All change

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately and think I've made some progress so let's run with this a little.

Something I've learned (and also read about) is the fact that people inherently want to hold onto what they believe, it's comforting and what is not comfortable is to find out that "everything you know is wrong; up is down, left is right and short is long" to quote Weird Al. As part of this, people (on all sides) inherently hold steadfastly to what supports their beliefs and dismiss what contradicts it with unbridled bias.

So I've been deliberately trying (trying being the operative word) to see things from another side even to declare myself an atheist for a moment but in all honesty I couldn't make that work (you try turning your faith round in an instant) and quickly became an unfaithful atheist. My journey started with one of the best sellers of the last year or so in Richard Dawkins' God Delusion.

One of the main problems that I had with this book was that all it did was demonstrate my point in the second paragraph perfectly. For a scientist (and clearly a talented one at that) he managed to go about his dissection of religion with absolutely no sense of balance or fairness. Ignoring evidence that didn't aid his arguments and snatching (and at times manipulating) evidence that supported him.

I know people of all faiths have been and can be equally blinkered but it's a no more an attractive quality in atheists than it is in the religious. Having said that I am aware that this book has not been universally welcomed by atheists and that many atheists are well balanced in their approaches.

Another problem I had was that I was clearly as out of depth in his understanding of natural science as he was out of his depth in the realms of philosophy or theology. Dawkins sees theology as an invalid subject altogether but then his unwitting attempt at engaging with it makes that painfully obvious. There were arguments he was making that I simply couldn't counter but as they didn't bear any relation to anything I believe they were irrelevant. Take evolution for instance. Frankly I've been a Darwinian and a Creationist at separate moments in my life and now I've decided that it's rather irrelevant because the two aren't incompatible. The Catholic Church has no problem with evolution and while I've decided to remain indifferent (simply because humility forces me not to side with something I know so little about), I don't find them as polar opposites.

So after reading Dawkins and in the interests of fairness and balance I read a book by Alister McGrath called the Dawkins Delusion. I've heard an argument between these two on video and if you read the comments on the video you can see the point at work in my second paragraph again with the atheists thinking Dawkins has won and the Crizzos thinking McGrath took it. It's probably just the style of argument they were using but they both annoyed the hell out of me with just the way they spoke. Anyway, McGrath's book balances the God Delusion out well and contrasts the arrogance of the God Delusion with a refreshing breath of humility.

Read both or read neither.

Today I read Velvet Elvis and it's brilliant. I will write about that another time though as it's a whole other blog but certainly related.

I plan on reading Kant's 'Critique on Pure Reason'...it sounds like a philosophical slog but one I think I want to take on and I think it's going in some directions I've been going anyway.

Feel free to join me.