Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
The only proof I am willing to accept is for god to show him/her/it self to me. Sending an agent will not prove anything. Arguments are not proof.
O.K. I lied – curing all illnesses and healing all amputees would definitely get my attention.
Argh! How true.
I recently listened to a debate between Daniel Dennett and respected theologian Alvin Plantinga. At one point, Dennett showed that if you replace “God” in Plantinga’s argument with “Superman”, it remains just as valid as before. Plantinga’s answer, as I understood it, boiled down to “Yes, but everyone knows that Superman doesn’t exist.”
Very true. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to prove that god exists. Even if God showed his-/her-/itself, how would we know it was a god and not, say, an advanced alien race?
I’m not sure I can think of any situation in which a god would be a more reasonable explanation than an advanced alien race.
Poll after poll after poll shows that the vast majority of religious Americans believe in a personal god who answers prayers, punishes sinners, rewards the faithful, and intervened in the evolution of the human species (or created us outright). The portion who believe in literal angels is only barely smaller. Not only are the arguments of sophisticated modern theologians filled with sloppy thinking and cheap sophistry, they are largely unknown to the American public. Furthermore – the religious right is dominated entirely by crude and vicious forms of theology favoured by those who utterly despise those sophisticated modern theologians. And it is those crude and vicious forms of theology which so strongly influence American politics. The sophisticated modern theologians have no comparable influence.
Back in the days when The God Delusion was provoking a great deal of argument, TGD was frequently accused of ignoring modern, sophisticated theology. Entirely true, and for a very good reason: modern, sophisticated theology is wholly irrelevant.
The arguments of theologians attempting to show the existence of a vague, undetectable something-or-other are only a stepping-stone; once they have shown, to their satisfaction, that it is not unreasonable to suppose that something of a vast sort might exist, then they gasp with relief, throw away any pretense of arguing logically, and leap into faith, accepting the claims of some “revelation”, by some self-proclaimed “prophet”.
These “modern theologians” do their mental acrobatics during the week, then on Sunday they recite the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.
finding “modern theologians” to be an answer to atheism is always amusing. If God is omni-everything, why wait until the late 20th and early 21st centuries to get across what it “really” meant? The base story hasn’t changed no matter how desperately theists attempt to redefine their deity, a magical beastie in teh sky controls everything and we have to worship it. Just saying that makes me realize just how utterly primitive that sounds.
Folks, German journalist, Smoltczyk avers that God is neither an entity nor a person nor a principle but the Ultimate Explanation [ Aquinas’s etiological [ First Cause, which term he did not use] ;Leibniz’s U.E.], but that is just another example of that theological sophistry, because if He is neither of the first two, then He cannot effectuate Himself as that explanation and this affirms ignosticism- no referent for Him , and so He cannot exist!
Theology- the study of that non-concept- God- that square circle!
Yes, advanced theologians and others, make me laugh as much as any fundamentalist one!