Is God a Delusion? - Part 1

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Well, what do you think? Is God a delusion? Oxford professor for Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins would have us think so. I'm currently reading his book of the same title, an impressive attempt to intellectually dismantle polytheism, monotheism, deism, and agnosticism with words of reason derived from his love of the scientific method, relentless pursuit for truth, and solemnly held view that organised religion has traditionally been and remains a force for evil throughout the world. It is important to stress that his primary focus is the Abrahamic monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and naturally the weight of his arguments against the existence of a supernatural being leans heavily on Christianity as that is the one which he has most 'knowledge' and 'experience' with in his daily dealings, that is through the self-professed believers in the Christian God.

There are many who hold fast to religious creeds who would not touch this Darwinian lover's book even if an abundance of indulgences and miracles were granted an imprimatur from their local archbishop. Indeed, it is fair to say that Dawkins would most certainly have found himself a personae non grata in the not so distant past in Ireland (and still most certainly in present day Poland alongside the weirdly religious U.S. - 50% believing in the literal Genesis creation story) for espousing such notions in such an articulate and fearless fashion. For those of us who are in the region of a quarter of a century old (born around the period Karol Wojtyla was crowned Pope John Paul II), and have been limited in our reading apart from the proscribed canon of pre-consecrated literature, it may unruffle our feathers to accept and eventually assimilate knowledge and understanding that atheists have strong rational arguments backed up by clear empirical evidence for the views they hold, and the views they deem unworthy to be held.

Every tradition can hold aloft great names to support the legitimacy and profundity of their philosophical, ethical or theological systems of belief. For those impressed by names that strike the popular imagination, atheism certainly carries a lot of clout in terms of who it can proudly paint as fellow 'infidels' (I use this term not in a vitriolic sense towards atheists but rather to ridicule the religious fundamentalist idiots - as opposed to moderate religious folks - who cannot look outside their own narrow delusional world views and swallow the fact that Noah's Ark is a fable or that dinosaurs were actually wiped out more than 6,000 years ago).

Amongst the most well-known are:

The great physicist Albert Einstein who said "I do not believe in a personal God'.

Former American President Abraham Lincoln who once declared, "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession".

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who held the opinion, "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

Napolean Bonaparte (anybody who has read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' will know that the French General is not exactly a good ambassador for atheism, nevertheless I found the following viewpoint he had quite interesting) - "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."

Karl Marx (yes, he was bright and complicated but I deem Bakunin's foresight of the 20th century tyranny of State Communism as worthy of making anarchists the true victors of the First International Squabbles and from a humanitarian outlook Marxism should be flung into the dustbin of nasty ideological history-designers) - yet most thinkers, religious or not would agree with Marx's statement that religion 'is the opium of the people'.

I'm painfully realising that I have never given the make-up of my professed Trinitarian God much thought beyond superficiality - I suspect that I just did not have the tools for reasonable evaluation about what the Nicene creed meant and whether I actually believed or even understood what I was supposed to say at mass every Sunday. I have reasoned against atheists that their efforts to de-evangelise me were all well but I felt it would be impossible for them to understand the subjective experiences which had reinforced my beliefs in Jesus and the Trinitarian God. I hope to be disciplined enough to honestly write about my introspective journey over the coming weeks, as I once and for all (not meaning to sound like Tolstoy here - that bastion of black and whiteness professed in his fifties that he would find the meaning of life or committ suicide) delve deeper into why I am a baptised Roamn Catholic, why I have prayed, why I have served/played music/sang/prayed/cried during mass and other standard Catholic rituals - and why, since I have removed myself geographically from Dublin since our successful Ploughshares trial, have I quite simply and 'happily' learned to live without such rituals as offered by the Polsih church.