I recently went to a lecture on Darwin by Pietro Corsi. After the lecture, someone asked Corsi a question about Dawkins, and he responded, "Christians love Dawkins: 'God doesn't exist!' he says. 'Yes he does!' they say. They love him!"
This reminds me of the controversies surrounding the Da Vinci Code a few years back, and the industry that surrounded it. Dan Brown's book provided a huge (if temporary) industry for Christian writers and speakers, and that gap is perhaps being filled now by responses to Dawkins et al.
I have been thinking some about the question, Does God exist? And I'm becoming more and more convinced (by myself) that it's not a meaningful question, or that there isn't much difference between answering 'Yes God exists' or 'No God does not exist.' Both answers provide the illusion that something meaningful has been established, but both answers work into the same logic, and provide answers based on the same criteria (generally evidence). The real winner in any debate over the existence of God isnt which ever argument seems to win (existence; no existence). The real winner is the logic and form of knowing that undergirds their arguments, that is reified even by responding to each others arguments as meaningful arguments. I'm not interested in these arguments over the existence of God precisely because I'm not interested in the logic behind them, or with the binary of existence and nonexistence, or convinced that there is a great deal of difference depending on how you answer that question. Along with this question we could ask if Genesis or the gospels are "historically accurate," or whether miracles really happened, or if Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, or if a band sings Christian music, or whether Muslims go to hell, and in all of these cases those are the wrong questions to ask, and summarily any answer (usually an either/or) is the wrong answer. Answering the question without altering the question is assent to the logic behind it.
Another question to be added to this list is the question of right and wrong, and whether specific actions are/were right or wrong. Questions of right and wrong are always anachronistic, in the sense that the situation doesn't matter (I'm not sure if situational ethics are actually very situational). I want my understanding of the past and present to be much more sophisticated than a belief that history can be written as a history of right and wrong (often the Christian view of history). I'm much more interested in talking about utility: cause, effect, function, forces upon a system, including the forces working upon your system that make it impossible for you to agree with me, or me with you.
Most arguments are empty arguments in the sense that people are secretly agreeing with each other by validating the system of knowledge in use by the involved parties. In the cases where systems dont agree, the other party is written off as absurd or crazy. To this degree, when someone's belief changes because of an argument, they're not convinced by the other person, they're convinced by themselves.
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I just got a book from the Theo fac library about this called God Without Being, by Jean-Luc Marion, on whom Ben Olsen is writing his honors project. We should read it together before bedtime.
'Day had argued against what he saw as atheist propaganda for some years on his Worldnet column and his personal blog. On noting reports that some readers had lost their faith after reading the "new Atheists", he says he decided to publish a book to tackle atheists on their own ground using logic and evidence'
I appreciated this. That's all.
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