Re: [asa] Dawkins, religion, and children

At 05:22 PM 4/28/2007, Iain Strachan wrote:

>Despite the quote bomb of truly Janice proportions.."

@ You called? :)

Monday, April 09, 2007
Tone Deaf Factsimians and Their Haudible Godlessness
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/search?q=dawkins

".....But this is what atheists do -- the clever ones, anyway -- for
it is what all intellectuals do. Because they are clever, they are
very good at understanding and internalizing the fashionable
abstractions of the day. As a result, they tend to live in their
abstractions, and there is no theory more abstract than atheism, for
it superimposes an ultimately sterile dogma over the mystery of
being. While this ground of being is a mystery, it is not an
absurdity because it is infused with the very same logos that
illuminates the mind and allows us to comprehend it. We see beauty or
know truth because both are logos calling out to logos. To paraphrase
George Steiner, if all of the religious loans made to science were
called in at once, there would be no science left standing. Most
notably, science cannot operate without the principles of
transcendent truth and the objective mind capable of knowing -- and
loving -- it, for truth is not pursued for its own sake, but because
it partakes of the beautiful and the good.

Atheism is not just "ignorance of God," but it inevitably redounds to
ignorance of everything, since God is the seal of truth. To cite
several obvious example, scientific materialism cannot tell us
anything about what energy, or life, or consciousness actually are --
but this does not mean that they do not exist or that humans cannot
know what they are by other means, for we have reliable testimony
that they are three aspects that converge upon the same entity,
sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss. You could proclaim
this to a scientific audience, but it would have no meaning within
the constraints of the abstract paradigm they superimpose upon
reality in order to reduce it to scientific understanding -- which is
to say, measurable quantities. You could also say that life is to
matter as mind is to brain as God is to existence, but it wouldn't
mean much to a scientistic atheist.

In his
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226876802/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0226876802>Ideas
Have Consequences, Richard Weaver summarizes the situation; I am
paraphrasing from memory, but he wrote that without imagination the
world is simply a brute fact -- there is nothing to spiritualize it.
In the scientistic flight from the center to the periphery, one
becomes lost in details which cannot be integrated in a holistic way.
This "downward pull" puts an end to ideational life, as the resultant
fragmentation leads to an obsession with parts, and with it, an
inability to intuit the whole. Hyper-specialization leads to a kind
of cognitive deformity, as the world shrinks in proportion to our
quantification of it. As a pathetic compensation, modern man is
puffed up with the vanity of being able to describe some minute
portion of the world, but this is merely postmodern provincialism of
the most naive sort. In the end, the separation of knowledge from
religion is the separation of facts and knowledge from the
metaphysics that explains them and gives them meaning.

Elsewhere Weaver observed (it is possbible that these are my own
notes, not his exact words) that "Truth is an antecedent reality
perceived by the intellect and not the senses," and that "immersion
in matter makes man unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Facts
are substituted for truth, but there is no knowledge at the level of
sensation. Facts do not speak for themselves and experience cannot
tell us what we are experiencing. The world is our primary datum, but
we do not end our days with a wealth of sense impressions."

But this is how science -- which should be the pursuit of universal
truth -- evolves into metaphysical scientism, which denies universals
transcending experience, and therefore ends in bonehead relativism.
Put another way, science reduces the world to a coherent absurdity,
while metaphysics expands it into a coherent non-absurdity. And there
is no reason to take anyone seriously who believes existence to be
absurd, since anything they can say will be equally absurd. And no
one is more proudly absurd than the atheist.

Now, one of the reasons it is pointless to debate the existence of
God is that higher realties do not stand out except to those who
stand in them. Perhaps an analogy will be helpful. .." [snip] ~
Robert W.Godwin, Ph.D (a clinical psychologist whose
interdisciplinary work has focused on the relationship between
contemporary psychoanalysis, chaos theory, and quantum
physics.) http://www.onecosmos.blogspot.com/

~ Janice

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Received on Sat Apr 28 17:39:23 2007