The atheists Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell and Richard
Dawkins in The God Delusion talk down to believers. Sam Harris in
The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation insults believers
outright. All three assume that believers are not very bright.
Their approach is not productive of much understanding. In The
Philosopher's Enigma, Richard Watson explains to believers in
temperate and readable prose why he and many others are not
believers. His discussion is based on strict Augustinianism, the
foundation of seriously argued Christianity. God is hidden - that
is, the concept of God is unintelligible - as discussed at length
by Leszek Kolakowski in his Religion If There Is No God (St.
Augustine's Press) - in the sense that there are no known rational
arguments for God's existence. Moreover, Augustine argues that
finite human beings cannot understand God's infinite perfections.
Augustine concludes that God has omniscient knowledge of every
human being's behavior, which after all, is predetermined by God
prior to His creation of the world. Most difficult to accept, as
Calvin later stresses, is the inference that because humans do not
determine their own behavior, God predetermines who is saved and
who is damned with no reference to this behavior. A foundation of
Christianity is that because of the Fall of Man, we are all
sinners, and thus there is no reason why God should pick this
person for salvation and that one for damnation. But most
Christians believe that faith, God's grace, Jesus' sacrifice, being
born again, and in particular, good works, can earn one salvation.
But Augustine and later Calvin see no evidence for these views.
Even if, or perhaps even because, God gives a sinner the grace to
be good - a person's good works do not assure salvation. After all,
even before God created the world, God predetermined the behavior
of every human being. Thus because humans cannot determine their
own behavior, they cannot be saved or damned with reference to this
behavior.A major difficulty in understanding and accepting the
story of the Creation, then, is that even though God determines
Adam's behavior, God punishes Adam for disobedience by decreeing
that all Adam's progeny will be born sinners. Watson begins his
book with the steel-trap objections made by his daughter, when she
was seven years old, as he read the Bible to her. To the story of
the Garden, she objected: "But God made Adam! God made Adam sin!
God is not fair!" She slid off his lap, and he had to bribe her to
return.In The Philosopher's Enigma, Watson also discusses in detail
the concepts of the soul, angels, ghosts, mind, and body. He argues
that the classic Cartesian mind/body problem of how an immaterial
mind or soul and a material body can interact will eventually be
superseded by a concept of a human being according to which, even
though a person's body/mind is bound by physical laws, it still
makes its own considered decisions, and to that extent a human
being is free. And because the mind/body is one entity, there is no
problem about two different things - a mind and a
body-interacting.Watson concludes that this means there is no such
thing as a disembodied mind or soul, and so no such things as
angels and ghosts that could help or harm you. Basing this
discussion in the context of contemporary neurophilosophy, his
conclusions about the relationships of mind/soul follow those of
Kolakowski in being reminiscent of Spinoza.
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