Wow, great responses guys. Here is an effort to respond to some earlier comments from Johnson. There are such a lot of good comments that I haven't yet got to all of them that I want to.
By the way Johnson, you might like an avatar. There is a famous Johnson whose picture is at
http://www.abc.net.au/children/includes ... son_87.gif that you could consider, if you just chop off Michael's torso to get within Chris's 100x100 pixel limit. Johnson is the pink elephant and is Michael's favourite and oldest toy. His friends are the hot water bottle, the truck, the accordion and the robot. Sorry if it is not your style.
johnson1010 wrote:I enjoy debates with you RT for the simple fact that your position is unlike other defenders of religion. However, I do find your arguments faulty in many ways.
Thanks Johnson, I much prefer discussion with atheists because they are more honest than Christians. Christians tend to get very emotional about factual questions such as whether dogma is true or whether Jesus Christ existed as a person, whereas by and large atheists are more able to consider the evidence objectively. I have much sympathy for atheism, but as you would have noted, I also think atheism often brings a set of assumptions which are questionable, notably the belief that the empirical way of studying truth is the only valid method. My view is that empiricism is necessary but not sufficient, so I am suggesting a version of Christianity which is compatible with atheism, and arguing that this version is imbedded in the Bible.
God is a mystical, magical word. It’s whole basis for existence is the description of a supernatural entity whose realm is that of magic and irrationality. That is what God is!
You say “what God is” is an entity - something that science finds grossly improbable if not impossible. Such 'entity' thinking is of course widespread, almost consensus, but is really a pre-modern vestige, constraining our ability to make productive use of religious texts. Your argument that the realm of God is 'irrationality' is strongly present in folk cults such as creationism, but goes completely against the Logos spirituality of the Bible which identifies God with reason. If we junk the idea of God as entity then the texts acquire greater utility. This is what Jack Spong, Tom Harpur and Acharya S advocate, based on scholarly investigation of themes such as how the Christian ideas were plagiarised from more ancient sources and how theism has become a corrupt and dangerous political device.
I am not alone in defining 'our God' as what we value most highly. This theory is present in the Biblical idea of false Gods. Some people go to church on Sunday and formally worship the Judeo-Christian God, but really most value their possessions, friendships, career, family, etc, and see religion as an instrument to serve their material ends. The Bible describes this attitude as idolatry, the worship of false Gods. Of course the claim regarding truth and falsity begs the question of whether the God promoted by the church is true, or just another form of idolatry, but the point is that the Bible defines what people value as a God to them, with sustainable values linked to a true God and unsustainable values linked to a false God. In ancient times people worshiped idols in a way that has lost favour – no one now explicitly worships their car as a God – but there is a continuity in the attitude of reverence for whatever you most value.
Using the term God in this way, as what we value most, Christianity, at least in the Bible if not the institutions, values the idea that the source of creation in the universe is manifest in our world in a spirit of truth, love, mercy and forgiveness. So Christians tend to invoke the God of truth, the God of Love, the God of Mercy, etc, equating these all with the creative source. Atheists, by contrast, value the idea that we should only support claims that have strong evidence, and demand logical argument rather than authoritarian tradition. So by this trope, atheists believe in the God of evidence, and the God of logic. This is no more to say atheists believe that logic is an entity than to say Christians believe love is an entity.
Where this use of God as highest value becomes interesting is that people become emotionally vested in their God. Just as Christians become annoyed when people question their God, atheists become annoyed at the suggestion that evidence and logic might not be sufficient to explain human spirituality. This annoyance is justified, because evidence and logic are important, but my point is that people have an emotional investment in their beliefs, and are often unaware of the hidden assumptions they are making.
Neil Gaiman provides a related argument in
American Gods, that the existence of Gods is purely relational, dependent on people believing in them. Based on this framework, Gaiman pits the modern highest values – cell phones, iPods, the internet, shopping malls – against the gods of pagan mythology, suggesting a deeper meaning within the forgotten stories that still has power to resonate.
The Biblical idea that God is Love is a way of saying that people should make love their highest value. Much modern Christianity instead heretically reworks the Bible to claim God's blessing on people's material values. I suspect the resonance of Christianity is in decline partly in reaction against the irrationality of prosperity theology.
‘Of course there are subtle hidden links at unknown levels. The world climate is interconnected and has many systemic links which science has not yet understood. …love, understood as hidden linkages, is essential for human life, and is somehow built in to the emergence of complexity.”
So then Love, as you have defined as god, is therefore intimately involved with the subtle hidden links at unknown levels throughout our reality. I call shenanigans on this sentiment. Feel-goodery is not responsible in any way for the climate or the natural mechanisms of the universe. It is a product of them.
In trying to understand the Biblical statement that God is Love, we need to be careful in defining love. It is not just talking about human sentiment, but claiming something embedded in reality. The claim, as I see it, is that (i) nature has an intrinsic tendency to build greater complexity, working against the general entropy, (ii) the greater the complexity of a system the greater the interconnectedness between its parts, and (iii) love can be equated with interconnectedness. In any complex ecosystem, there are dependencies or links which are hidden. For example, aspen forests in Yellowstone have a hidden dependency on wolves to prey on moose, and this is likely to be just at the more evident end of the spectrum.
Now, on your comment that 'feel-goodery is not responsible in any way for the climate', yes, but the climate does have hidden stabilisers, linkages and dependencies which we have to respect if we want to avoid catastrophe. So we could say, God so loved the world that he gave our planet four billion years of temperature between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius. This anthropomorphising of the world thermostat is not intended to suggest God exists as an intentional entity, but to say that the mysterious complexity of life, with the anthropic nature of the laws of physics, can be reconciled with the core Biblical idea that God is love.
...to invent supernatural layers to add on top of the already daunting task of understanding the natural world ... stirs in confusion where we need clarity. It exists, as Interbane said, solely to salvage religious faith and does not contribute to our understanding of the universe. Love can be better understood as love, rather than as the manifestation of a, from your position, non-existent god which is really just a synonym for love in the first place. If it is just a synonym, lets not use it. It has many connotations not found in other synonyms such as affection. If it is a means to an end, such as keeping the use of god on life support, then it is a very useful practice, and not fully on the level.
The contribution to understanding is in the theme of grace – that our universe is so harsh, and complex life so unlikely and rare, that it is rational to postulate deeper levels of connectivity which sustain our life. By the grace of nature our world is not only unlike the dead planets of Venus and Mars, but has evolved the fantastic complexity of human language, enabling the cosmos to become self-reflective. My view is simply that the story of Jesus, centred on the idea of God as love, actually does help us to understand how human life has departed from the natural law of love, and the grave risks this poses for our future.
More Johnson pictures are at
http://www.tvmem.com/OZST/tv/A-Z/J/JOHN ... NSON&.html