No religion and an end to war... sounds a little like the John Lennon "Imagine" school of philosophy is at it again, doesn't it?
People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.
I have no problem with people's fascination for superstition disappearing, but there's something that someone is missing: the human being is a religious animal, and being an intelligent creature(providing I'm not assuming too much) there's no way that television and the Internet will satisfy our longing for God--though eventually it may drive humanity closer to God when we finally lose our fascination the information idol. What follows in the story comes closer to a sales pitch for the atheist religion.
Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".
Really, cell phones undermining fanatic intolerance? Well, maybe we might use them for our purposes. I can see the headline now "Dial-a-Prayer Leaps Into the 21st Century." We just need to get some phones into the hands of the extremists and, voila, problem solved, right?
Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."
Anyone who supposes that theory can replace the human longing to seek God seriously misunderstands the depth of that longing and has a poor image of God--certainly it must be an image of God that lacks the quality of God being a reality that we can know through lived experience.
What has theory--even noteworthy theory, unlike anything I've seen from Dawkins, though River Out of Eden was an interesting piece of anti-theism--given us that remotely approximates the richness and depth of faith?
The problem with the ivory tower is that it's a little too remote from where people actually live, and I'm not talking about a naive view of reality, but a deeply rich and observable life in faith. Rather the (a)theistic notions that arise from being infatuated with theory are simply reflections of the fascination with the scope of empirical data--an idol at least--while lacking a single nanometer of depth. Something I have noticed often in juveniles is a fascination with the surface of things--one would think a man of Dawkins age would have grasped that much. While I can somewhat tolerate the religion he espouses, I cannot tolerate the prejudice he seeks to inspire through it.
I confess that the attraction to John Lennon for me was the fact that he was just so much fun to watch. I loved the whole length of his looks, and I always liked his ways and his clever humor. Lyrics were wasted on me, tho' -- I was always happy just to dance; he couldn't possibly have said anything more important to me than, "Shake it up, baby, now," but I wonder what he'd say today? He espoused the religion of No Religion, at least outwardly, but true thinkers keep looking, and he was a true thinker. Maybe Dawkins et al should set their words to music; one might at least dance to them, rather than sink from them even more quickly into the dust to which our organs including brains will one day return.
Posted by: Honora | January 11, 2007 at 11:25 AM