A fascinating ‘blogalogue’ about religion can be read at Beliefnet.com. The dialogue is between skeptic and journalist Heather MacDonald and theologian Michael Novak. You can also watch the two debate religion here (if you are unwilling to read the exchanges, or as an extra).
The two touch one some interesting subjects for both atheists and believers. They talk about what Novak considers the ‘nature’ of God and what God does, what God means for believers and for the world.
The conversation is quite intellectual, which makes it increasingly fascinating for me and for others who believe that faith and reason are not polar opposites.
MacDonald explains the reasonable atheist point of view. She criticizes but respects those who disagree with her views.
It is a fascinating conversation, but there is one major problem from my perspective: Novak constantly talks about God from the perspective of Judaism or Christianity, not Islam. Only once does Novak touch on Islam in the blogalogue (written exchange) touch on Islam, and then he says something that is incorrect. Namely, he says that God is “Truth” in Judaism and Christianity, not in Islam.
This is a talking point often repeated by anti-Islam forces and adopted by virtually everyone else as correct. Luckily for me as a Muslim, it is not. Rather, in Islam ‘Truth’ plays a major role, as does it in the understanding Muslims have of God. “The Truth” is one of the 99 names of God, Al Haqq (الحق).* The 99 names of God are, unlike what some non-Muslims believe, not merely ‘names’ as ‘Michael’ is for me, for instance. Rather, they are attributes of God or characteristics. If one of the 99 names of God is Al Haqq, the Truth, it means that God is (the) Truth.
* See also Sura 6:62, 22:6, 23:116, 24:25.
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There is a point where reason and faith don’t seem to be able to coexist. I see it in the inability of believers to doubt or even wonder about the dogma of their particular religion. Since God is supposed to be of a higher order than mere moetals, it’s this inability to be humble about their particular beliefs that trouble me most – to the point that discussions become impossilbe to maintain on an intellectual level.
For the present, I suppose it’s a good thing that these discussions are attempted. However, until the participants acknowledge the possibility that they may be entirely wrong, reason can only play a marginal role.
meitene I think I understand where you’re coming from, but since matters of religion, since they are so amorphous and prone to personal interpretation (including what “god” is) I think some elaboration would be in order.
Generally speaking faith and reason can coexist, in the sense that being a person of faith does not preclude you from being reasonable and logical in most aspects of your life, even including certain internal aspects of your religious dogma (the best example is Catholic or Jewish wrangling with their religious laws, which can get highly arcane and legalistic). However when it comes down to the very fundamentals of a religion, there is a wall that people who are not of faith cannot cross. It eventually comes down to faith, and at it’s most fundamental level faith and reason are like oil and water. I can’t make an argument with a claim that depends on faith for it’s validity, because by its very nature it is immune to logical reasoning.
But different people will get to this point at different levels of a religious discourse, and at which level the “wall” is located is very important on a practical level. It’s, to my mind, quite a different thing to get to the wall of faith at the point of the beginning of the universe (if such a term is even valid) than at the beginning of life than at the supposed time of the great flood. When you’re dealing with someone that puts up their wall of faith at the initiation of the universe but considers everything else open to logical argument, you’re very likely dealing with a very different kind of person than the kind who has their wall of faith at Noahs ark and thinks that the Grand Canyon was formed in a month because their faith demands such a rationalization.
To my mind it is a mistake on the part of non-believers to categorize all theists as identical and equal. Though faith at its fundamental level is acceptance without the need for evidence, and in that sense it is the same, there are actual differences between someone filling in a henceforth unexplained phenomenon (whatever there was, if anything, before the Big Bang) and someone filling in a perfectly explained portion of history with demonstrably false folklore. I think we would do well to engage the more educated and rational theists in constructive discussions (without neccesarily conceding anything we feel untrue or unsupported) instead of merely deriding them as nothing more than silly faith-heads.
Claudia,
I have no argument with anything you say. In fact, I think it’s far more profitable to find ways of applying the ‘can’t we just get along’ principle rather than to deal across the divide in terms of derision.
For me, the ‘wall’ consists of how people of particular faiths coneptualize. or even visualize, what or who God is. To make God specific in the descriptive sense seems to me, according to reason, antithetical to the idea of God as spirit or some entity or phenomenon beyond human conceptions or understanding. I don’t see how someone can say ‘God works in msterious ways’ one minute and then proceed to enumerate the ways He works in very humnan, down-to-eath terms the very next minute.
That’s why I believe reason has to be left in the marginal, though important, areas where people of faith and nonbelievers can cooperate for common goals.