Sunday Atheism Review

Today I got a Sunday paper. Bad man! News on a Lordsday!

I say "got", not "bought", because I subscribe, and that gives me vouchers to use every day of the week. It's still cheaper even for six days, and the Sunday papers have always seemed a bit too padded. Still, today I shopped, and remembered my voucher, so there was no point passing it up.

And apart from being very marginally more informed than I might have been about things in general, I was very glad to read about someone else's troubles with the religion debate. John Humphreys, of the BBC, has written a book about the failure of his search for God.

What is particularly intriguing to me is that, having grown up with church, he lost his faith and was disturbed to lose it. More recently, he undertook to talk to many experts in the hope of discovering just where the gap was, exactly what it was he had lost, and found nobody very convincing. The general consensus, even among very intelligent believers, is that the belief has to come first, then the reasoning is built on top of that. Without belief, the reasoning doesn't hold up.

I agree with that. My own explorations have led me to similar conclusions.

Then, though, he delved into the recent writings of evangelical atheists - there has been quite a spate over the last couple of years - and found himself outraged on behalf of believers. Here I nearly cheered out loud, as I recognised the reaction precisely. One doesn't like to find oneself on the side of superstition against reason, but there is an arrogance and intellectual dishonesty about militant atheism that is worse.

I won't go into the detail. Anyone wanting to know can read the book "In God We Doubt" (good title), or even a review of it, which is often as good.

One further point is that the author is uneducated, and those reviewing the book often have the benefit of university behind them, and it strikes them how much of philosophical history is covered without any knowledge of the thinkers who have been over it before. Apparently, the conclusions are Kant's. They seem to think that only a non-formally educated person would have what it takes to retread such ground, that those who have been taught it would shy away. Here again I find a pang of recognition. I like to think about and study assorted matters which are quite deep, and regularly find people being quite dismissive about them because they covered the ground years ago while at university. I often wonder where the benefit lies if the only effect it had was to act as a cultural box ticked. It has occurred to me before that the ideal university education would be on an obscure and pointless subject, so that one gets the training in thought, the advantage of contact with intelligence, but doesn't have an interesting subject spoiled for life.

And having strayed a long way from my original subject, I'll stop there. I'll start on Miyazaki next if I continue digressing.