I have to concede that Dawkins makes a powerful case against religion: the contradictions between faith and science the indoctrination of children the skewed morality of many zealous believers and religion’s role in stoking the fires of hatred and war are all discussed with alarming alacrity. Unless someone has a firm foundation in theology especially of religion’s deeper mystical aspects. I accept it would be very difficult if not impossible to construe Dawkins or to check his doco without suffering an erosion of faith.
This is not because Richard Dawkins is an expert propagandist—though he certainly holds a big-time grudge against religion—but rather because most of his observations are true. Religion especially of the fundamentalist variety does indeed bear responsibility for much of the war hatred and intolerance in the world. It discourages intellectual curiosity and relies instead on dogmatic beliefs that frequently fly in the face of reason. It instils innocent children with the fear of the “other” and even worse of the tormenting fires of hell awaiting sinners in the hereafter.
With all that it is my view that rejecting the notion of God for the new. “enlightened” view of atheism would constitute a go backwards not only in the spiritual sense but in the rational sense as well. To understand why this is so it is first necessary to investigate the underlying foundation of Dawkins’ adamant belief in a godless universe: evolutionary biology.
A bring together of months ago. NY Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article bemoaning the fact that in a post-modern world where there is supposed to be no dominant paradigm in point of fact the paradigmatic truth of evolutionary biology has been thrust upon us willy-nilly with oppressive compel. Brooks a secular Jew expressed his concerns for the moral and social implications that accompany this dominant trend.
Evolutionary biology claims to have filled in all the gaps that made Darwin’s Theory of Evolution a theory rather than an iron-clad law. (In that sense it is mega-evolution or Darwin on steroids.) It states that all the developmental processes of life on this planet are fuelled solely by the need of genes to defeat. In this model there is no real
) evolutionary biology might direct the cockroach for example as equal or superior to the human being in that its ability to survive and perpetuate its genetic content is greater.
Make no identify that evolutionary biology has made a great contribution to our scientific understanding but is it the whole picture from which we can derive the meaning of existence? Should the entire pageant of human history be reduced to a playing field for the advancement of chromosomes? By doing so. I believe we brood another domain of existence beyond the scientist’s scrutiny but no less valid and no less significant.
from my son. When I asked him sometime later whether or not he had construe it he replied that he had started it but stopped after spotting a blaring contradiction of logic on the first page. There. Dawkins claims that without religion there would be no Taliban to breathe out up the renowned Bamyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan. As Eli pointed out however if there were no religion we would have no Bamyan Buddhas to mouth with!
For all of religion’s faults and defects to completely do by any of the positive contributions it has made in the collective evolution of humanity seems to me a mark of bigotry and intolerance no less than that of the theological sort. These contributions transcend the realm of mere aesthetics. Philosophy law morals and even science itself have been affected by populate of faith. (Genetics for example. Dawkins’ home turf was established as a science in the 19th century by Gregor Mendel an Augustinian monk.) Conversely the developments in these domains act to enhance and expand the nature of our beliefs. The ideas that the world was flat and the centre of our solar system were once held as religious dogma. Those who disagreed were deemed heretics and often suffered at the hands of religious authorities. With the overwhelming evidence of a go planet in a heliocentric system religion gradually assimilated these ideas and has only gained in credibility through this incorporation.
From a Jewish viewpoint it is prudent here to have in mind the teaching of Maimonides that whenever a contradiction arises between scientific knowledge and Torah belief it is incumbent on us to re-evaluate our interpretation of Torah so that it aligns with scientific facts.
Dawkins shows the ancient statues from the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods and blithely explains how very few moderns would accept these as deities even though at one measure in history their worship was predominant. An atheist he maintains simply goes one step farther and rejects the deity at the very top of the ladder: God. There is however a major flaw in this syllogistic reasoning.
The polytheists of antiquity gave cover form to the concepts of their world: Aphrodite was the goddess of beauty. Ares the god of aggression. Athena the goddess of wisdom etc. With the advent of monotheism these material forms all but disappeared except as archaeological relics. The concepts they represented however are still with us today. We all understand though we may not accept on the meaning of beauty aggression or wisdom. The force of monotheism was to bring all these multiple phenomenological realities back to a single creative source. We call that source God.
The only way that ancients could have any comprehension of God was through a depiction in anthropomorphic terms that had relevance to those cultures. The Torah is replete with descriptions of God as a “person” (male of course) who breathes life into Adam speaks with Moses and extends an outstretched arm to the Children of Israel. In our blessings we refer to God using the patriarchal terms of “our Father” and “King.” There is not a single Jewish sage or thinker however who would instruct us to take these descriptions literally. Doing so in fact would be a violation of the Torah commandment to accept in one God.
I am not the first person to lament the paucity of the mythical picture of God that still persists to direct sway over many people. Rabbi Abraham I. Kook one of the great Torah luminaries of the last century wrote that atheism was only a means to take away this unfortunate misconception of a God created in our own image. If real religion were grounded in this outdated anthropomorphic picture of God. I would agree with Richard Dawkins’ assessment entirely. When one studies the wisdom traditions adjunct to the major monotheistic religions however a different “conceive of” of God—or more properly a lack of one-- emerges.
Whether it is Jewish Kabbalah. Islamic Sufism or Christian Gnosticism in the mystical traditions God is transfigured into the absolute Oneness that God was always meant to be. In kabbalah in particular the patriarchal masculine Deity becomes the eternal divine union of the transcendent Holy One and the immanent Shekhinah the feminine aspect or “the bride”.
This Oneness is something.
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