of hypothesis, a way of understanding and bringing intelligibility to a variety observations that are repeatable or through experiments. But, as Haught points out, God is not a hypothesis for believers. He writes,

Dawkins and the other new atheists have made things entirely too easy for themselves. In the first place, as is typical of all their writings, in order to dispose of God they first shrink the idea of divinity to that of a lawgiver, cosmic engineer, or intelligent designer. This sets the stage for showing everybody that Darwinian evolution obviously proves that nature was not intelligently designed after all, and that the God hypothesis has at least been decisively defeated...there is nothing terribly bright about debating creationism and ID while avoiding any direct engagement with theology. The new atheists make no mention, for example of the most important Protestant theologian of the past century, Karl Barth, who, along with most other recent theologians, has argued in effect that any God who functions as a "hypothesis" is not worth defending anyway. The new atheists are actually doing theology a favor by disposing of the God hypothesis (43).

Haught doesn't stop here however. He turns the tables on the new atheists and asks them about the status of the scientific method and independent method of justifying science. He writes,

Exactly what are the independent scientific experiments...that could provide "evidence" for the hypothesis that all true knowledge must be based on the paradigm of scientific inquiry? If faith requires independent confirmation, what is the independent (nonfaith) method of demonstrating that their own faith in the all-encompassing cognitional scope of science is reasonable?...there are many channels other than science through which we all experience, understand, and know the world...Do your new atheists seriously believe, therefore, that if a personal God of infinite beauty and unbounded love actually exists, the "evidence" for this God's existence could be gathered as cheaply as the evidence for a scientific hypothesis?

From here Haught argues that every truth claim at some level resorts to a leap of faith. "Most of us simply believe that seeking truth is worthwhile,"he writes. "We cannot prove it since even the attempt to do so already presupposes this trust...basic trust is not the outcome of any regime of scientific experimentation" (47).

The new atheists belief system in scientific naturalism at the end of the day is a leap of faith--there is no independent way to establish its truth claims. He concludes the chapter by saying,

Science is simply not wired to either detect or rule out the existence of God. God is not a hypothesis...at a usually tacit level of awareness, both the atheist and the theist participate in a common faith. They both believe that reality is intelligible and that truth is worth seeking. What theology adds is that the existence of God--that is of Infinite Being, Meaning, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty--provides an adequate justification of this belief, as well as an answer to the question of why the universe is intelligible at all (51-52).

Read more!

Thought for the Day

I lose God, I lose the world, I lose myself, if I want only to clutch at things and use them only for my own pleasure or profit.
--Gerald Vann

Read more!

tThought for the Day

It appears that when life is broken by tragedy God shines through the breach.
--George A. Buttrick

Read more!

Thought for the Day

While the [Christian] faith takes care of the ultimate incongruities of life, humor does nicely with the intermediate ones.
--William Sloane Coffin

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Better than one who knows what is right is one who is fond of what is right; and better than one who is fond of what is right is one who delights in what is right.
--Confucius

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Truth often suffer more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of is opposers.
--William Penn

Read more!

Sunday's Prayer

Almighty Father who gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise for our justification: Give me grace so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that I may always serve you in pureness of living and truth; through Jesus Christ your Son my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Read more!

Latest News on Uganda

As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, Kony has not signed the peace accord and at this time there is no scheduled date in the future. We need to keep this in our prayers so that true peace can come to northern Uganda. Go to the Resolve Uganda website for an update on what is happening there.

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Today, eternity enters into time, and time, sanctified, is caught up into eternity.
--Thomas Merton

Read more!

Thought for the Day

Silence is the fence around wisdom.
--Proverb

Read more!