The Emptiness of Theology
Richard Dawkins wrote The Emptiness of Theology back in 1993.
What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. [...] If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? [...] The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?
(Emphasis mine.)
I don’t know why anyone would expect theology to be radically different from philosophy because truth is available to all the difference is often times philosophy mistakenly professes truth to be a human invention instead of a God invention. We all live in God’s world whether we believe it or not. Thus, denying the foundation of truth does not mean one doesn’t still adhere to the same truths. Philosophy and Theology have different starting points but they are going to still resemble each other in some fashion.
Karla
31 Jul 08 at 11:17 am
I agree with Mr. Dawkins. Without a lick of evidence how is studying theology any different than discussing, in detail, the Harry Potter series or people analysing a soap opera to death? Serves no useful purpose other than entertainment.
mike k
31 Jul 08 at 5:36 pm
If one presumes there is no God then one can liken theology to say science fiction. However, if one refuses to investigate the other side of the debate they can never even sharpen their own side of the debate. I think truth seekers are ones who are willing to look beyond their own assumptions into other propositions until they find something substantially true. Once you find truth, hold on to it. But until then, why not keep searching even into theological worldviews.
Karla
11 Aug 08 at 9:30 am
Are you seriously claiming that rationalists/atheists refuse “to investigate the other side of the debate”? We spend countless hours studying your holy books, analyzing your principles and the contradictions therein, and refuting your arguments piece-by-piece. We hold to our position not because we haven’t checked out yours, but because we have examined and rejected it.
I was raised as a Christian and I believed Christianity’s doctrines wholeheartedly, until I investigated “the other side of the debate” and, as a “truth seeker”, looked “beyond [my] own assumptions into other propositions until [I found] something substantially true” (atheism + rationalism + freethought + secular humanism).
Kevin
11 Aug 08 at 11:37 am
“They may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding” (Mark 4:12) “Some seed fell among the rocks. The seed sprang up quickly because there was not much soil but then the sun came up and the plant was scorched and burnt because there was no root” (Mark 4:5-6). It has been brought to my attention and concern that you feel you have renounced Christ and his gift to all who believe. My mind can not help but think of the seed that fell among the rocks but soon withered for its roots never took strong hold. Unfortunately this seed finds common root in many hearts and burdens the hearts of those who still believe yet see others walk away. However, it has been made public that your heart follows a different conviction. One that pronounces science and logic as the single truth that holds this world together which is thus controlled by man and his common will. You claim to have abandoned God and his promises to those he loves. I wish to prove that you have not abandoned God but that you still unconsciously search for him in another God given truth; the truth of logic and science. You ask for proof of Christ and his messianic prophecy and proof of the one who sent him; God. It is my eager expectations to give you that proof and more. However, we must open our eyes for the first time and be weary of he who blinds and devours us like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). I will first address your skepticism with the knowledge and grace given to me through Christ before I bring in the calvary in the form of John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, William Law, and many other devout in the Christian faith. Most importantly I will embrace the pillar of the church himself, the apostle Paul.
Grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I do not ask or expect you to swallow this argument whole without first chewing and cutting it up. On the contrary, I hope you will dissect my diatribe and study it. God never expected his children to follow his will without conflict and question. It is quite the opposite, the Lord our God invites us to question his ways so that we may better understand him. We are invited to wrestle with God just as Jacob did on Peniel. He was not punished by God but was blessed! Do you think that scientists give up so easily on a theory that would change the world the way Christ has. No! They keep wrestling with their theories, doing everything they can to learn and embrace it. A son argues with his father and the bond becomes stronger. The Lord our God does not wish to be followed by mindless bodies with no questions or concerns, he only asks that he be followed with a believing heart. O’ how we live in such an unbelieving world that demands answers and rejects faith! I pray that you wont see me as one who wishes to condemn your convictions, but one who wishes to walk alongside of you in your search for truth.
As I have studied your arguments you have exemplified much on your forced will against faith. You demand answers that are sound and that are accompanied by logic. You seem to reject the notion of faith and place folly on those who hold it true. I rebuke such a foolish and worldly statement. Faith is that which you hope in, that which convicts you, that which you are loyal to. Faith is not branched to one sect of religion but is rather held by all created mankind. I believe that Christ is the messiah whom will save those who believe on him and carry the cross day to day. You believe that science and logic is the key to all truth and unless it is proved by such it is utter foolishness. Yet I say prove science to be the only means of truth. Give evidence on how it is the reliant source of all creation. Give truth on how science even exists but in the minds of those who hold it. You cannot just as I cannot fully prove the undoubted existence of God. Whether proven or not there will always be human will and the choice to believe or not. You had to once search science to be true in order it to be so. It is thus proven that man is a curious creature and is always searching for something it can cling to. What was before science or your search for it? What could be hoped for? If you had not searched for science your hope and faith would lie in another. Whether it be God, science, or just the will to survive, we all place trust and faith in something. And where there is room for faith there is room for doubt. Yet mankind sees doubt as a fearful thing and runs from it. I see it as a chance to grow and strengthen one’s faith. In another way we all serve and follow a yoke. Christ said his yoke was easy and light (Matthew 11:30). What could that mean? How can it be said that out of all the yokes people served since creation Christ’s would be the easiest and realist? Dwell with me so that we may find its answers. Let us first travel back to your faith in science.
I feel I have proven man’s curiosity and his need to believe in something. With curiosity we were given senses to discover a vast world. However, do senses make us man? Are we governed by our senses or do we govern them? I think we would both agree that for the most part man is in control of his senses. They serve him. It is with these senses that science was created. Science runs off our senses and our ability to discover new truths from them. Did we not discover though that senses serve man. If this is true than by the use of your logic that would mean that Science serves man. If B serves A and B creates C, than C also serves A. What is so significant about this discovery though? If your faith and hope lies in science, than by your own admission you are a servant to science. However, science was created to serve man, but if your truth and foundation lie upon it than you have become subject to it. You have become subject to a man created religion, science. It thus then becomes your idol, an engraved image upon your heart. How can this be when science was created from man’s curiosity? Complete faith in science turn’s man’s curiosity into a known box of limited truths. There must be curiosity outside of science otherwise science has failed its purpose to spark continual curiosity.
Allow me to put it in another way. Full trust in science is full trust in our senses. As humans however we are fallible. Our senses thus can be fallible. In other words by your own logic once again this is proven unsound. To have faith in science which is based on even small occasional fallible senses is unsound and foolishness. You say the faith of Christ is unsound and cannot be proven. I return that argument asking how can science be proven anymore true. I say its proven that much more less. Our senses cannot always be trusted and to some philosophers they cannot even be proven to exist. If you believe science then you believe the human race to be animals which thus says that senses are purely chemical reactions. To have hope and faith in chemical reactions is once again foolishness. What becomes of those who loose their senses? How will you prove science to them when they cannot even verify it with their own senses. If there were no senses or a limited form of them what would we place our trust in? It is thus so, that those who place all faith in science place their faith in something that is subject to change. If I were to close my eyes how would you prove anything to be true to me? This is not so with my faith. If my eyes open or remain closed God is unchanging. If you continue to demand God’s proof of existence then I will demand you to continue to prove the existence of air for your examples do me no justice just as mine do you none. You say you do not wish to take the extra step of faith to believe in God but you are willing to take the necessary steps to believe in such unseen things as air. You might believe it to be air, others could very well claim it to be the movement of spirits yet neither can be fully proven. But enough with this claim, I wish to continue on it no longer.
There is that which cannot be proven from science and logic but is still held true by everyone. Such things as love. You would think love as a physchological and chemical emotion. I believe despite of this notion you would still lay down your life for those you love dearly just as would I. However, if this is true then in my eyes you are foolish to do so. What would compel another to lay down his life on the cause of a chemical reaction? Its purpose and end would most certainly not justify the reason if this was true. More so, despite your thoughts on false emotions and chemical reactions you still hold a conscience and moral law. You generally know that which is good and bad and do your best to follow it. Who taught you such and who taught them and so on. There are truths of moral action that are held as good for the common people around the whole world since the beginning of time. Everyone knows that it is better to tell the truth and not lie or not to steal. However, if this is governed by chemical reactions why would that be my ultimate reason for not doing so. It seems weak and foolish. I believe logic would also see this as unsound.
The mind is truly a vast cosmic gift! Whether senses are used or not all thoughts, feelings, and experiences are verified by the mind. Such a dreadful waste if it were to be thrown away at the end of our time. The mind holds many mysteries and many that we suppress from ever knowing. I refer to the innate ideas that is implanted in our mind since the beginning of our existence. Such things as a triangle or a square; it does not need to be seen or experienced to know that it exists and that its structure cannot be corrupted through different interpretation. Triangles and squares have equal sides and equal angles in any form it is pronounced; the object can only be changed in the name of the object itself. It is a idea, innate, neither needed to be seen or experienced. It is not subject to change. I simply choose squares and triangles because they are easily referable but there are many innate ideas that do not require experience. There is the innate knowledge of self existence from the mere knowing that it thinks. “I think therefore I am” (Descartes). Just as Descartes pursues this knowledge further I need to inquire where these truths hold their form. There must be a outside force to implant these innate ideas and govern them and make them incorruptible. They must find their truth in a all powerful truth. However, scientific theories are not innate, they are subject to change, they are what the human will makes of it. If science is what the human will makes of it then it makes man the highest truth known. How can this be when the simple idea of a triangle is not found in us as the highest truth? Science is trust in a idea that is subject to another. Yet going further at one time you searched God and what was to become of your life. Discovering these ideas you must have believed there to be life after death. Where did this idea come from? I would be cautious to say its idea came from those who taught it long ago. For this idea was held true before language even came to be and therefore it could not have been taught. Religion exists around the world since the beginning of time and the afterlife holds true to them all. How could this be unless God has made this idea innate to them? “He has set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). People hope that they wont waste away after death and for good reason; its because they wont. There mind wont let them think that and if they do it is because they fall into denial from truth. God exists because I exist! Praise be to God and his overflowing mercies.
I have not come unprepared for there are those greater than I who speak for the sake of Christ and the Gospel. Let us dwell deeper into the idea of the sense of religion. The words of John Calvin and Gill speak strongly in this area. “There never has been, from the very first, any quarter of the globe, any city, any household even, without religion…a sense of deity is inscribed on every heart. Even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact. For we know how reluctant man is to lower himself, in order to set other creatures above him.” How steadfast my brother in Christ speaks and he goes on to say, “It is most absurd, therefore, to maintain, as some do, that religion was devised by the cunning and craft of a few individuals, as a means of keeping the body of the people in due subjection, while there was nothing which those very individuals, while teaching others to worship God, less believed than the existence of God. Men have introduced a cast number of fictions into religion, with the view of inspiring the sequious; but they never could have succeeded in this, had the minds of men not been previously imbued with that uniform belief of God.” Gill branches off the words of Calvin as he states,
“Man has an intelligent soul, is subject to no creature in the world; and yet man is afraid of the future state: who is it that he is afraid of there? That must be a great Spirit that has dominion over us, O did we but know him! O had we but him for our friend!” Now what do all these fears and tortures of conscience arise from, but from the guilt of sin, and a sense of a divine Being; who is above men, and will call them to an account for their sins, and take vengeance on them? And, indeed, the eternal punishment that will be inflicted on them, will greatly lie in the tortures of their conscience, which is the worm that will never die; and, in a sense of divine wrath, which is that fire that will never be quenched.”
“The number of real speculative atheists have been very few, if any; some have boldly asserted their disbelief of a God; but it is a question whether their hearts and mouths have agreed; at least they have not been able to maintain their unbelief long without some doubts and fears.”
The theology of Strong gives strong assertion to the knowledge of faith in his systematic theology.
“Faith is knowledge, and a higher sort of knowledge — Physical science also rests upon faith — faith in our own existence, in the existence of a world objective and external to us, and in the existence of other persons than ourselves; faith in our primitive convictions, such as space, time, cause, substance, design, right; faith in the trustworthiness of our faculties and in the testimony of our fellow men. But physical science is not thereby invalidated, because this faith, though unlike sense-perception or logical demonstration, is yet a cognitive act of the reason, and may be defined as certitude with respect to matters in which verification is unattainable.”
“Faith is knowledge conditioned by holy affection, — The faith, which apprehends God’s being and working, is not opinion or imagination. It is certitude with regard to spiritual realities, upon the testimony of our rational nature and upon the testimony of God. Its only peculiarity as a cognitive act of the reason is that it is conditioned by holy affection. As the science of aesthetics is a product of reason as including a power of recognizing beauty practically inseparable from a love for beauty, and as the science of ethics is a product of reason as including a power of recognizing the morally right practically inseparable from a love for the morally right, so the science of theology is a product of reason, but of reason as including a power of recognizing God, which is practically inseparable from a love for God.”
“We cannot know an orange by the eye alone; to the understanding of it, taste is as necessary as sight. The mathematics of sound cannot give us an understanding of music; we need also a musical ear. Logic alone cannot demonstrate the beauty of a sunset, or of a noble character; love for the beautiful and the right precedes knowledge of the beautiful and the right. Faith, then, is the highest knowledge, because it is the act of the integral soul, the insight, not of one eye alone, but of the two eyes of the mind, intellect and love to God. Intellect has been divorced from heart, that is, from a right disposition, right affections, and right purpose in life.”
For logical argumentative evidence of God I turn to Thomas Aquinas and his writings. To fully understand Aquinas’ thoughts we must look at the definition of God in his mind and in the minds of many other great thinkers in his time. God is defined as “That than which nothing greater can be thought.” From the fact that the mind conceives what is meant by the name of God, it follows only that God is in the intellect.
“For the term ‘God’ we understand something than which nothing greater can be thought. This is formed in the mind of one who hears and understands the term ‘God’, and thus that God exists must be at least in his mind. But this cannot be in his mind alone, since what is in the mind and in reality is greater than that which is in the mind alone. But that which nothing is greater than God is shown by the word itself. It follows than that God exists is self-evident, manifest from the very meaning of the term.”
How great the mind of Aquinas for the idea of God is self-contradictory unless it actually exists. “God exists because his essence is his existence. But because we cannot see his essence, we come to know of his existence from his effects and not in itself.” Aquinas goes on to use mathematical ways of discovering God.
“Whatever is moved is moved by another. It is evident to sense that something is moved, for example, the sun. Therefore, is is moved by some other mover. And either that mover is moved or not. If it is moved, the thesis is proved that it is necessary to hold that there is something moving that is immobile. This is God.”
“Mathematical propositions, for example, are necessary and eternal, in the sense that their truth is independent of the existence of any contingent things. The statement that given a figure bounded by three straight lines is has three angles is a necessary truth, whether there are any triangles in existence or not. These eternal truths are not ‘fictions’. They therefore require a metaphysical ground. and we are forced to say that they ‘must have their existence in a certain subject absolutely and metaphysically necessary, that is, God.”
My arguments are not supposed to answer questions so much as they are to raise more. The more that is discovered about one’s faith and his purpose in life does not solve as many questions as it raises. Faith is a canvas and is awaited by all to add there own colors from their own individual palettes. Faith is not meant to separate but to draw together. Such unity and freedom is a trifle when sin enters the scene and blinds those who are not weary, “…in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). The commanding words of the apostle Paul speak with truth and authority. It is foolish to demand acts of God and proof of his existence for he is made known to all. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Romans 1:18-19). All mankind suppresses the truth for they wish to look unto themselves for truth and dependency; through sin they place themselves on the throne that is not rightfully theirs. Realizing it or not man strikes out a rebellion against his creator denying his existence when God is made plain to them. “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Truly, I say they are without excuse for God has made a vast world and he has gifted man with eyes to see that world so that man might see God and his glory. Even the stars in the sky were made for that only purpose, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech of language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth their words to the ends of the world” (Psalm 19:1-4).
The disease of sin has left man helpless and lost in his own pride, and it is by the grace of God that he is given life once again, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). Man alone cannot renew his heart and is left for death if his hope does not find Christ. “And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). Salvation is through Christ alone and the quickening of his Spirit. His spirit is not obtained by searching him with the wrong motives or demands. Christ’s promises can only be realized when man depraves himself of all desires and relinquishes his will to God’s. Faith in him is found in the Gospel and the Gospel alone and can only be seen when one is saturated by the word, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).
As I have stated earlier, this does not solve as many questions as it raises, or it raises more arguments than it solves. However, if God exists than your mind is feeble and can never understand its mysteries and a man made science will certainly never figure it out. How can the clay understand its potter? It is also understood that many questions are not even addressed in this argument. Such questions as why is there pain and suffering, why does God allow sin, can he not draw us easier to him, why is there never enough proof, could the other religions be just the same? Assuredly though I have arguments for each and am more than willing to share them but my purpose is not to answer them but to strike a chord that we both might be able to sing to in the future. May my words find meaning in your search for truth.
Keith Vande Vrede
19 Aug 08 at 9:14 pm