|
Post by Josh on May 27, 2009 13:52:23 GMT -8
I'm reading the book "There is a God" by Antony Flew, the famous atheist-recently-turned-theist.
Has anyone read it yet? Or heard of it?
I've just started, but I sense it might be a good Mo-recommendation. The preface takes aim specifically at Dawkins.
|
|
|
Post by moritz on May 28, 2009 23:07:26 GMT -8
I'm reading the book " There is a God" by Anthony Flew, the famous atheist-recently-turned-theist. Has anyone read it yet? Or heard of it? I've just started, but I sense it might be a good Mo-recommendation. The preface takes aim specifically at Dawkins. Have you already finished the God Delusion?
|
|
|
Post by Josh on May 29, 2009 12:52:59 GMT -8
I gave up plowing through it until the summer, because I can't just "read it". I've got to take notes and think through it step by step, so in two weeks I plan on diving back in like I did last summer.
I thought maybe the Flew book might be a good one for you to read, though I've only read the intro.
|
|
|
Post by moritz on May 29, 2009 14:11:24 GMT -8
I gave up plowing through it until the summer, because I can't just "read it". I've got to take notes and think through it step by step, so in two weeks I plan on diving back in like I did last summer. I thought maybe the Flew book might be a good one for you to read, though I've only read the intro. I think I've come across it too. Right now I'm reading "Down Under" by Bill Bryson. Right after that one I'd like to give C.S. Lewis a go. Sooner or later I might read Flew too, who knows.
|
|
matty
Advanced Member
Posts: 103
|
Post by matty on May 30, 2009 12:19:48 GMT -8
I don't read many theology books. The only theological book on my shelf is my bible. And let me honest with you the front cover and contents are missing and i got it for my first communion when i was eight so.
|
|
|
Post by Josh on May 30, 2009 14:46:58 GMT -8
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Jun 10, 2009 11:37:31 GMT -8
I'm really digging Flew's book so far, btw. I'll try and provide some tasty snippets soon.
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Jun 11, 2009 15:01:12 GMT -8
"...two things must be said here about certain comments by Dawkins that are directly relevant to the present book. After writing that Bertrand Russell 'was an exaggeratedly fair-minded atheist, over-eager to be disallusioned if logic seemed to require it,' he adds in a footnote:
'We might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicized tergiversation of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity (triggering a frenzy of eager repetition all around the Internet). On the other hand, Russell was a great philosopher. Russell won the Nobel Prize.'
The puerile petulence of the contrast with the "great philosopher" Russell and the contempable reference to Flew's "old age" are par for the course in Dawkin's epistles to the enlightened. But what is interesting here is Dawkins's choice of words, one by which he unwittingly reveals the way his mind works.
Tergiversation means "apostasy". So Flew's principal sin was that of apostatizing from the faith of the fathers."
-Roy Abraham Varghese, Preface to Antony Flew's There is A God
I'll be back with some more substantial nuggets, but I thought this was a valid complaint against Dawkins
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Jun 11, 2009 15:31:06 GMT -8
An interesting note on Russell, written by his daughter, Katherine Tait:
[Russell's] "whole life was a search for God... Somewhere at the back of my father's mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it." [He had the] "ghostlike feeling of not belonging, of having no home in this world."
In a poignant passage, Russell once said:
"Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached."
-Roy Abraham Varghese, Preface to Antony Flew's There is A God
|
|