{"id":4520,"date":"2013-05-22T08:32:48","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T08:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/rpe\/?p=269"},"modified":"2013-05-22T08:32:48","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T08:32:48","slug":"attempts-to-prove-god-exists-are-a-meaningless-account-of-faith-and-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/2013\/05\/22\/attempts-to-prove-god-exists-are-a-meaningless-account-of-faith-and-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Attempts to Prove God Exists are a Meaningless Account of Faith and Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In which I argue that attempts to prove God exists (or that He doesn&#8217;t) are a meaningless account of faith and Religion: to engage in them is to misunderstand the very nature of what religion\u00a0<em>is<\/em>&#8230;<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"&#039;Proving God&#039; - a futile enterprise?\" width=\"1290\" height=\"726\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ek_wv1RHlyw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nI have written about this, in another context, in the book\u00a0<em>Dispirited &#8211;\u00a0<\/em>I quote the relevant section below..<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">&#8212;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Staff from the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.glos.ac.uk\/courses\/undergraduate\/rpe\/Pages\/entry2013.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Religion, Philosophy &amp; Ethics course\u00a0<\/a>at University of Gloucestershire talking about Philosophy of Religion..<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/RPEglos\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FEEL FREE TO VISIT\/JOIN OUR COURSE FACEBOOK GROUP..<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; Current and past students talking about\u00a0Philosophy,Religion, Ethics, Religious\u00a0Education and more.. (and the odd cat picture..)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">&#8212;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">From the Book\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Dispirited-Contemporary-Spirituality-Selfish-Unhappy\/dp\/1846947022\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dispirited<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Since Richard Dawkins\u2019 <i>The God Delusion<sup>33<\/sup><\/i>, it seems like the talk in the virtual and fleshy public spheres has been dominated by an interaction by two ever more shouty choruses. Gathered on one side, we have the serried ranks of atheists and their long-standing sub-corp of the collectively minded known as humanists. Across a chasm of mutual, wilful misapprehension from them are gathered the (largely Christian) hosts of Theism\u2019s defenders. I want to suggest here that this debate has become ever more futile, distracting and shrill. Given the largely nihilistic tone of my existential world view, one might expect me to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Dawkins, Dennett, et al \u2013 and I have felt that draw. However the polarising, simplifying nature of the arguments rehearsed leaves, I believe, a substantive middle ground untouched. Further, both sides are ever-more prone to treating religious faith merely as a matter of correspondence-theory metaphysics. Colleagues will know, and readers can surmise in safety, that I am not the world\u2019s greatest fan of Theology \u2013 but it\u2019s as if the discipline has never existed. You\u2019d never know that reflective, intelligent, humane and critical people had actually given the nature and content of religion some sustained and rigorous inspection already.<\/p>\n<p>In trying to articulate this with my students \u2013 who often feel draw to one or other of the positions above \u2013 I always find myself thrown back on a philosopher I used to consider pass\u00e9 and annoying: S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard. I will paraphrase him roughly, hopefully\u00a0 driving readers into the arms of his beguiling prose. The key insight that I take from Kierkegaard is his rejection of, and hostility to, the view that religious faith is a rational undertaking \u2013 to be defended or assailed via a series of propositional manoeuvres.<br \/>\nIn the aftermath of the European Enlightenment of the 18<sup>th<\/sup> Century, the idea of the primacy of logic and reason has begun to deeply permeate even the religious institutions it was so often used to criticise. The view exists that (blind) faith is the recourse of the ignorant and unthinking \u2013 while the man or woman of thought and reflection accepts or rejects all beliefs (including religious ones \u2013 all beliefs are seen as of the same order) on the basis of the evidence for or against them \u2013 that is, they are reasonable \u2013 requiring a fulfilment of an epistemic duty.<br \/>\nIf one accepts this as the ground rules for debating the veracity of religious faith, we can see where it leads \u2013 to the need to prove\/disprove religious claims \u2013 and also we can see how much it seems to look like the current discursive landscape. Kierkegaard has more sense; he\u2019s called the father of Existentialism for a reason \u2013 and he starts with religion as an engagement with existential realities: doubt, fear, uncertainty and despair. He also wants to challenge the notion that being reasonable is the challenging intellectual position \u2013 whereas the person of faith has it easy \u2013 being too lazy to think, they just accept what they are told. His view is that it\u2019s all very well going around only believing things you have evidence for \u2013 that requires no commitment from the thinker: try believing something <i>without<\/i> evidence. Really believing it \u2013 not in the lazy way I just mentioned \u2013 but actually basing your life on something which you are not only currently unable to prove \u2013 but which you know to be unprovable. The \u2018leap of faith\u2019<sup>34<\/sup> that this demands, once we really appreciate how serious and life-changing it is, and the intellectual bravery it requires, should make us reconsider the new atheism debate altogether. It should teach us at the very least that the \u2018creation-science\u2019 brigade, the rational defenders of liberal Anglicanism, the \u2018militant\u2019 atheists, and the proponents of new-age crystal twonkery as underpinned by \u2018quantum science\u2019 all share one feature: they miss the central point of what religion even <i>is<\/i>, never mind where we might start a discussion of its benefits and dangers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In which I argue that attempts to prove God exists (or that He doesn&#8217;t) are a meaningless account of faith and Religion: to engage in them is to misunderstand the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[392,43,375,379],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argument-for-existence-of-god","category-philosophy","category-philosophy-of-religion","category-videos"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/rpe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}