Before going on with Hans Kung's examination of the consequences of choosing to believe in God or to choose to not believe in God, I'll remind you that this started for me in the perennial demand that I provide a "proof" that God exists, something I've never claimed to have and, in fact, have never claimed is a possibility. What I have given is Hans Kung's elucidation of what a choice to believe in God can give you in terms of an acceptance of and committed engagement with reality. I didn't intend for this to turn into a series but it seems to have. Here are the posts in order.
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Post 4
I did warn at the beginning that Kung's argument wasn't of the cut and dried type, that it was quite long. Being a scholar in the German language tradition, he goes for as close to a comprehensive view as possible. And it's set in a far larger argument, he starts with a comprehensive account of modernism starting with Descartes and the scientific revolution and going step by step of that ending with pretty much today, or, rather, when he wrote the book. The part of the argument I'm giving you starts after more than five-hundred fifty pages of tightly written exposition and argument. It goes on for quite a while after. I will give you the next part of the argument later but will have to break off at some point. The book is Does God Exist? by Hans Kung translated into English by Edward Quinn. As qualified an author as Elizabeth Johnson says that it's about the best book dealing with atheism from the viewpoint of belief as there is.
As I pointed out at the start of this, atheists who demand proofs of God never accept any burden of proof for their preferred things which, accepted, can provide a far more limited and contingent benefit than the belief in God does, as rather brilliantly demonstrated by Kung, including the possibility of so many of those contingent benefits so beloved of atheists being held to have significance and meaning and value, even as atheism undermines those things. Atheists, of course, don't really believe their nihilistic declarations forced by the consequences of their materialism and atheism and - with the most supreme of ironies - scientism. On the basis of materialism, alone, the ultimate significance and even the possibility of knowing the truth of science is impeached and any confidence expressed in it is held at peril of, at any time, the consequences that fall from materialism, forcing a crisis in belief in its significance and even Truth.
Rupert Sheldrake often quotes someone whose name escapes me just now, who says in effect that the modern materialist position is, essentially, give me one free miracle (the big bang) and I'll explain the whole of reality mechanically. Only that's not the last miracle that the conventional materialist-atheist demands because they demand that things their own ideology impeaches must be held to be an exception for their entire framing requires its validity even as it also insists on the impossibility or, at least, the vanishing improbability of that validity. Anyone who believes in God has no problem with that, as Kung so brilliantly reasons out at several points in his arguments.
"Anyone who believes in God has no problem with that, as Kung so brilliantly reasons out at several points in his arguments."
ReplyDeleteRaising, again, the question of why atheists are so concerned with these questions. They remind me of children who reach an age where girls no longer have "cooties," but they talk endlessly about how "gross" girls are to obviously hide the fact they are, in fact, attracted to them.
If you think God doesn't exist, what does it matter to you if somebody else thinks the opposite?