Category: Faith

Darwin’s Faith: The Religion of the New Atheism

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New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, deny that they have faith, but it is all in the way they define faith. Even so, they do have faith. Their faith is in the human intellect and capacity to reason, and this is their religion.

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The New Atheists today scoff at people of faith. Richard Dawkins has even urged his followers to mock people of faith. The same people bristle at the suggestion that they, themselves, have faith.

Yet they do have faith, and they are apparently too blind to see it. As intelligent as they are in the field of science and their philosophical naturalism, they are ignorant of the true meaning of faith and not self-aware enough to know that they have it.

In fact, the faith they have might even be characterized as the kind of faith Dawkins urges people to mock. Let me explain.

To begin with, I need to identify how Dawkins has defined faith. In a debate with John Lennox, and in other contexts, Dawkins defines faith as belief without evidence or even belief “in the teeth of the evidence”. Dawkins limits faith…

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Perspective

We live in a self-centered, me-focused world that is continually sending us the message that no one matters more than me.

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“Know that the Lord Himself is God; it is He who made us, and not we ourselves.” Psalm 100:3

Such a simple, seemingly self-evident statement, but some people do not believe God exists, and the rest of us (me included) act sometimes as if God does not exist.

When we myopically go about our days focused on ourselves and our surroundings, good or bad, we tend to forget that we did not make ourselves. We act as if we are the be all, end all of our own lives. We act as if the moment and momentary pleasures and pursuits of our lives are more important than an eternal relationship with our Creator.

We are told that we have rights, and we have a right to demand things for ourselves. We live in a self-centered, me-focused world that is continually sending us the message that no one matters more than me.

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Is God Reducible to the Golden Rule?

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Bernie Sanders described his views about God this way: “Everyone believes in the golden rule, and we call that God.”

I think he expresses a popular notion here, that God is universal truth that transcends all religions and people. But is that really true?

God really reducible to a rule to live by? Is that all that God really is?

kevingdrendel's avatarNavigating by Faith

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I recently heard that Bernie Sanders described his views about God this way: “Everyone believes in the golden rule, and we call that God.”

That sounds nice, but I don’t believe it’s true.

Plato might agree with the idea that a “rule” may be God, but I believe that the best evidence suggests that God is a personal being. The golden rule, itself, is part of the proof.

The golden rule, of course, is the statement famously made by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, in part: “Do to others what you would have them to do to you.”[1]

The golden rule requires interpersonal relationship.

Bernie Sanders believes that the golden rule is universal. It certainly has universal applicability and universal appeal. But, it isn’t universally believed, and it certainly isn’t universally observed.

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Tolkien, Lewis and True Myth

Are myths just arbitrary inventions of fiction? Do we pull them out of thin air?

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From a clip from EWTN’s “Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings:’ A Catholic Worldview”

Are myths fiction? The stories they tell aren’t true. Are they, therefore, lies? Are they worthless? Nothing but “beautiful lies”? Nothing but fairy tales?

These are the questions posed by one man playing J.R.R. Tolkien to his counterpart playing C.S. Lewis in a fictional conversation between the two men: Lewis and Tolkien Debate Myths and Lies (embedded at the end of the article).

This interplay, while fictional, is intended to capture the essence of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien as Lewis was transitioning from the materialism he embraced as a young man to theism. At this point, he is wrestling with doubts that were rising in his mind about the truth of that materialist  world view. He was becoming convinced his previous conclusions no longer made sense.

Lewis had been raised on a diet of classical Greek and Latin literature that he learned to read in the original languages. He read these classics along with Celtic, German and other literature filled with myth, allegory and symbolism. The literature captured his imagination as a child and young adult.

As he got older, he embraced materialism, but that materialism eventually clashed with a profound undercurrent of something “real” that appealed to him in that ancient literature. The reality Lewis was confronting might, perhaps, be considered nothing more than a love of art, beauty, poetry and love itself that the materialist enjoys in common with more metaphysically minded men.

But it raises some existential questions: Is matter and energy all that exists? What of the sublime reality we all intuitively “know” and sense in classic, timeless literature and art?

Tolkien’s response to Lewis’s existential angst is the subject of this article. The substance of it continues to resonate and illuminate such modern thinkers as Jordan Peterson, whose thoughts on the same subject are contained (briefly) in a short video embedded at the end.

Meanwhile, I have done a transcript of the fictional reimagining of the Tolkien and Lewis discourse to follow:

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Interplay of the Word and the Spirit

God works through “the word” He gave us through the writers of the New Testament, along with His Spirit working in us to guide into truth.

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I recently heard a Sermon on Matthew 3:15. The verse was posited for the proposition that believers in Christ should be baptized as a public expression of faith in obedience to God. This is a pretty fundamental proposition that most Christian denominations would advocate in some form or another.

In Matthew 3, John the Baptist has been preaching repentance, turning to God and baptism to make the way for one who “is coming soon who is greater than I am – so much greater that I’m not worthy even to be his slave and carry his sandals”.[1] This was Jesus, of course. Then we are told that Jesus went to Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by John, and John tried to talk him out of it, saying, “I am the one who needs to be baptized by you….”[2] This is the context in which Jesus makes the statement that was the focus of the sermon.

The New Living Translation of the Bible was used for the textual reference. I tend to use the ESV and NASB translations because they are more literal. They are word for word translations, rather than phrase for phrase (or idea for idea) translations, like the NLT. The word for word translations tend to be considered more accurate and more authentic to the original text. These are things I was thinking as I listened to the message, and I wondered what difference a more literal translation would make.

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