RE: Franics Collins
January 16, 2016 at 1:00 pm
(This post was last modified: January 16, 2016 at 1:03 pm by athrock.)
I was struck by this passage from his interview with PBS:
"As I began to ask a few questions of those people, I realized something very fundamental: I had made a decision to reject any faith view of the world without ever really knowing what it was that I had rejected. And that worried me. As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data. It was pretty clear I hadn't done any data collecting here about what these faiths stood for."
I can't help wondering how many people in this forum are in that same position of having rejected faith without actually knowing what it is that they have rejected. When I read the posts of many forum members, it is obvious that they have little to no real understanding of basic theology and that their views of the Bible are based not upon a careful reading of those 72 books but on mischaracterizations of them by Internet bloggers and other forum members.
The irony pointed out by Collins is that while these folks claim to believe in the principles of the scientific method, they behave in a decidedly unscientific fashion by making their decisions to reject God with flawed or incomplete data.
And why is this the case? Collins explains:
"...if you're going to accept the existence of God, at some level you have to give up control, and you can't just do what you want to because it feels good. And I liked very much being in control. I liked not having to answer to what was holy and vote for what was right. Maybe in some way, I was aware already without having put words to it, of the moral law — and aware that I wasn't living up to it.
So in recognizing my desire to have relationship with God, I also had to come face to face with my own massive imperfections. If God is holy, and if you can see God in some ways as a mirror to yourself, you realize just how far you fall short of anything that you could be really proud of. And that is a terribly distressing kind of experience for anybody who's first coming to that. So I would not say I was an ecstatic convert."
And thus it comes down to an emotion-driven act of the will to avoid the intellectual rationale for faith. The brain knows (or fears) that God is real, but the unbeliever does not want to give up control of his life (falsely believing that what he calls freedom is actually slavery to sin), so he refuses to make the choice to act upon that knowledge. From that point on, life for the unbeliever is a daily struggle of swimming against the tide.
Only the apatheist is free from such internal conflict...free because thoughts such as these never cross his mind. But for the atheist, the one who has declared to himself (if not to others) that there is no God, crossing that line has not brought peace but open warfare.
"As I began to ask a few questions of those people, I realized something very fundamental: I had made a decision to reject any faith view of the world without ever really knowing what it was that I had rejected. And that worried me. As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data. It was pretty clear I hadn't done any data collecting here about what these faiths stood for."
I can't help wondering how many people in this forum are in that same position of having rejected faith without actually knowing what it is that they have rejected. When I read the posts of many forum members, it is obvious that they have little to no real understanding of basic theology and that their views of the Bible are based not upon a careful reading of those 72 books but on mischaracterizations of them by Internet bloggers and other forum members.
The irony pointed out by Collins is that while these folks claim to believe in the principles of the scientific method, they behave in a decidedly unscientific fashion by making their decisions to reject God with flawed or incomplete data.
And why is this the case? Collins explains:
"...if you're going to accept the existence of God, at some level you have to give up control, and you can't just do what you want to because it feels good. And I liked very much being in control. I liked not having to answer to what was holy and vote for what was right. Maybe in some way, I was aware already without having put words to it, of the moral law — and aware that I wasn't living up to it.
So in recognizing my desire to have relationship with God, I also had to come face to face with my own massive imperfections. If God is holy, and if you can see God in some ways as a mirror to yourself, you realize just how far you fall short of anything that you could be really proud of. And that is a terribly distressing kind of experience for anybody who's first coming to that. So I would not say I was an ecstatic convert."
And thus it comes down to an emotion-driven act of the will to avoid the intellectual rationale for faith. The brain knows (or fears) that God is real, but the unbeliever does not want to give up control of his life (falsely believing that what he calls freedom is actually slavery to sin), so he refuses to make the choice to act upon that knowledge. From that point on, life for the unbeliever is a daily struggle of swimming against the tide.
Only the apatheist is free from such internal conflict...free because thoughts such as these never cross his mind. But for the atheist, the one who has declared to himself (if not to others) that there is no God, crossing that line has not brought peace but open warfare.
