Dear Graham Y,

Unfortunately the Sunday School version of God that Dawkins attacks is the only version that many Christians get. A friend was a Lutheran pastor and told me about his training at St. Olaf's seminary in the United States. He spoke of sophisticated discussions of the origins of belief, the relation of the scriptures to concurrent legends etc. It was far from the Sunday School version that Dawkins attacks. I asked him how much of these discussions he brought to his parishioners. He said, "I wouldn't want to disturb their simple faith." He has since left the church altogether and is CEO of a do-good organisation.

Dawkins is doing the job that my friend should have done. He is questioning that simple faith.

Graham,

I would suggest that criticism of simplistic and ignorant views of "god" is a good thing. Those who hold such simplistic and ignorant views should be the target. Hence athiests criticise the worst manifestations of "christianity". A pity "christians" from more learned ranks do not also take the time to rebuke and instruct such poor examples, as it might lead to a far less obviously tarnished reputation for "christians" generally.

Rusty

This discussion has taken an interesting turn.

>>I get a bit tired of all the discussion on this site about God being about the Sunday school version that Dawkins sets up as his strawman punching bag.<<

Apart from the gratuitous "strawman punching bag" part, this is an acute and pertinent observation.

The vast majority of my (English-speaking) generation were introduced to religion in its Sunday School format. Stories about lambs and flocks, Bibles illustrated with impossibly Aryan images of a bearded man with a circle of light round his head, simple tunes that we all could sing without worrying about the words... I'm sure I'm not alone.

At the other end of the scale we have...

>>...a Lutheran pastor [who] spoke of sophisticated discussions of the origins of belief, the relation of the scriptures to concurrent legends etc.<<

In both instances, I would suggest, the concept that God "exists" is taken for granted. Certainly, it would be pretty pointless attending St. Olaf's seminary as an atheist. And a child rarely questions "facts" that are presented by well-meaning adults.

On this forum, we do have a sprinkling of theologians defending their turf, using the vocabulary of the seminary. And we do have a handful of mature believers, who for reasons of their own have graduated from the Sunday School version, but without getting too mystical about it all.

Many of the rest of us, it would seem, handed in any faith we had at the Sunday School door, unable to accept that the images it had presented us with bore any relation to our lives whatsoever.

It is not surprising therefore that posters of either persuasion often feel unable to communicate effectively with the other. In fact, it most often seems that we are talking to ourselves, about ourselves.

So getting cross about a bit of sniping is pretty pointless, I would have thought. It goes with the territory.

In my view, by the way, Brian Holden's musings are themselves firmly rooted in his Sunday School perception of God.

I thought we had already gone over this in that other thread, Graham…

<<I get a bit tired of all the discussion on this site about God being about the Sunday school version that Dawkins sets up as his strawman punching bag.>>

So many of the more ”sophisticated” theists like to portray this image of Dawkins (why they never pick on any of the others is beyond me) simply attacking an invention of his own making - a God that allegedly no-one actually believes in.

“Oh, Dawkins isn’t attacking any REAL God”, they’ll proclaim.

Yes, he is.

Dawkins is attacking the God that the vast majority of theists still believe in; the God whom those “people in the pews” (those “people in the pews” that so many “sophisticated” Christians like to look down upon) believe in.

And besides, anyone who’s actually read The God Delusion would realise that Dawkins’ arguments on this topic are board enough to cover most versions of God. There’s a reason why he focuses on the bearded old man in the sky that most theists worship and it has to do with percentages.

<<Brian is obviously not using the word in those terms.>>

The word “God” carries with it some baggage because of its historical use. We don’t get to just apply the term “God” to anything we want and ignore the baggage when it’s convenient, but then use the baggage when it is convenient - as so many Christians do.

It would be wrong for me to claim that God is, say, “gravity” because gravity doesn’t share any identifiable characteristics with the classical definitions of god (where we get the baggage from) and neither does mathematics.

All Mr Holden’s article appears to be is yet another attempt to rescue God from the redundancy scrap heap. Nothing more.

Greetings, GrahamY…

I've lost track of who is preaching to which choir at this stage of the comments, but I'll join the chorus.

The only prejudice I believe I brought to my reading and reaction to the article was an expectation of mathematically applied logic.

That Brian didn't quite get there is evidenced in the way you couched your comments yesterday – that is, what you *think* he was or was not suggesting God is or isn't.

Maybe I have a different concept of what "rigourous method from first principles" means. Otherwise, it opens up the possible line of argument that God might have decided that one plus one equals three. I've met practising accountants who are capable of doing this – and they certainly didn't think they were god – though come to think of it, chartered accountants…

"With the simultaneous development of communications at the speed of light and transportation at the speed of sound, the world has contracted into a mere neighbourhood in which people are instantly aware of each other's affairs and have immediate access to each other. And yet, even with such miraculous advances, with the emergence of international organizations, and with valiant attempts and brilliant successes at international cooperation, nations are at woeful odds with one another, people are convulsed by economic upheavals, races feel more alienated than before and are filled with mistrust, humiliation and fear."

(26 November 1992, message from the Universal House of Justice)