Sunday, October 17, 2010

Skeptics and Religion: Beginning thoughts

I have been hoping to learn more about atheism and religion for a long time.  Although any conversion requires an evaluation of the religious landscape, I have never gone through a systematic evaluation.  And now I have a great opportunity to do that.

An atheist friend of mine often raises objections to religion and faith on Facebook, and I have certainly linked to several critiques of atheism.  Facebook was not built for weighty theological and philosophical discussions, and so often those discussions were not as useful as they could have been.  So in a spirit of dialogue, we have decided to seek out a common vocabulary by listening to lectures on skepticism and religion.  These lectures (I hope) will offer a survey of religious belief and its criticism.  What I hope to gain is perspective.  I want to understand why people have had different views from the perspective of those views.  In other words, it is usually not enough for me to understand the criticism of a worldview.  I also want to hear and understand why it is that a worldview exists.

Our first lecture series is called Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition.  These lectures are given by Professor Tyler Roberts, who is himself a skeptic.  The second lecture series is called Faith and Reason: The Philosophy of Religion by Professor Peter Kreeft, an outspoken Catholic apologist.  I hope that these two sets of lectures will give us both points of view.


To begin the discussion, I have some questions I hope are answered by Prof. Tyler over the course of the lectures:

  • Will he frame the religious narrative as a search for truth or as the slow triumph of human thought?
  • What does he believe is the purpose of philosophy?
  • Can he explain love and the intellect from a skeptical point of view?
  • Under the skeptical mindset, what stops one from becoming a nihilist?
The final question is the one that I am most interested to learn about.  Is nihilism inevitable if there is no God?

My friend's commentary can be found here.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Brett, I think this is a permanent link to my first post: http://cheglabratjoe.blogdrive.com/archive/67.html

    I think each entry I make will count upwards from 67, but I'm not positive. For what it's worth, my entry about the first lecture is indeed permalinked at: http://cheglabratjoe.blogdrive.com/archive/68.html

    I really don't like BlogDrive, but I have a fair amount of inertia built up with it. Do you like BlogSpot?

    I'm very much looking forward to this, as well! But, I don't know if your questions are going to be addressed directly. It doesn't seem like Prof Roberts is going to be "proselytizing for atheism," as it were. So, I don't see him explaining the skeptic's view of love/intellect or the skeptic's avoidance of nihilism, except in that he might cover what individual skeptical thinkers said about those topics. But, of course, I don't know for certain.

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