April 17th, 2009

Text Ticker: A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers

RD reports on another interesting-looking reply to the New Atheists with a silly title. Here’s Is God a Delusion? author Eric Reitan:

Back in January of 2007, a colleague gave me a photocopied page from a book and asked me to evaluate it as if it were a student paper. The page contained a summary and cursory criticism of the first three of Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (arguments for proving the existence of a transcendent being). As I looked it over, I noticed that the author got Aquinas’ arguments wrong… and then criticized them at precisely those points where he got them wrong.

As it turned out, the page was taken from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. And so I bought the book, and as I was reading it I thought that one could write an entire introduction to the philosophy of religion just by correcting all of Dawkins’ philosophical mistakes.

via RD10Q: Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers | RDBook | ReligionDispatches.

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6 Responses to “A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers”

  1. fatedplace
    April 18th, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    Don’t we all know that Dawkins is a pompous jerk who was dying to make loads of money of hawking his militant anti-religious sentiments since there seemed to be a big market for it?

    I’m tired of thinking about these guys. Lol.

  2. Quentin Kirk
    April 18th, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Agree with fatedplace. Finding the good in religion, shaping and growing it is much more fun and more deep down true.

  3. Nathan
    April 19th, 2009 at 10:22 am

    Absolutely. I’m pretty sick of these guys too, but I also think the same principle applies to atheism. Better to find the good in both religion and atheism than to try to obliterate simplistic caricatures of either.

    Currently working on a book review that tries to do both. Coming soon.

  4. Quentin Kirk
    April 20th, 2009 at 10:49 pm

    Hmmm atheism. It seem to mean or has the feeling that there is no beautiful and mysterious power possible in our lives. I think if anyone or any community is dedicated to universal brotherhood, or to profound harmony with nature, or to learning, a beautiful and mysterious power enters that person’s or that communities’ life………. you can call it God..

  5. Nathan
    April 21st, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    I don’t think most “atheists” would fundamentally disagree with you here. Take, for instance, this famous passage from the end of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which I’ve never heard even the most outspoken atheists disavow:

    It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

    It seems to me that the only difference between you and them is that they are more insistent on distancing themselves from supernaturalist religious traditions which they find to be so full of superstition as to be not worth trying to salvage.

  6. Is God a Delusion? A Philosopher's Response to the New Atheists Homebrewed | Homebrewed Christianity
    June 10th, 2009 at 4:21 am

    [...] book has also been making its rounds in the blogophere, so check these posts out for more.    Standard Podcast [64:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Tweet [...]

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