REALITY BITES

1. REALITY BITES http://www.realitybites.org.uk/

2. Religion, Reductionism and a Christian Ontology Isn’t reductionism a nightmare?

4. Reductionism can be compared to the mafia! It ruins everything!

5. Everything is really just physical stuff! Everything is really just sensory stuff! Everything is really just economic stuff! Everyone has their price! Are three camels enough for grandma?

6. To really understand and engage with reductionism we have to take a fresh look at a dirty word - “religion”

7. It’s a funny old game! If there is one thing that people appear to know all about it is religion

8. Many people are sure: • all religions may be true; • no one can know if religion is true; • religions were invented as scare stories to control people; • belief in God is just wishful thinking, blind faith, or scare story.

9. Group Work What is religion? What kind of belief is a religious belief?

10. Roy Clouser “What is Religion?” The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Beliefs in Theories (University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn, 2005)

11. Divine = whatever is ‘just there’ – “unconditionally, non-dependently real” (Clouser, 2005, pages 19,24) What is a religious belief? • a belief in something as divine; • a belief about how the non-divine depends on the divine; • a belief about how we relate to the divine.

12. What is a religious belief? All of us, in our thinking and living, grant that status to something. We cannot avoid assuming that something is ‘just there’, our ultimate starting point.

13. What is a religious belief? Our god may be ‘matter’ or ‘sensory stuff’ just as much as ‘God’ or ‘Reason’

14. Paul on humankind: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25, NIV) Paul of Tarsus(1st cent AD)

15. but they are often unconscious assumptions, No one can avoid religion Everyone has religious beliefs • or known by another name than religious (values, worldview, philosophy …)

16. Religious beliefs • They are our most influential beliefs: • they can’t be walled off from the rest of our knowledge; • they shape our conceptions of human nature and destiny; • and also our ideas of society, justice, ethics – and science.

17. Do you remember Juan Gines de Sepulvida? This isn’t just an ivory tower debate!

18. Send in the lads on a religious mission! No expense spared!

20. Sepulvida’s worship of ‘reason’ had devastating consequences! • Some ‘thick’ people aren’t human and can be enslaved or killed. • 2) Justice is redefined to include enslaving and killing sub-humans (those who lack ‘reason’). • 3) Was he wise to follow Aristotle’s god?

21. All religions focus upon a belief in something divine. What is the divine? The divine is whatever is unconditionally non-dependent while all that is not divine depends on the divine.

22. Different religions agree on what constitutes the status of divinity but they disagree with one another concerning who or what has that status.

23. Religions to Ponder • Pythagoreanism - Numbers • Shinto religion – Kami • Buddhism – Nothingness/Void • Taoism – The Tao • Hinduism – Brahman-Atman • Platonism – The Forms • Materialism – Matter and Energy

24. Clouser argues that this definition of religion is almost completely ignored in contemporary textbooks of religion. But some of the greatest minds in history including Plato, Aristotle, Calvin and Luther agree with Clouser’s view.

26. For example, Calvin wrote (speaking about God): “…that from which all other things derive their origin must necessarily be self-existent and eternal.” Inst 1,v,6

27. “Therefore about that which can exist independently and is changeless, there is a science…And if there is such a kind of thing in the world, here surely must be the divine, and this must be the first and most dominant principle.” Aristotle Metaphysics 1064a33

28. There are, however, more senses in which a belief can be religious than simply something as divine. A second sense concerns how the non-divine depends on the divine. A third sense concerns how humans come to stand in the right relation to the divine.

29. Christians call this third sense God’s plan of salvation. God offers us his love, his forgiveness of our sins and the gift of eternal life and he calls us to love, obey and trust him.

30. Let’s look very briefly at the religions of ancient Greece and Rome. These religions believed in many gods, none of whom were thought to be divine.

31. Ares, the god of war likes a good punch-up!

32. The myths of both Hesiod and Homer say the gods originated out of a pre-existing source called “Okeanos”. An impersonal force. Notice a contrast here between Yahweh and Okeanos.

33. The gods were not divine per se but were more like the divine than humans because they were immortal and had superhuman powers. In these pagan religions it is “Okeanos” which is divine in Clouser’s sense.

34. Does Scripture talk about pagan beliefs? Yes!

35. You have abandoned your people, the house of Jacob.They are full of superstition from the East;they practise divination like the Philistines and clasp hands with pagans.Their land is full of horses;there is no end to the chariots.Their land is full of idols;they bow down to the work of their hands. Isaiah 2:6-8

36. Consider this story!

38. Some folk in Dorset are very superstitious!Pagan religious beliefs are powerful!

39. So what implications does this analysis of religion have for atheists? All too often atheists claim to have no god.

40. Atheists are also incurably religious just like pagan people. They also have gods but they are cleverly disguised and camouflaged. Like a sniper in a bush! Can you spot this one?

43. Atheism? Tells us what they don’t believe, not what they do believe

44. Knowing that someone is an atheist is a bit like knowing that someone is a vegetarian. You know what they don’t eat but not what they do eat.

45. Many atheists hold that only matter and space have independent existence. Everything else depends on matter combining and recombining in space. This is to hold to a divinity belief.

46. Let’s now explore a non-reductionist ontology that presupposes that Yahweh, alone, is divine Caution we are changing colour! Danger!

48. What is a Crocodile?

50. How do different worldviews perceive the crocodile in all its terrible glory?