During the debate, it seemed that at the heart of Dawkins’ difficulty with faith is his impoverished view of God and is failure to grasp more than the most simplistic understanding.
Towards the end he asked the archbishop: “Why don’t you see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that we can explain the world, life, how it started, from nothing? … Why clutter it up with something so messy as a god?”

Dr Williams replied that he doesn’t see clutter: “I’m not thinking of God as being shoehorned in.”

Dawkins then said: “That is exactly how I see God.”

Read it all.

Watch and listen to it all; it really is worth the time.

Richard Dawkins was crossing proverbial swords with Giles Fraser, the Canon of St Paul’s, on the findings of a poll by his foundation which found that many people who describe themselves as Christian have low levels of belief and little or no practice.

Dr Dawkins claimed that self-identified Christians were “not really Christian at all” because an “astonishing number” couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament (Matthew) during questioning for the poll.

Dr Fraser then challenged the country’s top Darwinist to name the full title of The Origin Of Species…[which Dr. Dawkins was unable to do]….Dr Dawkins later accused Dr Fraser of an “ambush”.

Read it all (requires subscription).

In “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism,” published last week by Oxford University Press, he unleashes a blitz of densely reasoned argument against “the touchdown twins of current academic atheism,” the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, spiced up with some trash talk of his own.

Mr. Dawkins? “Dancing on the lunatic fringe,” Mr. [Alvin] Plantinga declares. Mr. Dennett? A reverse fundamentalist who proceeds by “inane ridicule and burlesque” rather than by careful philosophical argument.

On the telephone Mr. Plantinga was milder in tone but no less direct. “It seems to me that many naturalists, people who are super-atheists, try to co-opt science and say it supports naturalism,” he said. “I think it’s a complete mistake and ought to be pointed out.”

Read it all.

O God of searing truth and surpassing beauty, we give thee thanks for Clive Staples Lewis whose sanctified imagination lighteth fires of faith in young and old alike; Surprise us also with thy joy and draw us into that new and abundant life which is ours in Christ Jesus, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Alan Saunders: When the Abbéde Villars published a criticism of Pascal’s argument in 1671, he said, ‘I lose patience listening to you treating the highest of all matters, and resting the most important truth in the world, the source of all truths, on an idea so base and so puerile, on a comparison with a game of heads and tails, more productive of mirth than persuasion.’ Now, he wasn’t the only person who said that sort of thing. The idea seems to be that there’s something disgusting in bringing gambling into a religious argument.

James Franklin: Yes, and in fact most religious people are even more keen to say that than atheist people. They, most religious people have not liked the wager and have headed for the hills at the mere suggestion that there’s any agreement between themselves and Pascal. People talk about the wager as if the mercenary or gaming aspect of it is very bad. Well, that’s just too bad. We’re all philosophers here and we’re interested in the validity of arguments. Not in whether they’re tasteless or not. Or convenient, or have a good look and feel about them.

We want to know, nevertheless, whether it’s a good argument, and talk about whether it’s base or not is really not to the point.

Read it all.

How do you approach apologetics in the current culture?

I think our culture is very pluralistic in a lot of ways. Different pockets of the culture have different perspectives on truth, knowledge, worldviews, and so on. The savvy apologist needs to understand the basic worldviews and epistemologies, and then get a good read on the approaches taken by individual people. You can only do good apologetics when you have some understanding of the perspective of the person or the group you are addressing. Many people have worldviews that are internally inconsistent. They may have a certain amount of folk Christianity or some Hinduism, so the apologist has to sort things out and expose the inconsistencies. We need a kind of existential engagement with people, whereby we genuinely and humbly interact with them&m;dashnot dump the truth on them or view apologetics as some kind of philosophical game. It is too serious to be anything like that.

Read it all.

That Jesus is this Creator come among us is the heart of the story of how God deals with the bad things that happen. It is not just that Jesus calms the storm, but that he himself endures the worst storm that his creatures can throw at him. Recall another reference to the Jonah story in the gospels. Jesus stated: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40) At the deepest level of the biblical pattern of how God deals with evil is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In the biblical account, the very Creator of the Universe, who loves and cares for his creation, who does not abandon but rescues those in distress, rescues them by himself becoming one of them, and goes through what they go through. As Jonah sank into the depths, so Jesus faced the cross, and the greatest evil that humans fear, death itself. As Jonah was rescued from the depths, so God the Father rescued his Son by raising him from death on the third day.

In one of my favorite essays, Dorothy Sayers refers to the incarnation of God in Jesus as “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged.” (1) If the incarnation is true, she says, then, for whatever reason that God made human beings, “limited and suffering and subject to death ”“ He had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair,” she writes. And, of course, a subset of the final theme is that the followers of Jesus, his church, share in his death and resurrection as we become his disciples through faith and the sacraments. So from top to bottom, from beginning to end, the Christian version of how it is that God deals with suffering and evil is that God loves and cares for his creation, but also takes it seriously, so seriously that he provides rescue and redemption from evil and suffering in that creation by taking the full consequences of death and evil on himself, and coming out on the other side, and taking us with him.

That has interesting implications….

Read it all.

Challenging the cultural climate is a major component of the new apologetics, said Sean McDowell, head of Worldview Ministries. “The apologetics resurgence has been sparked ultimately by teens who are asking more questions about why people believe the things they do,” he said. “Those who thought that kids in a postmodern world don’t want an ideology were wrong.”

Greg Stier, founder of Dare 2 Share Ministries, agrees. “[Teens] are aware of the latent apologetic conversations in culture””Harry Potter, for example””and want to react,” he said.

Read it all.

It’s striking that throughout his eight years in charge, Williams has been touring as God’s fairground boxer, willing to go five rounds with all comers. Up steps AC Grayling, next day Philip Pullman. But his fondness for quoting Saint Ambrose ”“ “It does not suit God to save his people by arguments” ”“ suggests how little store he sets by such encounters. “Oh, look, argument has the role of damage limitation. The number of people who acquire faith by argument is actually rather small. But if people are saying stupid things about the Christian faith, then it helps just to say, ‘Come on, that won’t work.’ There is a miasma of assumptions: first, that you can’t have a scientific worldview and a religious faith; second, that there is an insoluble problem about God and suffering in the world; and third, that all Christians are neurotic about sex. But the arguments have been recycled and refought more times than we’ve had hot dinners, and I do groan in spirit when I pick up another book about why you shouldn’t believe in God. Oh dear! Bertrand Russell in 1923! And while I think it’s necessary to go on rather wearily putting down markers saying, ‘No, that’s not what Christian theology says’ and, ‘No, that argument doesn’t make sense’, that’s the background noise. What changes people is the extraordinary sense that things come together. Is it Eliot or Yeats who talks about a poem coming together with an audible click? You think, yes, the world makes sense looked at like that.”

Read it all.

…this brings me back to John Paul II’s theology of the body. The difference between John Paul’s theological anthropology and the pitilessly consistent materialism of the transhumanists and their kith – and this is extremely important to grasp – is a difference not simply between two radically antagonistic visions of what it is to be a human being, but between two radically antagonistic visions of what it is to be a god.

There is, as it happens, nothing inherently wicked in the desire to become a god, at least not from the perspective of Christian tradition; and I would even say that if there is one element of the transhumanist creed that is not wholly contemptible – one isolated moment of innocence, however fleeting and imperfect – it is the earnestness with which it gives expression to this perfectly natural longing.

Theologically speaking, the proper destiny of human beings is to be “glorified” – or “divinized” – in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), to be called “gods” (Psalm 82:6; John 10:34-36).

Read it all.

I think this letter reveals a lot about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sort of theology ”“ more, indeed, than many of his lectures or agonised Synod addresses. I’d be interested to know whether readers of this blog think he did a good job of answering Lulu’s question.

But what the letter also tells us is that the Archbishop took the trouble to write a really thoughtful message ”“ unmistakably his work and not that of a secretary ”“ to a little girl. “Well done, Rowan!” was the reaction of Alex Renton’s mother, and I agree

Read it all.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

Read it all.

The problem here is that this defence of the authority of human reason is ultimately circular and parasitical. It assumes and depends upon its conclusion. This philosophical defence of the validity of reason by reason is thus intrinsically self-referential. It cannot be sustained.

The rational defence of reason itself may amount to a demonstration of its internal consistency and coherence – but not of its truth. There is no reason why a flawed rationality will show up its own flaws. We are using a tool to judge its own reliability. We have convened a court, in which the accused and the judge are one and the same.

Reason needs to be calibrated by something external….

Read it all.

As William James pointed out many years ago, religious faith is basically “faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.” Faith is based on reason, yet not limited to the somewhat meagre truths that reason can actually prove.

So is this irrational, as the New Atheist orthodoxy declares? Christianity holds that faith is basically warranted belief. Faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable, yet is nevertheless capable of rational motivation and foundation.

It is not a blind leap into the dark, but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, of which we are part. It is complex and rich idea, which goes far beyond simply asserting or holding that certain things are true.

Read it all.

A BBC Today audio report on this is described as follows:

A Church of England bishop has called on Anglican clergy to take the Church’s message to young people by trying to address the fundamental questions of life and death. Dr Graham Kings, the Bishop of Sherborne, in Dorset, says a lack of religious knowledge is one of the causes of religious doubt. Robert Pigott reports.

Listen to it all (about 3 1/2 minutes).

You may also find much more about this ministry here.

How can there be a God when people are suffering through floods and fires? How can God sit back and allow bad things to happen to good people?

A new online resource from the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne offers answers to these and other difficult questions as the Church seeks to engage directly with the rising “New Atheism” phenomenon.

“It’s not surprising that Christians will be asked hard questions like these as we watch the devastation of the Queensland floods,” said Bishop Barbara Darling, chair of the Christianity and Atheism Committee for the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne. “We should not be afraid of such questions, but should welcome the opportunity to talk with those who ask them”.

Read it all.

C.S. Lewis was talking to his lawyer one day when the attorney told him he had to decide where his earnings would go after his death.

Lewis, who had already written “The Chronicles of Narnia” book series, told the lawyer he didn’t need to worry.

“After I’ve been dead five years, no one will read anything I’ve written,” Lewis said.

Lewis was a gifted writer, but he would have been a lousy estate planner. More than 40 years after his death, the former medieval literature professor has become the Elvis Presley of Christian publishing: His legacy is lucrative and still growing, scholars and book editors say.

Read it all.

The “new atheism” promoted by academics and writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens came under fire at a debate in Cambridge.

Terry Eagleton, distinguished professor of English literature at Lancaster University, opened the discussion, titled Responses to the New Atheism. He said that the last time he had spoken at the University of Cambridge’s Great St Mary’s Church was in 1968, during a debate on student radicalism – something, he noted, that we are likely to see a good deal more of.

“Why is God back centre stage again?” he asked. “Just when grand narratives seemed to be over, He’s back in the spotlight.”

It was the events of 11 September 2001, Professor Eagleton suggested, that brought the issue of religion “to a new focus of intensity and politicised the debate, not entirely to its benefit”.

Read it all.

The combination within him of insight with vitality, wisdom with wit, and imaginative power with analytical precision made Lewis a sparkling communicator of the everlasting gospel. Matching Aslan in the Narnia stories with (of course!) the living Christ of the Bible and of Lewis’s instructional books, and his presentation of Christ could hardly be more forthright. “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying he disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.” Then, on the basis of this belief and the future belief that he is risen and alive and so is personally there (that is, everywhere, which means here), we must “put on,” or as Lewis strikingly renders it, “dress up as” Christ””that is, give ourselves totally to Christ, so that he may be “formed in us,” and we may henceforth enjoy in him the status and character of adopted children in God’s family, or as again Lewis strikingly puts it, “little Christs.” “God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.” Precisely.

Not just evangelicals, but all Christians, should celebrate Lewis, “the brilliant, quietly saintly, slightly rumpled Oxford don” as James Patrick describes him. He was a Christ-centered, great-tradition mainstream Christian whose stature a generation after his death seems greater than anyone ever thought while he was alive, and whose Christian writings are now seen as having classic status.

Long may we learn from the contents of his marvelous, indeed magical, mind! I doubt whether the full measure of him has been taken by anyone as yet.

Read it all.

One of the few voices willing to defend a more traditional form of Christianity in the twentieth century is that of C.S. Lewis. Though primarily a scholar specialising in medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis’ remarkable combination of imaginative and logical skills gave him a unique ability to portray the Christian worldview to contemporary readers. So pervasive has his influence been that Ralph Wood could write in 1991: “Lewis must be regarded as the chief Christian apologist for Christian faith in our century….[He is] our culture’s main Christian teacher.”

Heaven and hell play a vital role in C.S. Lewis’ thought in a manner highly unusual for a modern apologist….

–Kendall Harmon, Finally excluded from God? Some twentieth century theological explorations of the problem of hell and universalism with reference to the historical development of these doctrines (Oxford: Oxford University D. Phil., 1993), p.282

O God of searing truth and surpassing beauty, we give thee thanks for Clive Staples Lewis whose sanctified imagination lighteth fires of faith in young and old alike; Surprise us also with thy joy and draw us into that new and abundant life which is ours in Christ Jesus, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Check it out carefully.

(The cover itself is here).

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his hornrimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking””to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience””he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly ””his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers””to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job””the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C. S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.

One of the many things I reread in preparation for the class I am teaching on C.S. Lewis and apologetics mentioned yesterday–wonderful stuff. Read it all–KSH.

You can find information on St Paul’s Theological School here and the classes offered there.

i would appreciate your prayers–KSH.

[Austin ] Bramwell is looking for an exposition of Christian ideas over and against modern novelties. But Chesterton is rather a publicist and a polemicist on behalf of those ideals. He is not joining some great conversation with Dun Scotus, Aristotle, and Fredrick Nietzche. Rather he is in a constant scrum with Bertrand Russell, Benjamin Kidd, Cecil Rhodes, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Edward Carpenter, W.T. Stead, etc”¦ Notably, only half those names live on and most are dimmer than Chesterton’s. Judged in that company he is sterling. When was the last time you saw an H.G. Wells insight applied to anything? If Chesterton were alive today a similar list would be something like, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Karen Armstrong, Thomas Friedman, Marty Peretz, Stephen Hawking, and Jonathan Chait. If I were going to produce a polemic against Karen Armstrong’s book The History of God ”“ and I dearly would like to ”“ you might be satisfied with a clever review. You wouldn’t chastise me for failing to produce the Summa Theologica. To criticize Chesterton in this regard seems unfair. Besides The Everlasting Man, his books are mostly recycled newspaper material. Next to a considered book of philosophy, Chesterton seems a little smug. Next to a cartoon and letters to the editor and in response to his actual opponents, he’s not only a genius, but a delightful one.

Read it all.

I once found myself working closely, in a cathedral fundraising campaign, with a local millionaire. He was a self-made man. When I met him he was in his 60s, at the top of his game as a businessman, and was chairing our Board of Trustees. To me, coming from the academic world, he was a nightmare to work with.

He never thought in (what seemed to me) straight lines; he would leap from one conversation to another; he would suddenly break into a discussion and ask what seemed a totally unrelated question. But after a while I learned to say to myself: Well, it must work, or he wouldn’t be where he is. And that was right. We raised the money. We probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d been running the Trust my own way.

I have something of the same feeling on re-reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I owe Lewis a great debt. In my late teens and early twenties I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and read some of his paperbacks and essays several times over. There are sentences, and some whole passages, I know pretty much by heart.

Millions around the world have been introduced to, and nurtured within, the Christian faith through his work where their own preachers and teachers were not giving them what they needed. That was certainly true of me.

Read it all.

To become new men means losing what we now call “ourselves.” Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts, to “have the mind of Christ” as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be “in” us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.

It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is related to one of His creatures. But I will try two very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply “In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.” But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)

–C.S. Lewis
It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented-as an author invents characters in a novel-all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality
is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His)
will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

–C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity

I am an atheist but I do not begrudge people their belief in deity. It is one honest response to the experience of life’s profoundly sacred character. The dedicated effort of honest scientific inquiry is another form of response. That some respond to their experience with a belief in Deity is not the problem.

Intolerance is the problem. The rejection of science as a means of understanding aspects of the world is the problem.

As long as people understand that their way is not the only way and refrain from forcing non-evidence based modes of knowing on others then we have much yet to explore. There is a rich, vital and necessary discussion of Science and Spiritual Endeavor before us. Answering the unanswerable question of Gods’ existence is not a necessary precondition for taking on that necessary challenge.

Read it all.

In this six-part interview Hart talks about the impact of Christianity on the West, some questionable interpretations of history, suffering and the problem of evil and why he remains a believer.

The topics are:

The violence of Christian history

The new atheists and an ugly God

Ethics and the good life

Nostalgia for a pagan past

Gnosticism and alternative gospels

Suffering and the problem of evil

Check them out.