Former Aussie resident Paul Davies has a neat summary of his recent thinking in the above article from "Comment is Free" in The Guardian.
His suggestion that the physical laws of the universe are changeable over time, and in some sense, have created themselves in such a way as to be hospitable to life, certainly feels counter-intuitive. I am also not sure what he means by this:
Thus, three centuries after Newton, symmetry is restored: the laws explain the universe even as the universe explains the laws. If there is an ultimate meaning to existence, as I believe is the case, the answer is to be found within nature, not beyond it. The universe might indeed be a fix, but if so, it has fixed itself.Yet he has never claimed to believe in a personal God, or a creator God, and presumably does not believe in an afterlife, even of the Tipler Omega Point (eternal cyber-heaven at the end of the universe) variety.
So within that framework, how does he think you can say there is "ultimate meaning" to existence?
While I am mentioning God, I have been meaning for some time to post this passage from CS Lewis, which I have always thought makes a very valid point about "modern" thinking about God:
". . . When [people] try to get rid of man-like, or, as they are called, 'anthropomorphic,' images, they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says one, 'but I do believe in a great spiritual force.' What he has not noticed is that the word 'force' has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says another, 'but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all' -not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.
"A girl I knew was brought up by 'higher thinking' parents to regard God as perfect 'substance.' In later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God, are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology. For man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous experience."
I think there is more benefit in that passage than in most full length books of theology.
What if the exercise is not just to get rid of anthropomorphic shorthands for God. What if we say that whatever God is, is actually not a noun but a verb and subsists in relations rather than substances.
ReplyDeleteI think CS Lewis is as guilty as Dawkins of setting up straw men to demolish.
geoff
Bahhhh! You know my likely reaction to that. You can say that God has a lot to do with relationships, especially the Trinitarian God, but to say God's not a "thing" in any sense but is an activity is just a variation on pantheism, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteIt's very Cuppitt-ish sounding, and seems to me to be a sure way to dissolve religion into mere secular humanism, while still pretending it is "religion".