The Godless Delusion: (Judging from the author's review, The Godless Delusion: A Catholic Challenge to Modern Atheism by Patrick Madrid and Kenneth Hensley seems itself a burningly stupid book.)
...really many atheists are seriously looking for truth and the atheist worldview is downright depressing... Many atheists probably fall in the same camp in that they never take seriously that their can be a rational argument for God. No doubt there are atheists who live a tension with God in that they are really defying God more than not believing in him or do not want to look at the case for God because they realize they would have to change. ...
The third chapter starts of the real meat of this book as it looks at morality and the fact that materialism can’t explain it. ...
Later on they go into area of epistemology and how materialism is unable to provide a serious explanation for knowledge and reason. Kind of like the joke where the scientist creates life out of dirt and God tells him to create his own dirt.
I'm not sure I took the idea that there could be a rational argument for god seriously when I actually believed in one. I recall in (Catholic) high school thinking that there were certain things people believed, just because, and god was one. That's kind of a rational argument, I guess (Plantinga, for instance, uses a lot of obfuscation around that argument, I think, and gets big philosopho-credit), but very weakly, at best.
ReplyDeleteEventually, I realized that you don't really have to "just believe" in much at all, and started hanging out in atheist areas. There, I encountered people who *do* take seriously the possibility that there can be rational argument for god (and they think they have them). And I've found their arguments to be universally terrible (the cited arguments of the book sound like some of them).
So I don't take it seriously now, either.
You know, you didn't even need to write an article to go with that headline. There's so much to choose from that you could have just published the headline all by itself, and let the readers fill in the blanks.
ReplyDeleteEven as a Catholic myself I'd prefer a rational, peaceful atheist to a pious abortion-bombing, doctor-killing Christian.
ReplyDeleteWhoever decided to publish that book is either a fucking idiot.. or a Catholic organisation..
Even as a Catholic myself I'd prefer...
ReplyDeleteThe traditional argument here is that if you're going to go by your own preferences anyway, it's dishonest to bring God into the picture. The only point to projecting one's own preferences -- good or bad -- on God is to dishonestly claim ethical status of objective truth for one's subjective preferences.
I may of misunderstood your reply but when I said "Even as a Catholic" I wasn't bring God into it, I was saying that even from a Catholic perspective the people behind that book are idiots.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't correcting you, just amplifying the argument.
ReplyDeleteOh yes.. I understand now.
ReplyDelete