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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Peter Vardy

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151 pages

English

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Perhaps human beings are animals, driven by the will to survive and reproduce, perhaps responsibility is a useful fiction and religion is the opium of the masses. Perhaps death is the end, life is ultimately meaningless, brutish and short. Perhaps man is the measure of all things and beauty, truth and justice are open to interpretation. Or, perhaps not.

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	03 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334051992
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0028€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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God Matters
‘A must-read for Year 12 and 13 Philosophy of Religion students and their teachers, which will also be of great value for Undergraduate students . . .’
Dr Paul Rout OFM, Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, University of London
‘Once again Peter and Charlotte Vardy have done what so many teachers find so difficult - communicated complex philosophical and theological ideas with clarity, ease and a good deal of humour.’
Catrina Young, Deputy Headmistress, The Dixie Grammar School
‘It certainly made me think and I recommend this book to those people that are seeking a better understanding of the mysteries of life.’
Diana Parsk, Chairman of the Banstead 5 Churches and RE teacher at St Bede’s Ecumenical School, Redhill
‘Exactly what I was hoping to find for my students to encourage and stimulate learning in this intellectually rigorous and demanding subject.’
Christien Bembridge, Head of Religious Studies and Philosophy, St Peter’s School, York
‘The Vardys are gifted communicators and many have benefited from their excellent conferences. Now they have transferred their high standard of scholarship into this book and, as ever, all ideas are presented with clarity and precision. In a sea of introductory books, this is a very welcome development . . . God Matters will prove to be the “go to” book for both the seasoned teacher and the enquiring young philosopher.’
Tim Madeley, Assistant Vice Principal and Director of VI Form, Carmel College, Darlington
‘This book is the embodiment of the authors; engaging and intellectually stimulating!’
Gerard McNulty, Religious Education Coordinator, Mount Carmel College, Hobart, Tasmania
‘A perfect springboard from which to launch an essential journey to contemplate truth.’
Janet Thomson, Vice Principal & Head of RE, Harvey Grammar School, Folkestone
‘ God Matters is an excellent and thoroughly readable updated discussion of the arguments concerning the existence of God and the challenges to that belief. Abrahamic religious perspectives and relevant inputs from such authors as C. S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and Dostoyevsky also enrich the debates. I would have really enjoyed reading such a work when I was an undergraduate and I’m sure it will be thoroughly appreciated by both sixth formers and undergraduate students of this subject area. Well done the Vardys once again!’
Dr Vaughan Salisbury, Director of ITET Secondary Education, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
God Matters
Peter and Charlotte Vardy
© Charlotte Vardy and Peter Vardy 2013

Published in 2013 by SCM Press
Editorial office
3rd Floor Invicta House
108–114 Golden Lane
London EC1Y 0TG

SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)
13A Hellesdon Park Road
Norwich NR6 5DR, UK

www.scmpress.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher, SCM Press.

The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this Work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

978-0-334-04392-8

Typeset by Manila Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRO 4YY
Contents
Introduction: Why Does God Matter?

Part One: Calling Things by Their Proper Names
1 Faith and Reason
2 The Ethics of Belief

Part Two: Arguing for God
3 Arguing for God
4 Cosmological Arguments
5 God and the New Physics
6 Teleological Arguments
7 Evolution and Fine Tuning
8 Ontological Arguments
9 Necessity or Nothing
10 Probability Arguments

Part Three: Encountering the God of Abraham
11 Encountering the God of Abraham
12 Experiences in Religious Contexts
13 Specific Religious Experiences
14 Near-Death Experiences
15 Miracles
16 The God of the Philosophers

Part Four: Challenges to Belief
17 The Limits of Language
18 The Problem of Evil
19 Suffering
20 Life After Death

Conclusion: God Matters!
To Thora
Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Introduction Why Does God Matter?
Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability . . . Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.
(Dan Brown, Angels and Demons )

In 2004 Richard Dawkins proposed that ‘religion is the root of all evil’, following this up by sponsoring billboards on London buses advertising that ‘there is probably no God, so wake up and enjoy life’. He caught the mood of the times. Between 2001 and 2011 a startling decline in religion took place. In the United Kingdom, the percentage of people claiming to be Christians fell from 72 to 59, while the numbers claiming no religion rose by 4 million. 1 When census data was released, there was another wave of calls for religion to be removed from school curricula and for its influence in other areas of public life to be reassessed.
For increasing numbers of people religion has become something sinister, and talk of God has become irrelevant, even obscene. Aeroplanes flying into tower blocks, mothers blowing themselves up on shopping streets, child abuse being systematically concealed – it is not difficult to understand why, for many people, religion has become identified with what is primitive, irrational, regressive and brutal in humanity, rather than with what is essentially good.
Growing awareness of the inadequacy of religion should make God matter more, not less. ‘Religion’ is not the same as God. Religion is a human-created phenomenon which seeks to express, capture and sometimes control the idea of God, but the reality of God is greater than any religion.
What is God if not what is supreme, perfect and beyond the limitation of human understanding – the origin of all things, Truth itself? Karl Rahner described God as ‘Holy Mystery’; God is the ultimate Mystery that lies beneath all reality. No thinking person really thinks that God is humanlike, bearded and sitting on a cloud. God is the essence of reality, its alpha and omega, the cause of things being this way and not otherwise.
Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14.6). God can be another way of saying ‘objective truth’, contemplating God a way of reflecting on the implications of reality existing independently of how we human beings see things, realizing that humans are not the measure of all things and that beneath the changing world lies an unchanging, transcendent and perfect reality.
Religion may begin in our common understanding of the truth, it may support our common search for the truth, but it is not itself the truth. God is not a human being, nor are human beings God. God is Other, that than which nothing greater can be conceived, neither something nor nothing – outside and beyond normal categories and even language.
Religion at its true sense should stand against human arrogance and human ignorance, against relativism in all its forms and for divine truth. Just because of that, religion should rejoice in being a journey not a destination. As Nils Bohr is said to have remarked of quantum science, ‘anyone who claims to have understood it has not!’, the same could be said of the objects of religion, of truth and of God. By definition any person who proudly claims to possess the truth and to have understood God cannot have done so. Far from finding membership of a religion a secure place where one can delegate thinking to others, as Confucius taught, everyone ‘should study as though there is not enough time and still feel fear of missing the point’. 2
The word ‘religion’ derives from the Latin for ‘to bind together’. Religious beliefs, traditions and practices are designed to hold communities and cultures together, to inspire, motivate and to control. Sadly, the value of the unity offered by religion often makes it seem more important than truth. The value of religion makes people more likely to defend unity, to stand up for ‘us’ against ‘them’, rather than to exert themselves for the truthful purpose of religion, which lies beyond itself in contemplating God.
As Coleridge reminds us, ‘he who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and will end by loving himself better than all . . .’ 3 This wisdom applies equally to other faiths and goes some way to explain the route from religion to the evils of recent years. When evil is done in the name of God it is in truth rooted in pride, greed, envy or sloth, in self-love, the very essence of human vice and the manifest denial of truth. Also, as W. K. Clifford (1845–79) observed, ‘there is only one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command and that is the will to obey . . .’ 4
While putting religion first, ahead of love for trut