Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: atheism, children, Dawkins, God, God Delusion, parenting, philosophy
One of the areas that Dawkins gets quite emphatic on is his assertion that “there is no such thing as a Christian child; only the child of Christian parents.”
There are four basic errors in this statement. These errors are perhaps natural enough for an atheist to make, and concerns the nature of a religion. Dawkins in his statement is assuming that faith is a matter of reason and logic. These are important parts, but not sufficient.
Firstly faith is a community activity and the social element of faith is significant. Christianity at least, if not other religions as well, is about relationships and part of that is an identifying oneself with a community of faith.
Alongside that faith is also about recognising a set of traditions and rituals. Children love the repeating of things and ritual can give a lot of security in a young life. Elsewhere Dawkins says he is not about doing away with traditions such as celebrating Christmas.
My young children where in every respect part of a Christian community, enjoying its traditions and rituals. In these respects they were definitely Christian.
But perhaps the most important aspect of any faith is the spiritual element. Now while Dawkins might not recognise there is such a thing he must for the sake of argument recognise the other’s point of view and show his problem with it, not just dismiss it out of hand. Our praying together was a key part of the day, helping my children to deal with things that had gone wrong or anxieties they had as well as celebrating the joys fo the day. I have also recognised that my children had spiritual experiences at very young ages.
So in their spiritual lives my children were definitely Christian.
To look at if from a parenting/child development point of view, we need to consider what a parents role is in bringing up a child. The parent has not only to feed and clean a child, they need also to develop the child’s thinking and social skills. They need to feed in a set of norms about how you interact with other people, a task that can be quite laborious at times if you have children that tend to quarrel and fight. Young children only gradually develop their own separate sense of identity. Belonging is important for a young child and they do this by copying and and playing at being mum or dad. It is later when adolescence hits that they in earnest develop their own sense of separateness.
So in this child development view my children were Christian children.
At this young age children have neither developed the mental apparatus or the knowledge of the world to enable them to really think through issues of whether they agree with their parents. Later they will have to question whether and what aspects of their parents faith that accept or reject and make up their own minds, but they will be so much more equipped to do that if they have seen from the inside the workings of a coherent paradigm.
How is it that you come to believe what you do? One of the most important roles that a parent has is to help their offspring to understand this by being open with the processes in their own thinking, their reasonings, their doubts, their ways of dealing with these things and with other peoples points of view. A young child can learn what it is to have a world view by taking on their parents views, which they naturally do and seeing how well they feel it fits.
So I can not say that my children had thought it all through for themselves at a young age, but they certainly took on the paradigm and had a look at it from the inside. In that sense they were definitely Christian.
Now I always encouraged my children to think for themselves and accept them whatever the outcome of their thinking, so the fact that one of my children does not really call themselves a Christian now that they have grown to adulthood is not a problem in our relationship. Even though he has turned away from that faith I think he benefited from being part of a faith community and seeing faith from the inside
Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: atheism, beauty, Dawkins, God, God Delusion, philosophy, Proof of God
Now this is a big topic, and I’m not sure I’ll get it all finished tonight, but lets make a start.
All that Dawkins does in this section is to point out the times that people are mistaken in their experiences. Now this undoubtedly muddies the waters here, but it does need looking beyond. There are various types of mistake that people make. He starts the section on one where some campers mistake some bird calls for the devil’s cackling. Yes these mistakes happen, no problems with that.
He picks up this sort of idea later on in discussing how the human mind it built to create mental models of the outside world. Because of the minds attempts to make sense of the world it sometimes over interprets the data it has and creates illusions in its attempts. This is accepted.
But I think that Dawkins here makes the mistake that he thinks describing the mechanisms by which something happens explains them away. You might be able to very clearly describe how a telephone reproduces sounds that sound like a human voice and so show that there is not a little creature inside the phone. But this does not demonstrate that there is no-one on the other end of the phone. Yes we have a mind that is prone to create visions, but that does not show that there is not someone communicating with us through these visions. I’ll come back to this.
Dawkins rightly points out to us that there are many ill people that believe that they have heard from God. Their error does not demonstrate that all such experiences are false. He does in fact give us a bit of a clue in the observation that there are far more experiences that are not pathological in the sense that they do not lead to institutionalisation or criminal activity. Most people’s experiences lead to a completely different outcome, and these outcomes need to be looked at in judging the experience.
I would totally agree that you can not build a whole belief on simply an experience. You need to test these things against other things. If someone where coming to me to ask if what they had experienced was really God one of the chief things I would look at is what outcome does it bring about. If an experience results in actions of kindness and charity to others that is a positive sign. If it brings comfort, peace that is also good. And it is such experiences that are in the vast majority as Dawkins points out.
We need also to mention the people whose lives are transformed by such experiences. There are many whose lives have fallen to bits, relationships broken down, addictions destroying them and criminal activities keeping them on the run. Whether it is such huge and obvious problems or some quieter and more personal hells an experience of God often brings a complete transformation. Hope is restored and people turn around. I would say that there is little to be said against such experiences.
The account of a mass vision is a difficult one to interpret, again I agree with Dawkins in that. I do not however agree with his writing it off in that the sun did not really fall from the sky. Of course it did not, it was a vision, true or not I do not know, but it was a vision rather than a reality. If it were a true vision it would be a communication of some sort from God.
Dawkins says that that is all that needs to be said about experiences of God, but he has failed to mention some the the extraordinary outcomes of such experiences. To mention one that occurred in my life. My wife and I were praying for a lady that was seriously ill. She had had a measure of healing when my wife prayed but it was incomplete and so my wife sensed that there was some deeper issue in our friend that needed to be dealt with. We talked at length and prayed but it did not seem that we had achieved anything.
So I was asking God how to pray when I clearly saw the insides of a building. It was not a place where I had ever been. I was fairly sure God was speaking through this vision but what did it mean? I did as I often would and asked God what it meant, but heard no answer, again not too uncommon. But then I felt, I would not say I heard, but I felt that I should ask my friend what it meant. I did not think that this was a very good idea. She would have little faith that we could pray for her healing if I could not understand the vision, but the feeling persisted.
Eventually I did what I felt God was saying even though it seemed rather risky to my own credibility. I described the place I had seen and asked her what she made of it. For a moment she looked blank and then she suddenly burst into violent sobbing. God had obviously pinpointed a painful experience and we were able to pray into that to bring her release from that time. As the sobbing subsided she kept asking, “how did you do that?”, and “how did you know?” She told us that she had told no-one, not even her husband about the trauma that she experienced in that place. It was her secret and she wanted to know how I knew about it.
Was I having a real experience of God? It certainly proved to be true that this lady had been in the place I described. And not only so, she quickly, and very surprisingly recovered from the life threatening illness and remains clear of it years later.
So there are experiences of God that have a visible outcome, supernatural knowledge, lives transformed and people healed. I would think that such experiences are pretty good proofs.
