Day One: Faith and Reason, Friend or
Foe?
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Belief in God is something that the
unscrupulous use to exploit the credulous.
‘Christians are not prepared either to offer or to
accept arguments about their beliefs. They
resort to ‘don’t ask questions, just believe’ or
‘your faith will save you… ‘Being clever in life
is bad and stupidity is good’.
(Celsus – 2nd Century AD critic of Christianity)
Richard Dawkins
‘The Selfish Gene’
‘The Blind
Watchmaker’
‘The God Delusion’
Daniel Dennett
‘Consciousness
Explained’
Pascal Boyer
‘Religion
Explained’
Stephen Hawking
‘A Brief History of
Time’
‘The Grand Design’
Susan Greenfield
(neuroscientist)
‘The Private Life of the
Brain’
Iain McGilchrist
‘The Master and
his Emissary’
Roger Penrose
(Mathematical physicist)
‘The Emperor’s New
Mind’ ‘The Road to
Reality’
Alister McGrath, Chemist
‘The Dawkins Delusion’
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Faith and Reason are against each other.
We have revelation
Revelation contains the whole truth about
everything.
The enlightenment is a modern Western
phenomenon which is hostile to religion and
should be ignored.
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Humanity was in darkness, enslaved to
religion and superstition.
Then came freedom of thought, people
discovered the truth about the world.
We are now set free from religion by science
and philosophy to be truly human.
The only thing that holds us back is our refusal
to think properly and our fear of freedom.
Democritus
Epicurus
Lucretius
Plato, Aristotle
Stoic, sceptic
Philosophers
Egyptians
Babylonians
Sumerians
Persians
Jews
Indians
Arabs…
Christianity
Connections
New Atheists
Agnostics
Christian theists
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Origen (3rd Century): if it were practically
possible for everyone to abandon the
concerns of daily life and spend their
leisure doing philosophy – then this is
indeed the only path we (Christians)
should be pursuing.
Albert the Great (12th /13th Century):
when it comes to theology and morals I’ll
read Augustine, but when it comes to
science, I’ll read Aristotle and when it
comes to medicine, I’ll read Galen.
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The European Enlightenment – the younger
brother of Western Christianity
But ‘Enlightenment’ movements are neither
modern, nor exclusively Western. They happen
when people have the time to start asking hard
questions about the world.
The Faith tradition to which Christianity belongs
has been interacting with different forms of
‘enlightenment’ from the beginning.
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Common elements in Genesis 1 with more
ancient Sumerian and Egyptian myths of
creation: water, separation of heaven and earth,
making a space between the waters. (Early
speculative science).
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The heavens and the earth: genesis
of the Gods in Greek mythology
But in the book of Genesis
(6th/5th Century BC?) all of these
things are created and
ordered by the word of the one uncreated God.
This is the first important step towards our modern view of
the universe, governed by changeless laws of nature.
It is also the first step towards the idea of a world with
laws that can be known, but without a creator God.
Everything has its origin in water (Thales)
Everything has its origin in fire (Heracleitus)
There is a mind behind the universe (Anaxagoras)
Everything changes (Heracleitus)
There is a commanding word that runs through the
universe (Heracleitus)
True reality is changeless (Parmenides)
Everything is atoms, there are no gods (Democritus)
If you haven’t thought through what life is about, it’s
not worth living (Socrates)
We understand things when we can give
explanations (Aristotle)
Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Maccabees, Daniel,
Wisdom (Enoch) are written in the Greek period.
Jewish communities spread throughout Asia Minor
(modern Turkey) and Greek-ruled Egypt.
The Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek
(Septuagint) using some interesting ‘dynamic’
translation.
Jewish Authors write Greek tragedies, histories,
philosophy
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‘…and when the whole concatenation [of atoms
in the body] is dissolved the soul is scattered
and no longer has the same powers and it does
not move any more, and as a result no longer
has any power of perception.’
‘Grow accustomed to the thought that death
means nothing to us, since all that is good and
evil is in our perception and death is the
absence of perception.
But this is the most important thing: if you
believe in fate you make advising or
reproaching impossible…
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Wisdom 2.1 ff: (the wicked) who said among
themselves…’our life is short and harsh, we
have no rescue from death, no one has ever
returned from the world below. We were born
by chance and afterwards it will be as if we
never existed, because the breath of our nostrils
is a smoke… our body will be ashes and our
spirit will be poured abroad like unresisting
air’
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The Sadducees do away with fate altogether
and remove God beyond not merely the
commission, but the very sight of evil. They
maintain that man has the free choice of good
or evil, and that it rests with each man’s will
whether he follows the one or the other. As for
the persistence of the soul after death, penalties
in the underworld and rewards, they will have
none of them.
They like to say that after the conflagration
everything comes into being again in the order
of the universe and is numerically identical. So
an individual with a particular quality both is
and comes into existence again identical to the
previous individual in the other world, as
Chrysippus says in ‘Concerning the Universe’
1 The Pharisees are the Jewish sect closest to the
Stoics among the Greek thinkers.
2 The Pharisees, who are considered the most
accurate interpreters of the laws, and hold the
position of the leading sect, attribute everything to
fate and to God; they hold that to act rightly or
otherwise rests, indeed, for the most part with
men, but that in each action, Fate co-operates.
Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable, but the
soul of the good alone passes into another body,
while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal
punishment.
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‘The day of the Lord will come like a thief and
then the heavens will pass away with a mighty
roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire
and the earth and everything done on it will be
found out…but according to his promise we
await a new heavens and a new earth in which
righteousness dwells.’
Texts from before the Exile
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Judgment happens in this life (Amos 1)
After death we go to Sheol, a shadow existence
or sleep (1 Samuel 28.12 – 19)
‘Does dust give you thanks or declare your
faithfulness?’ (Psalm 30).
Texts from the 6th Century exile in Babylon and
(perhaps) before.
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The valley of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37)
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The land of shades gives birth (Isaiah 26.19)
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A new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65.17)
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Sadducees
no fate,
no afterlife,
Freewill
God remote from world
Epicureans
No fate
No afterlife
Freewill
gods irrelevant to humans
Pharisees
fate and freewill
end of the world in fire
New heavens and earth
resurrection of the body
Stoics
fate and freewill
end of the world in fire
the world cycle begins again
reincarnation of souls
Daniel 12.2 (2nd Century BC):
 ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust shall
awake and some shall live forever… the wise
shall shine brightly like the splendour of the
firmament.’
Wisdom 3.7 (1st Century BC)
‘In the time of their visitation the just shall shine
and shall dart about as sparks through the
stubble.’
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The dialogue with other cultures, new science
and new thought that asks tough questions
changes how we read ancient texts.
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New sacred texts emerge.
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Reason becomes revelation.
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The sabbath is made for humanity, not
humanity for the Sabbath.
Woe to you lawyers! You lay burdens on
people and do not lift a finger to help them.
Neither this man nor his parents sinned.