science, magic, madness

[malignd at aol.com]

Would that theologians think as clearly as you.  Do you think that Aquinas's arguments for the existence of God were open-ended explorations?

If theology is an explaination or an apology for a preordained conclusion then it can't be an argument, right?
What I mainly mean about theology -- and Terry Eagleton made a similar point about Dawkins as yours -- is that the idea of a supernatural deity who created the universe and listens to each and everyone's prayers and for which there is not a shred of evidence, is the two thousand year old idea of a primitive, superstitious people that is somehow treated as a special case, different from, say, leprechauns.  Applying weighty thinking to such a notion does nothing toward making it anything other than that.  Dawkins is not remiss in ignoring theological posturing.    



-----Original Message-----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, Apr 22, 2013 7:54 pm
Subject: Re: science, magic, madness



If theology is an explaination or an apology for a preordained conclusion then it can't be an argument, right? 
 
I assume you mean to say that the apology or explaination will eventually conclude with doubt or faith or the mystery of things or the ineffable we can only attributre to a divinity or things we can never know or undertand. 
 
This doesn't make the theologian's books or even theology a waste of our reading time. In fact, much of what we read from authors who are not theologians, and who don't write theology, provides little more than this. What more can a reader take from Alice in Wonderland or Pale Fire?  
 
 
 




On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:40 PM,  <malignd at aol.com> wrote:

For the most part, Dawkins doesn't write about theology.  And comparing theology or theologians to Hume or Derrida, is inept.  Theology is an explanation or apology for a preordained conclusion:  one needn't read the theologian to know where the argument will end.   



-----Original Message-----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, Apr 22, 2013 5:48 am
Subject: Re: science, magic, madness





Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. 

 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
 




On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:


"... applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science, playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other. The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom of pure science as much as it encourages applied science." 
 
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm




On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898






 





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