As Burkeman notes, Hart has removed God from the class of entities that exist and transformed Him into merely an Idea: a philosophical concept that can be subject only to philosophical arguments:. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. But this is all a stupendous confidence game.
For the vast majority of modern history, women were viewed as intellectually inferior beings. But that is simply a culturally-conditioned belief that supports no argument for female inferiority. Why on earth does that argument have any force at all? Western monotheists usually believe in a personal and anthropomorphic God—one who has humanlike emotions, cares about us, and wants us to behave in certain ways. The arguments for evolution are based on evidence, not philosophy, and can be comprehended by the average person: one who, for example, read my book Why Evolution is True.
The difference between theologians and believers is not their differential acquaintance with the truth about God, but the greater acquaintance of theologians with the history of theology. People like Hart, despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God than do Joe and Sally in the street. Theologians are, as we all know, simply confecting things about God, and then selling them using fancy words and their academic credentials.
And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. If I were a religious believer, I would likely neither appreciate the concessions that Linker has made, nor go along with his account of my beliefs. Chotiner is absolutely correct. If you define God as simply the set of our most admirable aspirations, then of course God exists.
But you could also define God as the set of our most unpalatable aspirations: greed, duplicity, criminality, and so on. And that kind of god could also exist by definition: as the Ground of All Evil.
Third, the variations had to be heritable, so that some variants would increase in number under favorable environmental conditions. Scientists who study the origin of life explore which sets of chemicals could have begun replicating themselves. Even if a living cell could be made in the laboratory from simpler chemicals, it would not prove that nature followed the same pathway billions of years ago.
The history of science shows that even difficult questions such as how life originated may one day be answered as a result of advances in theory, the development of new instrumentation, and the discovery of new facts.
But examining or explaining the purpose of the universe falls under theology or philosophy. True or False: Scientists are not religious. Culture of science. Does science disprove the existence of God? Ready to take the quiz? Tell me more about the differences between science and religion. Learn More. So they are different ways of understanding the world? Are scientists religious? Do religious people see a role for science in explaining the world?
Can people who are religious accept evolution? Credit H. How do they explain their acceptance of evolution? Why is evolution so important? Can science explain the origins of life on Earth? How are scientists studying the specifics of the origins of life?
Know it all? Prove it. Science is unable to explain the purpose of the universe because c. Many who believe in God have written eloquently about their beliefs. At the same time, we can erase every word of religious scripture, along with all religious representations in art and literature. If we wiped all religion away, anthropology suggests, it would rapidly reappear in new yet familiar forms—but probably without monotheism, assuming that history is any guide. Religion in the broad sense clearly represents a human instinct, since we find it in all human societies.
If you worship that sort of God, you share in that single, though by now hardly unitary, tradition. The monotheistic tradition of faith seems to focus and amplify the mental faculty of faith, concentrating the idea of the divine into a single, exclusive deity. Who else but the Jews, those famous monotheists from way back?
This essentially polytheistic outlook accords with the frequent mention of other gods in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament , for example. El was the Canaanite high god, but under him served other gods such as the fertility god Baal and the water god Yam. Perhaps Abraham and his kin adopted El as their own, accepting him as the same god who had urged Abraham to leave Ur and seek out the land of milk and honey in the first place. Nor, like El before him, does Yahweh appear at first to have been thought of by the Hebrews as a divine creator, at least not according to the picture we get from the last century or so of biblical scholarship.
Scholars believe that not until the eighth century bc was the first biblical account of creation composed starting at Genesis , and that only a couple of centuries later did an anonymous priestly author write down the full-blown version we get starting at Genesis 1. By that time, the Jews were rejoicing in their return to Palestine after the Babylonian Captivity c.
Enjoying a sense of revival and optimism, the Jews built the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Jewish priests acted as ambassadors to their Persian rulers. Jewish life comes down to earth at this point. The days of the prophets are fading. From here on in, the Jews will be concerned less with further prophecies than with the proper interpretation of past ones. In the coming centuries, the Jews did indeed take the final steps down the long road to true monotheism. Neither they nor their new conception of faith evolved in a vacuum.
Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity. The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels. The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument.
Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes. For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them.
This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar. Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader.
But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation. Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before.
And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc.
Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything. Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite. Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular.
Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane. Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition.
So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.
This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them.
We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July , when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god. The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey , reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world.
These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land. Like the Olympians, the little river is amoral and not much interested in the human world, but it is susceptible to a properly formulated plea for sanctuary Greek custom held that sanctuary had to be granted to a self-declared suppliant.
River and deity are one and the same. Putting up that boundary was the most significant act in the history of human thought. There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and.
The new conception here involved is that of reality. It soon gave rise to many branches of learning that are still with us, including literary theory, rhetoric, political science, history, ethnology, medicine, botany, biology, and not least logic itself—the rules of naturalistic thinking. Where physical sciences attempt to explain raw material reality in naturalistic terms, these disciplines sought to explain various other aspects of reality human social realities, for example, or realities of the plant or animal kingdoms in the same way.
He also made it psychologically necessary for someone to invent faith as well. We can draw a direct line from Thales through Plato, whose Demiurge shapes the seen in the image of the unseen, to St. Where Plato and Aristotle had tried to close the gap, the new faiths would own it. Hebrews was attributed to Paul by later figures such as Jerome and Augustine, who adored it. Many Greek philosophers had been intensely skeptical of the gods and religion, and starting as early as the fifth century bc, we can discern a hostile religious backlash against rational inquiry in Greece.
More than half a century ago, the classicist E. Applying his idea to the broader sweep of history, however, suggests that the phenomenon of faith itself emerged from a similar reaction—not in mainstream Judaism, in other words, but only with the radically new splinter tradition that became Christianity as it was taken up by the larger Greco-Roman world.
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