Dominic Bunnell
New
I'm sure some of you know Stephen Law. He was on Skeptiko some time ago discussing his book Believing Bullshit.
In Believing Bullshit, Law is very critical of the argumentative strategies used by supposedly sophisticated religious thinkers like Karen Armstrong, Denys Turner and Alistrair Mcgrath.
He shows for example that Karen Armstrong in 'The Case For God' is extremely slippery, evasive and inconsistent. When confronted with the problem of evil and suffering in the world, she will immediately say that God is mysterious, ineffable, beyond our comprehension, beyond good and evil, etc., and yet at other times she will state quite clearly that the God she believes in is loving, just, kind, peaceful, and worthy of praise and worship.
Like many other religious thinkers, she changes her definition of God depending on the situation. Sometimes she claims to believe in the perfectly good God of classical theism, but at other times, and especially when she's in trouble, she says that the God she believes in is ineffable, unknowable, and indescribable in human language.
Even worse than that is when religious thinkers use the very sneaky tactic of saying that God is good, but that the word 'good', when applied to God, means something different from the word 'good' as it's used in everyday life!
It seems to me the only thing an honest theist can really do here is to move to a position like that of Whitehead, where properties like all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving are redefined, but of course this raises the question whether this is still theism at all.
Here's a passage from David Ray Griffin's book Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy:
God's power is not coercive but persuasive, which means that God cannot unilaterally determine what happens in the world. Besides the fact that this idea of divine power means that the idea of God's goodness and love for the world is not undermined by the problem of evil, it also means that belief in God is no basis for complacency. We cannot simply ignore the ecological crisis on the basis of the assumption that if things get bad enough, God will intervene to save us from our foolish ways.
I'm no expert on Whitehead or Griffin, but this does seem like a fairly promising approach.
In Believing Bullshit, Law is very critical of the argumentative strategies used by supposedly sophisticated religious thinkers like Karen Armstrong, Denys Turner and Alistrair Mcgrath.
He shows for example that Karen Armstrong in 'The Case For God' is extremely slippery, evasive and inconsistent. When confronted with the problem of evil and suffering in the world, she will immediately say that God is mysterious, ineffable, beyond our comprehension, beyond good and evil, etc., and yet at other times she will state quite clearly that the God she believes in is loving, just, kind, peaceful, and worthy of praise and worship.
Like many other religious thinkers, she changes her definition of God depending on the situation. Sometimes she claims to believe in the perfectly good God of classical theism, but at other times, and especially when she's in trouble, she says that the God she believes in is ineffable, unknowable, and indescribable in human language.
Even worse than that is when religious thinkers use the very sneaky tactic of saying that God is good, but that the word 'good', when applied to God, means something different from the word 'good' as it's used in everyday life!
It seems to me the only thing an honest theist can really do here is to move to a position like that of Whitehead, where properties like all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving are redefined, but of course this raises the question whether this is still theism at all.
Here's a passage from David Ray Griffin's book Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy:
God's power is not coercive but persuasive, which means that God cannot unilaterally determine what happens in the world. Besides the fact that this idea of divine power means that the idea of God's goodness and love for the world is not undermined by the problem of evil, it also means that belief in God is no basis for complacency. We cannot simply ignore the ecological crisis on the basis of the assumption that if things get bad enough, God will intervene to save us from our foolish ways.
I'm no expert on Whitehead or Griffin, but this does seem like a fairly promising approach.