Sea of Faith Christchurch Group

Our next meeting, on 27 June, will continue the theme of the new atheism. Here is a little excerpt from Richard Dawkins, which crystallises his attitude to religion. It comes from an interview for Salon magazine, some years before he published “The God Delusion.”

I follow it with a quotation from Fritjof Capra, a physicist who aims to integrate physics and Eastern religion. While Dawkins thinks that science excludes religion, Capra thinks we need both.

Q. Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?

A. It comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it’s slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don’t despair, these things pass.

Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both. Fritjof Capra.

Our next meeting, on 13 June, will look at the new atheism. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of best-selling books that frontally attack God and religion. They include:

• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

• God is not Great by Christopher Hitchins

• God the Failed Hypothesis, by Victor Stenger

• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris

Our meeting will examine this new phenomenon and ask questions like the following:

1. Will the advance of science inevitably bring about the end of religion?
2. How can Christians deal with the violence that the bible ascribes to God, for example the holy wars, where God commands that everything and everyone must be destroyed?
3. How satisfactory are modern theologians’ attempts to talk about God in new ways?
4. What are the unspoken convictions and assumptions that lie behind these attacks?

There is no lack of voices that have responded critically to these new books.

Madeleine Bunting: “Richard Dawkins’s attack on religion is an intellectually lazy polemic not worthy of a great scientist.” Link here.

John Gray: “The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy, or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today’s secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.” Link here.

I’m looking forward to lively discussion!