I am
indebted to Mr. Joe Heschmeyer (the Shameless Popery) for posting one wonderful
article: Misunderstanding God: Where Atheists Go Wrong in Opposing
Christianity and for
providing link on Fr. Barron’s work the
“Youtube Heresies”.
The YouTube Heresies by
Fr. Robert Barron
In
review
Father
Robert Barron identifies four major patterns where Atheist uses in opposing
Christianity and he labeled these four as the “YouTube heresies”. (a) deep confusion about the meaning of the word “God”, (b) deep
confusion about the correct manner of interpreting the Bible, (c) deep
confusion about the relationship between religion and science, and finally, (d) deep
confusion about the rapport between religion and violence.
Mr. Heschmeyer provides us a simplified form:
(1) a misunderstanding of
what Christians mean by God – whether God is understood as the highest Being or
as the ground of Being itself;
(2) a belief that
Biblical literalism is the most accurate way to understand the Bible;
(3) a
belief in scientism, “the reduction of
knowledge to the scientific way of knowing,” with
a concomitant belief that religion and science are
antithetical; and
(4) the belief that
religion is invariably violent.
The
meaning of the word “God”
(a) a
misunderstanding of what Christians mean by God. – whether God is understood as
the highest Being or as the ground of Being itself
In his Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton recalled
the first time he read Etienne Gilson's The
Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and
encountered a philosophically sophisticated understanding of God as ipsum esse (the
sheer act of being itself). He was flabbergasted because he had assumed that
God was, in his words, a "noisy and dramatic" mythological being.
Again
and again, in my dialogues on YouTube, I encounter the characterization of God
as a “sky fairy,” an “invisible friend,” or my favorite, “the flying spaghetti
monster.” This last one comes from the militant atheist Richard Dawkins, who
insinuates that there is as much evidence for God as for this fantastic
imaginary creature.
Almost
no one with whom I dialogue considers the possibility that God is not one being
among many, not the “biggest thing around,” not something that can be
categorized or defined in relation to other things. Throughout his career, Thomas Aquinas insisted that God is best
described, not as ens
summum (highest
being), but rather as ipsum
esse (the
subsistent act of being itself). As
such, God is not a thing or existent among many. In fact, Aquinas specifies,
God cannot be placed in any genus, even the genus of being. This distinction -
upon which so much of Christian theology hinges - is lost on almost everyone
with whom I speak on YouTube.
One of
the best indicators of this confusion is the repeated demand for “evidence” of
God’s existence, by which my interlocutors typically mean some kind of
scientifically verifiable trace of this elusive and most likely mythological
being. My attempts to tell them that the Creator of the entire universe cannot
be, by definition, an object within the universe are met, usually, with
complete incomprehension.
Many
atheists didn't understand what serious-minded Christians mean when they say,
"God." Mr. Heschmeyer wrote,
if you understand “God” to be a material, invisible entity living inside the
universe, then it makes sense to expect that the search for God should be like
the search for the “God particle.” So you end up with people saying
things like this:
There
is not clear evidence of the existence of a God in the sense that there *is*
evidence of the guy next to me in the subway, or of the millions of people who
live in the same city as me, by the sheer fact that I see many of them, and the
artifacts they create and leave behind, every day. No one would seriously
dispute their existence. People can, and do, dispute the existence of God
because the
artifacts that a given God would at least have left behind do not exist.
Again,
this is like arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that "I
have not found Him in my test tube," or like the Soviet cosmonauts'
"argument" that they had found no God in outer space. If God exists
He is not found in a test tube or in space. That would make Him a chemical or a
meteor. The demand that non-empirical entities submit to empirical verification
is a self-contradictory demand. The belief that something exists outside a
system cannot be disproved by observing the behavior of that system. Thus, we
Catholics simply rejected a straw-God presented by Atheist.
Biblical
Interpretation
(b) a
belief that Biblical literalism is the most accurate way to understand the
Bible
The second ‘heresy’ has
to do with the reading of the Bible. To state it bluntly, most of my
conversation partners on YouTube think that Catholics approach the Bible the
way Muslim approach the Koran, namely, as a text that was directly dictated by
God; and they therefore conclude that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a
straightforward, unequivocal manner. I have discovered, in a word, that biblical
literalism is by no means restricted to the fundamentalist camp. The comedian
Bill Maher’s film Religious (my commentary on which has received 130,000 visits and over
7,500 comments) is especially instructive in this regard. Maher spends much of
the movie interrogating pretty simple people concerning the Genesis account of
Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the whale, wondering how anyone in the
21st century
could possibly believes such nonsense.
One of the most basic
clarifications I make is that the Bible is not so much a book as a library, which
is to say, a collection of texts from a variety of literary genres. The opening
chapters of Genesis are religious saga; the Songs of Songs is a love poem; 1
Samuel and 2 Samuel are theologically informed history; Paul to the Romans is a
letter; Daniel is an apocalypse, etc. But most of my critics want to approach
each of these texts with the same set of interpretive lenses, namely, that
which is appropriate to the reading of newspapers or strictly historical texts.
In regard to Scripture,
this means that the Bible is his book, not ours. But the Catholic sense, of
course, is that the Bible is, as Vatican II puts it in Dei Verbum (n.13),
“the words of God, expressed in human language.” Given God’s unique
metaphysical makeup, it is altogether possible to speak of a divine authorship
that does not compete with or preclude real human authorship. But to admit
human authorship means to admit cultural conditioning, historical context, the
particularity of literary genre, authorial intention, etc. in a word, it is to
admit the need for interpretation.
I have found that the
Catholic approach to the Scriptures, which involves deep attention to genre and
a keen interest in symbolic, spiritual, and allegorical styles of reading, is
largely unknown.
This is
another prominently featured to all Atheist argument, as if they know that we
Catholics interpret each verse in the bible literally. They don’t bother to
make an extra effort on how we view each book and verses in the Bible and
applying it to our day-to-day life.
Scientism
(c) a
belief in scientism, “the reduction of knowledge to the scientific way of knowing,” with
a concomitant belief that religion and science are antithetical
A third ‘heresy’ I
consistently encounter is scientism, by which I mean the reduction of knowledge
to the scientific way of knowing.
The
sciences - and their attendant technologies - have been so massively successful
that people have come, understandably enough, to see the scientific way of
knowing as the only epistemological path.
Time
and again, my conversation partners on YouTube urge me to admit that the only
valid form of truth is that which comes as a result of the scientific method:
observing the world, gathering evidence, marshaling arguments, performing
experiments, etc. I customarily respond that the scientific method is effective
indeed when investigating empirical phenomena but that it is useless when it
comes to questions of a more philosophical nature, such as the determination of
the morally right and wrong, the assessment of something’s aesthetic value, or
the settling of the question why there is something rather than nothing.
More to
it, I argue that to hold consistently to scientism involves one in an
operational contradiction, for the claim that all knowledge is reducible to
scientific knowledge is not itself a claim that can be justified
scientifically! But
this appeal to metaphysics and philosophy strikes most of my conversation
partners as obscure at best, obfuscating at worst.
Mr.
Heschmeyer observed that, Most of
the atheists who commented seem to have started from the same philosophical
assumption: that you can only know what you can prove, and that all proof is scientific proof.
In this view, “real” things are things that science can prove, while
“faith” refers to the obstinate, and inherently irrational, belief in those
things that aren’t “real.”
Scientism
is a self-contradictory argument. Using their own standard, that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that
cannot be proved scientifically; and since the premise cannot scientifically prove that
the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs (therefore intellectually
irresponsible). Since
the claim that all truth must be scientifically provable is not itself
scientifically provable, it’s self-refuting (by the claim’s own standard, it
renders itself false) Mr. Heschmeyer commented. There is no empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we
should accept is empirical evidence (or the premise that only scientific proofs
count as proofs is not scientific). Therefore, scientism undermines science.
[You
cannot get “thou shall not steal” out of a random quantum fluctuation in the
collapsing wave packet of the void. Natural science won't ever give an adequate
account of the moral truths concerning human life.]
Religion
and Violence
(d) the
belief that religion is invariably violent.
A fourth ‘heresy’ has to
do with religion and violence, and it is probably the most powerful and
deep-seated that I confront. The events of September 11, 2001, stirred up the
old enlightenment-era argument that religion is invariably violent, precisely because
it is irrational. It seems that since religious people cannot offer reasonable
arguments for their positions, they finally have recourse only to force when
they seek to propagate their faith or when they confront religious views alien
to their own. I have found that the enemies of the faith are only too well
acquainted with the examples of violence and misbehavior in the history of the
Church: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-hunts, the persecution of
Jews, and to bring things up to date, the abuse of children by Catholic clergy.
Innumerable critics ask
me how I could in good faith even represent an institution that is responsible
for so much mayhem. Here I am compelled to make a distinction between the
divine and human dimensions of the Church, between the mystical body of Christ
and the deeply flawed human beings who belong to that body. In its sacraments
(especially the Eucharist), its liturgy, its apostolic governance, its
Scripture, its essential teachings, and in the lives of its saints, the Church
is the font of living water, the spotless bride of Christ. But this holiness
does not preclude the possibility of Church people, even of the highest rank,
doing stupid, violent, and immoral things. I am
also not hesitant in reminding my secularist critics that the worst violence in
human history – that perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in the
last century – was the fruit, not of religion, but of fiercely secularist and
anti-religious ideologies.
Every
time atheists are talking about religion, they bring up the atrocities
committed in the name of religion but they
tries to get Nietzsche off the hook of having atheism blamed. (The atrocities
carried out by Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and many Communists who were explicitly
atheistic took the view that religion was precisely the sort of malign and evil
force.)
Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, millions of ordinary individuals were executed or imprisoned in labor camps that were little more than death camps. Closed down over 48 000 churches, and attempted the liquidation of the entire Christian Church. According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day.
"Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies" - Pol Pot |
Victims of Pol Pot's Astrocity |
“The
first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” -
Karl Marx
“Atheism
is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” - Vladimir I. Lenin
“Our
program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” - Vladimir I.
Lenin
Mr. Rod Liddle a British journalist hit the right nail. In The Trouble With Atheism, Mr. Liddle argued that atheists can be as dogmatic and intolerant as the adherents of religion. "History has shown us," he says, "that it’s not religion that’s the problem, but any system of thought that insists that one group of people are inviolably in the right, whereas the others are in the wrong and must somehow be punished." He argues, for example, that eugenic policies are the logical consequence of dogmatic adherence to Darwinism.
The second major area of
concern under this rubric is the Bible itself – more precisely, those passages
that seem to indicate that God commands acts of terrible violence… Not to put
too fine a point on it, they wonder how I could worship or recommend to others
such a wicked God.
Although
Fr. Barron gave a three line of defense for this, I would rather opt to post
specifically the two of them (his second and third explanation wherein he cited
the argument used by Early Church Fathers – Ireneaus and Origen)
[S]ince the Bible is “the
words of God, expressed in human language,” we might be sensitive to the
progressive nature of biblical revelation, a theme suggested by Irenaeus in the
second century. God is
slowly, gradually educating the human race in his ways, and this means that he
adapts himself to varying and evolving human modes of understanding. We cannot,
therefore, simply isolate one passage, one moment in the Bible and say, without
further explanation, this is the final revelation of God.
A third perspective – and
to my mind the most important – is that the violent passage of the Bible ought
to be read as spiritual metaphors, tropes for the terrible struggle between the
ways of God and the ways of sin. Origen long ago commented that, in many of the
biblical stories, the Israelites should be appreciated as evocative of all that
is congruent with the will of God and that the enemies of Israel.
Fr.
barron even further stressed that: as the
Bible not so delicately puts it, he
continues on the account of Saul “hewed
Agag in pieces” (1Samuel15:33). Read in
a purely literalistic way, this passage is brutal indeed; but read
metaphorically and spiritually, its depths open up: sometimes hacking evil to
pieces is the only proper measure.
Lastly,
this line of resistant may also fall under the second heresy or Biblical Interpretation
- a belief that
Biblical literalism is the most accurate way to understand the Bible
You know, all of us in this world have the intrinsically idea of a Supreme Being. Being image and likeness unto God, it has to be according to his will. Nobody escapes this fact though, he may argue “I don’t believe,” it does not implies this expression that God does not exist. It implies only the negation of the individual, and as such, his argument falls apart. GK Chesterton put it simply “because God exist there are atheists.” Now, as for the actual condition between Revelation and Science, the conflict arises not because they, the scientist, negates God but because, the claim that the Church holds the power to dictate in all matters of our daily life. By all matters, I meant: faith, morals, and these words either directly or indirectly embraces all human activity, so it is a huge claim from the Church, and from the pope the latter claiming to have the unique authority to speak directly from God, the Trinitarian God, and this claim I will repeat it is a huge claim. Finally, and safely I can assure that the real problem between Science and Revelation falls in the authority; the problem of who has the capacity (morally and scientifically speaking) to guide human activities. This is the heart of the matter AUTHOROTY; one time Stalin asked “how many divisions that the pope has?” see, this is a struggle over the power, which has the authority to guide human activities. Anything else besides this problem is totally scrapped. A person can say whatever he/she wishes about God but, at the end, this is a problem on authority. Lastly, the preaching of the Gospel from the Church it has been shot down since 1968, the idea of democracy inside the Church is latent. As an example of my thesis we have our lovely AMchurch, and I had heard from priests the claim that the pope may err in matters of Faith and Morals. Their claim is based incorrectly on the idea, that Science as we know it has reached the peak of wisdom which it is totally false. However, many people, I shall say billions of people seen this claim as an opportunity to escape their moral obligations before the Church of God. Which it is the Catholic Church; outside of her, there is no salvation. This last claim of the Vicar of Christ, and added to his authority both have been the stumbling block for Science if you will and for the rest of the world who, persistently and due to our falling nature, are willing to use Science and some other pseudo-philosophies to disobey the AUTHOROTY. God bless in Christ our Lord
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