Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist...

...says Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson in 1963 about Richard Dawkins.

Higgs also takes on one of Dawkins' other bete noirs:

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Apropos of the risk that those who need the "perfect" book or the "perfect 'oral tradition'" lest they lose their faith...

...Mark Shea writes:

The Bible is not written to be the Big Perfect Book of Everything. It is written to relay firmly, faithfully and without error those truths God wished us to know for the sake of our salvation. Eyewitness accounts which do not record “ipssissima verbi” (the exact tape-recorded words) are not “contradictory”. They get at the gist of what happened. They can leave out details that don’t concern the author or his readers and include details that do (as, for instance, when both Paul and Luke record that Jesus said the cup is the “new covenant” and not merely the “covenant” in His blood. But varying details do not (except for flat-footed fundamentalists) “prove” the story is worthless. They merely prove that the witnesses are human beings telling about an intensely important memory in a human way. The only thing more foolish than trying to enforce a foolish hyper-consistency on such testimony is to lose your faith when you fail to do so.

Mark Shea is kindly referencing my podcast on Apologetic Thomas - Thomas v. Bart Ehrman, but after the back and forth with Steve Hays at Triablogue, it is palpably clear that the fundamentalist and the atheist are driven by the same foolish need to see perfect consistency.

We don't need to "see" a perfect consistency because "seeing" is not univocal with "believing."

Notice how different this need to "see" is from the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas on dealing with what Bart Ehrman calls - and a wooden literalist like Steve Hays might fear is - a contradiction, i.e., the difference between the Gospel of Mark that implies that Christ was crucified at the "third hour" and the Gospel of John that implies that it was "about the the sixth hour." Ehrman would - actually he does - ullalate in victory, "See, there's a contradiction, it must be all wrong." A wooden literalist would do back-flips trying to explain how "third" really means "six."

What does St. Thomas Aquinas do? Read for yourself:

Reply to Objection 2. As Augustine says (De Consensu Evang. iii): "'It was about the sixth hour' when the Lord was delivered up by Pilate to be crucified," as John relates. For it "was not quite the sixth hour, but about the sixth--that is, it was after the fifth, and when part of the sixth had been entered upon until the sixth hour was ended--that the darkness began, when Christ hung upon the cross. It is understood to have been the third hour when the Jews clamored for the Lord to be crucified: and it is most clearly shown that they crucified Him when they clamored out. Therefore, lest anyone might divert the thought of so great a crime from the Jews to the soldiers, he says: 'It was the third hour, and they crucified Him,' that they before all may be found to have crucified Him, who at the third hour clamored for His crucifixion. Although there are not wanting some persons who wish the Parasceve to be understood as the third hour, which John recalls, saying: 'It was the Parasceve, about the sixth hour.' For 'Parasceve' is interpreted 'preparation.' But the true Pasch, which was celebrated in the Lord's Passion, began to be prepared from the ninth hour of the night--namely, when the chief priests said: 'He is deserving of death.'" According to John, then, "the sixth hour of the Parasceve" lasts from that hour of the night down to Christ's crucifixion; while, according to Mark, it is the third hour of the day.

Still, there are some who contend that this discrepancy is due to the error of a Greek transcriber: since the characters employed by them to represent 3 and 6 are somewhat alike.

In other words, the first thing that Thomas does is not to read the text of the Bible as a wooden literalist does, ie., like Bart Ehrman. Thomas suggests that maybe, just maybe, the times were collapsing an entire series of events into a single time, which, you know, when you think about it, is what people often do.

The second thing he does is even more interesting - and more precious as a character trait: Thomas says, "Hey, maybe there's an error in the Bibles we are reading."

Thomas points out that there could have been a scribal error because in Greek "three" and "six" are "somewhat alike."

Notice the casual way he concedes the fargin' obvious? Thomas isn't suffering a crisis of faith because of it. He isn't saying, "Woe is us; we can know nothing." To the contrary, he says, in essence, "well if there is a problem, let's work it out."

Jeepers, you mean, just like a scholar?

Also, think about why Thomas might not have been overly-shocked about this prospect, unlike Bart Ehrman and modern folks. Namely, because Thomas actually worked with scribes, who undoubtedly made errors all the time, unlike Bart Ehrman and his audience who think that everything should look like a "Xerox"(TM) brand copy.

On the other hand, if you listen to the podcast, if you listen closely and pay attention, you may just hear the dog that didn't bark in the night.

You know who should have suggested that the so-called discrepancy might be a scribal error? Bart Ehrman, that's who. Ehrman has written books on scribal errors. Yet, he never suggests - as does St. Thomas - that maybe we can answer the question of "contradiction" on the basis that both texts once said "three" or "six," until a scribe came along and confused one for the other because in Greek "three" and "six" are "somewhat alike."

But Bart Ehrman doesn' offer that possibility because he's on record as saying that if the Bible were really and truly God's word, then God would have prevented there ever being any confusion, such as perhaps by inventing photocopiers in the First Century.

Which when you think about it has the same structure as Steve Hays' argument: if God had wanted His truth to be communicated, He wouldn't relay on impermanent, easily confused oral communications; He would only have allowed His word to be communicated in something permanent and less easily forgotten, like a written text.

Fundamentalism and atheism - both want to tell God how He could do His job so much better.

File under "Scratch an Atheist, find a Fundamentalist."

The author of this article at "Gather" states the problem with Dawkins' speech at "The Reason Rally":

It would not be offensive to have a gathering of like-minded people to engage in secular discussion and activities relevant to their non-belief. What is offensive is actively encouraging hatred for people who believe in something greater than themselves. Why would any speaker encourage anyone to mock and show contempt for people that they do not even know? Is this not akin to racism? Is it a "Reason" rally? Or an anti-religion rally? According to a recent article, "this rally is not simply about protecting the rights of non-believers, but about the inferiority of religious belief."

Is there not an irony in speaking out against intolerance while being intolerant? Richard Dawkins' foundation's mission is in part, a "quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering." Perhaps the atheists, by encouraging "ridicule and contempt" for believers, are closer than they think to those who may invoke God to bring wrath upon those with whom they disagree.

The Big Time.



Mark Shea gets noticed by Russ Douthat in the New York Times for his kerfuffle with science-atheist Jerry Coyne.  Douthat is amused that, in this exchange, the atheist is the fundamentalist:

Why Atheists Need Fundamentalists


I’ve written before about the interesting symbiosis that exists between militant atheism and religious fundamentalism — the way the Richard Dawkinses of the world are always eager to insist that a cartoonish figure like Pat Robertson represents the truest form of Christian faith, and that any believer who disagrees with Robertson’s pronouncements on Haiti or Hurricane Katrina obviously doesn’t understand his own religion.

For a recent example of this tendency, consider the fascinating exchange between the prolific Catholic blogger Mark Shea and Jerry Coyne, the author of “Why Evolution Is True” and a Dawkins-esque critic of biblical religion. The subject is human origins, and specifically the debate over whether the Western Christian understanding of original sin — as the fruit of a primal disobedience by the human’s race first family — is compatible with the increasing scientific consensus around polygenism (that is, the theory that today’s human race descends from a larger population rather than a single couple).

Shea touched off the dust-up by arguing that there’s nothing particularly radical, at least from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, about interpreting the first books of Genesis as a “figurative” account of a primeval event, rather than as literal historiography that requires that two and only two human creatures were on the scene when mankind exchanged our original innocence for disobedience and shame.

To Coyne, this idea was absolutely outrageous: In a searing post, he accused Shea of trying to defend “the palpable lies of the Bible” with a lot of hand-waving about allegory and symbolism and myth, when anyone can see that the authors of Genesis were just making stuff up. It’s “nonsense,” Coyne wrote, to suggest that the Old Testament is somehow compatible with human evolution and polygenism: All you have to do is read Genesis itself, which never suggests “that Adam and Eve were anything but the ancestors of all humanity.” To argue otherwise — to “fabricate a huge population of humans, not directly related to Adam and Eve but living at the same time” — is just a crude “attempt to evade the blatant fictionality of the Genesis story by claiming that the book doesn’t say what it seems to say.”

It was a peculiar spectacle, to put it mildly: An atheist attacking a traditionalist believer for not reading Genesis literally. On the merits, Coyne is of course quite correct that some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict what science and archaeology suggest about human origins. (For instance, the claim that Adam and Eve were formed from the dust of the ground and a human rib, respectively, not from millennia upon millennia of evolution, the suggestion that they lived in a garden near the Tigris and the Euphrates, not a hunter-gatherer community in Africa, and … well, you get the idea.) But then again some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict one another as well, in ways that should inspire even a reader who knows nothing about the controversies surrounding evolution to suspect that what he’s reading isn’t intended as a literal and complete natural history of the human race.

Shea lets slip that the true identity of the person commenting on Coyne's site as "Ye Olde Statistician" - and outclassing all of those worshipper of reason - is none other than science fiction writer Mike Flynn
Good times, good times.

Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.

Are there contradictions in the Resurrection accounts?

This is a big issue for raging fundamentalist Bart Ehrman, but it's not so much for other - saner - people.

Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.

P.Z. Meyers offers a Jack Chick comic as a way of understanding Catholicism.

Scratch an Atheist, Find a Fundamentalist

This blog summarizes an observation from Cardinal Schonborn

3. Fundamentalism and Scientism are Twins.

Cardinal Schonborn said that the agnostic scientist and the fundamentalist believer essentially have the same understanding of God. Both, victims of nominalism, see God as entirely other, as inscrutable and unintelligible. Such a God is so “foreign” to our experience that we either shrug our shoulders and say, “Who knows?” and look to reason without faith to explain the universe or we accept a religion that is irrational, that we follow out of “blind obedience.”

Cardinal Schonborn said that we don’t follow God out of “blind obedience,” and neither do we follow him only after figuring everything out. We follow him in faith, and deepen our faith with reason.

He quoted a principle of Aquinas which I had never heard before: “Do not defend your faith with stupid arguments, because you make faith ridiculous to the unfaithful.”