Reviews for Reason to believe

The average rating for Reason to believe based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-19 00:00:00 Stephen Crawley I think I’m a bit of a pop theology junkie and I don’t think it’s good for me, I may need to go to a self-help group, maybe my local church runs one, that would be pretty Christian of them. Richard Purtill is this professor of emerituses in America and the word lofty was invented just for him. I noticed that this book was originally written in 1974 and so the sub-title “Why Faith Makes Sense” must be put into that context, because a lot of things that made sense in 1974 don’t now, like droopy moustaches, jumpsuits, Gary Glitter and the Bay City Rollers. I got about half way in this book and then I slumped stunned by the impermeable hauteur of the author to the ground which at that point appeared to be ankle deep in hemlock-flavoured slushies. I felt I was drowning. But it wasn’t that at all, it was the professor’s complex choirpreaching arguments which were sticking in my craw and making it hard to breathe. There’s a lot about souls in this book. Now, Blind Willie Johnson was a great gospel singer from the 1920s, and was a fervent Christian, yet, interestingly, he recorded a song called “The Soul of a Man” : Won't somebody tell me, answer if you can! I want somebody tell me, what is the soul of a man I'm going to ask the question, answer if you can If anybody here can tell me, what is the soul of a man? I've traveled in different countries, I've traveled foreign lands I've found nobody to tell me, what is the soul of a man RP in the first chapter gets into the whole thing about when you die, how can anyone tell who your soul is? How would they know it’s yours? He says well, you don’t have a body, and we know that memories can be false. (Sample dialogue from the afterlife: “Huh, he says he’s Adolf Hitler, but I’d know Adolf anywhere, and I can tell you, dear, that’s not him.”) So that problem is why RP believes in the Resurrection of the Corporeal Body. He says, there isn’t any reason not to accept the literal resurrection of ALL human bodies – look at Star Trek. Star Trek? If Captain Kirk steps into the transporter at one place and disappears, and a body identical with his, with the same memories and character, appears at another place, there seems no good reason to deny that it is Captain Kirk who has appeared, even though the standard of bodily continuity had been violated. At any rate, the many thousands of people who enjoyed this program seemed to have no difficulty in accepting this situation p35 Well, yeah, but when I read The Wind in the Willows, I have no problem accepting that a mole can wear glasses and make a cup of tea and a toad can drive a car like a lunatic. So no, this appeal to Star Trek is not going to make me believe in the possibility of the resurrection of the body. He has a really funny cheeky line about the argument that Christians are credulous and not scientific. He compares three views – Christian belief, scientific determinism, and something he calls the Chance View, which is that there are no rules and no God and no sense – only Jean Paul Sartre believed that, so evidently that’s a non-starter. So, when you take a good squint at the deterministic view, you find that it says that impersonal forces created the entire universe, including the Planet Earth and everything upon it, such as people, and their minds. Since impersonal forces created our minds, we have no way of telling if we are in our right mind! So... er, are you with me so far... Every view except the Christian view destroys our confidence in reason, and therefore in science. Therefore the Christian view is the only view that is not antiscientific. That’s some three card trick he pulled there. Ha, I would lose my shirt to this guy. I was waiting for him to get round to the problem of evil and suffering, which he does, and this is it: Now, the whole Christian answer to the problem of apparently useless suffering is that no suffering is really useless… The Christian belief is that the point of our whole existence… is to become a person of a certain sort… All the suffering in this world is bound up with this aim and this necessity. That is the Christian answer to the problem of pain. Christianity has no other answer. So, God creates us, then throws a number of obstacles our way (insert favourite form of useless suffering here) and watches us surmount or be defeated by these things, and become or fail to become a person of a certain sort. The assumption is that if you fail at this, you get the big heave-ho and down to hell you go. And that’s all the whole thing is about. A giant experiment which, one assumes, amuses God. Christian theologians all seem to think it would be dreadful if we didn't have free will, if God had fixed it so humans weren't the aggressive dangerous extraordinarily flawed things we so clearly are. We would be nothing but robots! O the horror the horror. I don't get that. Let us all be meat puppets with only the self-delusion of free will and none of the murder, mayhem and misery. O Lord, take my free will, I never had much use for it anyway, it's clearly a dangerous thing. Wind up this unethical experiment now.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-15 00:00:00 Jay Freedman This was enjoyable and accessible; but some parts were oversimplified, and the author's presuppositions skipped ahead of his argument. Don't get me wrong, I agreed with much that he said. I just thought he could have drawn out some of his arguments a little further, specifically in the last section on objections.