Reason and Faith - Not the same thing!

Those wacky folks at Alive! are at it again, offering up one of the most stunning examples of self-serving circular reasoning I have ever seen, courtesy of an editorial by one Dr. John Murray, a lecturer in Moral Theology at Dublin's Mater Dei Institute. But don't take my word for it - here, for your reading pleasure, is the entire text of the piece:

We can know, by reason alone, that God exists
The notion that human beings cannot know if there is a God is called agnosticism. It’s a widely held view or assumption in Ireland today. Many people, including some Catholics, simply assume that we cannot know if God exists or not, that accepting his existence is totally a matter of faith. But the Catholic Church teaches, by an infallible doctrine of Vatican Council I, that man can know of the existence of God by reason alone. Now this knowledge of God from reason provides a reasonable ground for our faith. In other words, faith is not a mere leap in the dark, an intuition, a mere choice, or some kind of mysterious thing that simply happens to a person. Rather, it is a thoroughly reasonable decision to accept God’s revelation of himself and his love and his will. The idea that faith is a leap in the dark, a choice without justifying reason, is called ‘Fideism’, and is totally rejected by the Church. Fideism considers faith to be something separate from or even the opposite of, reason, a believing something against reason, or without any reason, except the choice to believe. Faith and reason belong together but are, of course, distinct. Faith is not a matter of reaching a conclusion by reasoning, nor is it the same as seeing something as true directly. Rather, it accepts truth on the authority of someone who reveals that truth to you, whose revelation you fully accept. In the case of “divine and Catholic faith” it is the authority of God that grounds our faith, not our seeing God or grasping him directly by our power of human reason. Faith is a divine gift, but it is also a human act. So it is only possible if we think we have good reason to believe. And we have good reason to put our faith in God and the Church. When it comes to the classroom, religious education would probably not be suitable for schools if faith were merely a matter of private and personal emotion, intuition, or choice. So it is easy to understand why both agnostics and fideists in Ireland today want confessional religion out of the education system. For them, schools are concerned with knowledge, which is not compatible with their notion of faith, so schools are not to be religious. The Church, however, has great confidence in reason, tremendous belief in man’s ability to know religious and moral truth. Hence her promotion of education down the centuries.

Pssst! John! Whisper it, but you can't prove an institution's belief system is valid by quoting from confirmatory statements issued by that institution! Haven't you been studying the diagram? And aside from all that, what's all this blurring the line between faith and reason about? You don't get to make up your own set of meanings for the words mate! There's nothing wrong with accepting something on the word of an authority, we do it all the time. The difference, however, illustrated beautifully here by Dan Dennett, between believing that, say, E=mc2 is true and believing in God is that when you ask a Professor of Physics to explain E=mc2, even if you don't understand the data yourself, you know that they, and many others like them, have devoted time and resources to gaining a deep understanding of the formula, to picking it apart, to examining and experimenting with every facet of its implications in an attempt to falsify it and, in failing to do so despite such efforts, can honestly tell you that the evidence points overwhelmingly towards the concept being true. Religious officials on the other hand tend to champion the ultimate unknowability of religious knowledge, making a virtue of ignorance while, bizarrely, claiming supernatural knowledge on such varied topics as sexual orientation, moral values and the possibility of an afterlife - hence the word faith. They wouldn't call it the 'Catholic Reason' John, nor should they.

God? Sure! Creator? Nah!

The Irish Independent ran an interesting article yesterday, one which may have faith-heads up in arms or contemplatively stroking their beards depending on the level of their personal attachment to dogma. God, it seems, was never meant to be labelled 'creator' in the Old Testament, a mistake resulting from the mistranslation of a verb (bara) meant to denote 'spatial separation' rather than creation. The amended translation, courtesy of Professor Ellen van Wolde, has God fulfilling a more administrative role, sorting beast from bird, sea from land, in a worldscape already fundamentally formed - though he does retain credit for seeding life as we know it. Hoping to promote a "robust debate", the Professor has certainly stirred up a potential hornet's nest for hardline Christians and Jews, for whom the traditional position of God as creator of the Universe ex nihilo has been central for thousands of years - one can only imagine what the Vatican will make of it! Might make the 'God-as-extra-terrestrial-traveller' brigade happy though (y'know, the Chris DeBurgh theoreticians!).

Religion, The Card Game!

Move over 'Yu-Gi-Oh!', stand back 'Magic! The Gathering' and hold onto your balls 'Pokémon', there's a new game in town!
Whilst bouncing merrily across the information superhighway I came across this fun little link.

Here!

Enjoy!

-K

Burned Retinas, Hallelujah!

Thanks to Dublin-based 'clairvoyant' Joe Coleman, Ireland has managed to make a tit of itself on the international scene once more as thousands of rapturous mooks descended yesterday on the Knock Shrine, Co. Mayo, in anticipation of an appariton of Our Lady herself. Following several hours of staring at the sun observers noted shimmering coloured patterns in their eyes and proclaimed it a miracle, evidently taking a phenomenon observed by EVERYBODY ON A SUNNY DAY, EVER as a sort of spiritual IOU, in lieu of an actual appearance from the Holy Mother. Here's the Irish Times' take on the whole sorry business, while over at Pharyngula PZ is having second thoughts about his upcoming trip to Irish shores.

Prepare for Lunar War!

Are we all tingling with anticipation at the prospect of bombing the Moon? You can follow the eruption of interstellar war live at www.nasa.gov/ntv. Naturally some balderdash cover story about 'finding water on the moon' (psssh!) was released to the press, but I'm not fooled! An outline of the mission can be found on YouTube.

On Creationist Geology

YouTube user Geochron lays the smack down on Eric Hovind:

Secular Ireland - The Dream

Thanks to, amongst others, Hemant at Friendly Atheist and PZ at Pharyngula, the folks over at blasphemy.ie received a great many messages of support and solidarity from all over the globe as they took the opportunity on International Blasphemy Day to reiterate their protest of the new Irish blasphemy law and raise awareness of their ultimate goal of a secular Irish constitution. As they rightly put it, "Theological thought-crimes belong in the past...We need a secular Irish Constitution, and we need it now", conveying a very real sense of urgency in the face of a political situation that would be laughable in any fiction, but is, unfortunately, a reality. A reality symptomatic of more than just the hopelessly outdated nature of the Irish constitution, or of the lingering legacy of the dark years of Catholic oppression in this country, or even of the bizarre excesses of 'political correctness' and deferential treatment religions in Europe have been granted, particularly since the Danish cartoons incident - a reality grounded in no small way in the continued ostracisation of the non-religious in Western society. One need only take a look at Glenn Beck's latest spate of verbal diarrhoea, or listen to John Lennox snidely suggest that atheism makes life meaningless and therefore leads to an 'anything goes' approach to life to know how real this phenomenon is. Which is not to say that we have not come a very long way in the West (Inquisition, Witch-trials et al), but merely to indicate that in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds religious dogma continues to exert an unwarranted amount of influence over public attitudes, political trends and, as illustrated so damningly here, laws. blasphemy.ie outlines just how deeply entrenched these Bronze Age beliefs are in our constitution: '[Y]ou cannot become President or a Judge unless you take a religious oath asking God to direct and sustain your work. So up to a quarter of a million Irish people cannot hold these offices without swearing a lie. This is contrary to Ireland’s obligations under the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...The Preamble states that all authority of the State comes from, and all actions of the State must be referred to, the Most Holy Trinity...The Constitution also contains many other references to this god and to religion generally. Our national parliament reflects this by starting each day’s business with a prayer explicitly asking the Christian God to direct all of their actions'. Some may protest that such references to religion are harmless and effect no real-world consequences, but I, as I imagine the people at blasphemy.ie would, strongly disagree. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, makes the point when he is interviewed by Brian Flemming, in the documentary The God Who Wasn't There, that religious moderates provide the climate of acceptance of dogma that allows fundamentalists to flourish, and by the same token continued references to and reverence for the religious in our constitution gives carte blanche to anybody with an axe to grind or a political agenda to achieve to do so by jumping on the god-botherer bandwagon. Worse still, it legitimises religion where it should be criticised and contributes to the culture our political-correctness-gone-mad has bred, in which we are discouraged from asking the hard questions of religion, from loosening the choke-hold it has had on political power and opinion in Europe since the Dark Ages and wherein people without religious affiliations continue to be at best marginalised, if not demonised - this despite the inconvenient truth that, historically, it is religious fanatics and not secular humanists who have been responsible time and again for many of the worst atrocities and injustices the Western (and indeed, Eastern) world has seen. Most of all though, the continued presence of religion in our constitution, as in our collective cultural consciousness, retards our moral and societal growth - a notion I've talked about before, with regard to individuals, but which applies to societies in general just the same. As long as the middle-man of religion is involved in how we think and act as societies we are avoiding responsibility for our actions, our laws, our opinions and prejudices, every facet of the myriad moral, ethical and philosophical questions that we as individuals impose on society by way of majority opinion or minority dissent. I have no problem with religion in its capacity to exist as the personal opinion of an individual and their preferred answer to questions they have about the universe around them (provided of course that this does not lead them to attempt to infringe upon the freedoms of others, engage in hate speech, deny proper education to their children, and a host of other caveats), but I have a MASSIVE problem with religion as it continues to exist today, as an influencing force that bullies and cajoles its way into spheres it has nothing to do with and nothing to add to but superstitious, closed-minded baggage (Sharia courts in the UK, anyone?), weighing down our culture, our politics and lives for no better reason than the fact that it has done so for centuries, unquestioned. One can only hope that the folks at blasphemy.ie see their dream realised sooner rather than later - we need a secular Ireland, a secular Europe, a secular World - and we need it now.