They were really just worshipping Yahweh.

Back in August, this blog argued that it was not possible to believe in false gods, and that if it were, it would be silly for God to be jealous, as that is a tacit acknowledgement that these “false” gods actually exist. An American Old Testament professor by the name of Dr Claude Mariottini stumbled across the piece, and duly produced a response on his blog. For someone who has a doctorate in the area, his piece is stunningly lacking in rigour, apparently ignorant of many basic facts about the Bible, and exemplifies the dismissive attitude of many theologians to those who question their faiths.

He says that I had “introduced so many incorrect statements that I believe some clarification is in order”—which must whet the intellectual appetite, given that my piece was only 196 words long. Then he says, not in the least tautologically, “In my response to his statements, I will be brief, otherwise, this post would be very long.” [Read more →]

Diplomatic relations between the camps of Waldemar Januszczak and Roger Scruton are especially hostile. The BBC’s Modern Beauty season has recently been the stage for a pitched battle between the two, and the debate has spilled over into other mediums, too. Each presents his own views on beauty and art in an impassioned way, occasionally descending into ad hominem, and naturally coming no closer to a resolution on the matter at hand. [Read more →]

It seems to me that in the atheism/theism debate, neither side openly professes certainty, for fear that they will look like fundamentalists. If neither side is certain, then nobody can back up their view with real conviction. Let’s look at it this way. If someone were to tell you that object x exists, but that nobody in the world has seen it, your first inclination would be to doubt it, especially if the object has such extraordinary qualities that it would be very surprising if it was even possible to exist. However, you couldn’t say, x definitely doesn’t exist. The most you can say is that it probably doesn’t exist. But how do you accurately assess probabilities in such cases? Given that there are an infinite number of things that x could be, one would have to conclude that the probability, in this grand scheme, that x exists, is very low. As far as we know, God is as likely to exist as a unicorn.

But there are other things that we haven’t seen, yet we have reason to believe exist. The reason we believe that black holes are likely to exist is that they are postulated as a result of calculations which, as far as we know, are correct. There is no equivalent for God. There is no calculation which says the universe must have been consciously created. Scientific endeavour hasn’t led us to a definite conclusion about the beginning of the universe, but the evidence leads us further and further away from conscious creation.

In a world in which the idea that some unseen x might possibly exist is taken seriously, how are we to treat this x? Certainly, we should not treat it seriously according to how it is defined. If I say that x is a being such that if you don’t believe in its existence, you will suffer an eternity of pain (and that is its only property), again you will be disinclined to believe. There could be another being called y which has the property that if you believe in x, you will suffer an eternity of pain. How can you know which to believe in? They are equally likely to exist, and neither x nor y has any presence in our lives in any meaningful way, other than that we are told that they exist by people who have never seen them.

That is the reason why, despite a lack of evidence (if such a thing could ever be produced) that God doesn’t exist, there is no reason to believe. One’s life might be different if the idea of God was removed, but not if God himself were gone.

There’s a nice, long, fascinating article in The Nation on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. The writer, Corey Robin, discusses the view posited in Quentin Skinner’s book Hobbes and Republican Liberty that Hobbes was the first counter-revolutionary. What does he mean by that? As he says, the English Civil War of the 1640s, often thought of as a revolution, was not a revolution at all, so what was there to be counter to? Well, Hobbes did think of it as a revolution, in the slightly antiquated sense that the ancients used the word—the cyclical change of a political system. (As an aside, that must surely be the origin of the modern political sense of the word, since when real revolutions started popping up, the word picked up new baggage.) The “revolutionaries” of the time were aiming for a republican system of government, and Hobbes was avowedly against such a thing. Where Hobbes’s genius lay, though, was in coming up with arguments against it that were not utterly terrible. [Read more →]

Can art ever be truly timeless? It’s an almost universally accepted idea we have of great art that if it is truly great, it will “stand the test of time”. What does that mean, exactly? Simply that it still appears just as fresh, insightful and powerful as it did when it was first created. The point we can infer from that is that these great works of art are not slaves to fashion, but strike somewhere near the heart of human nature, which is unchanging over thousands of years—a fact which we know primarily from the classics. When we read an old play that is a relic more than it is a classic, that is usually because the artist was so seduced by some particular artistic fashion that was sweeping his part of the world at the time, that he forsook a true depiction of human nature in its favour. That seduction must be strong, because proportionally speaking, the amount of classics the world has produced is close to nil. [Read more →]