Atheists have no quarrell with Deists. They especially can sympathize with those taking such a view who did not have the advantage of explaining the appearance of design through Darwin’s theory.
Why do you try so hard to claim Deists for your “team”? I don’t see how you have anything in common with them that you don’t have with atheists. Whether they believe in a god or not, it is certainly not your god. It is what they often refer to as Nature or some undescribable “higher power.”
Best,
Leela
I agree with some of what you’re saying here, Leela, but what Charlemagne has in common with deists that he
doesn’t have with atheists is, quite clearly, a belief in God.
Also and more importantly, I realize that you’re not alone in your assertion that the God of the deists is not the Christian God. Blaise Pascal asserted quite confidently that ‘‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’’ is
not ‘‘the God of the philosophers,’’ but I couldn’t disagree more.
The philosophical concept of the First Cause, Prime Mover, etc. can seem very different from the Christian idea of the Triune God, but I think that from philosophy alone it becomes clear even that the Supreme Being must be personal in nature and morally perfect. Even atheists agree - why else would they use the problem of evil against Christianity if they didn’t see that if there is a god, He
must be good?
I don’t deny that there are some difficulties in conflating the deistic God whose existence philosophy can prove with the God of Abraham, but there’s nothing that
prevents the two from being the same.
You will not find an atheist website that does not use the founding Fathers to hammer Christianity. The same websites conveniently ignore the fact that the Founding Fathers unanimously hammer atheism.
Well said. You make a very good point.
Yet, Charlemagne, I disagree with what you’ve implied elsewhere - that this country was in any sense founded on Christian principles. Theistic principles are not ‘‘Christian’’ enough to be called Christian.
Even John Adams himself, the
only founding father who can be said to be Christian (in my fallible opinion, that is), said -
as quoted earlier in this thread - that the United States of America was
not founded on Christian principles.
The founding fathers believed in God, yes. But the majority of them were deeply hostile to core Christian truths such as the Incarnation - not just Jefferson (who compared the Incarnation to the pagan myth of Zeus’ cerebral generation of Athena) but Franklin, Madison, even Washtington (later in life), etc.
Religiously speaking, neither atheists nor orthodox Christians can claim the founding fathers as allies.
a) That they retained formal membership in certain Christian denominations is no commentary on their actual beliefs - especially when it comes to beliefs that our country may or may not have been founded upon. It has been made abundantly clear by many, many quotations that with the
possible exception of John Adams, the original Founding Fathers were
not Christians.
b) You cannot equate even 18th century Deism with Christianity. The Deistic God may be similar to the Judeo-Christian ‘‘God the Father’’, but Deists vehemently denied
crucial Christian dogmas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation (!). Seriously, without a firm commitment to the Incarnation, no belief system can be even remotely close to being accurately called ‘‘Christianity.’’
But there is a larger issue at stake here, which TheAtheist summed up quite well:
I wish to raise a simple objection to all of this - as it is actually one of my largest pet peeves.
Why do we even care if a particular figure is on a “team?”
Take the case of Albert Einstein. A lot of disingenious statements have been made about the man regarding the status of his orientation toward religion.
Taking all of his quotes out of context - can portray the man as a Christian or a Jew.
Much to my dismay, Richard Dawkins also engaged in this game of semantics and attempted to claim that Einstein was being “poetic” about his orientation toward nature and the idea of a god and that he was in fact an atheist.
I find the great irony of course is that Einstein (who by proper historical scholarship ~ ie: People more engaged with rendering his views and not invested in this debate - is in fact a Deist) did have a number of telling remarks against people who engaged in such debates.
To paraphrase him: the Bible is in fact mythical, but nothing to be sneered at as it was man’s attempt to understand the universe - and atheists who waste their time being angry and argumentative have lost the whole narrative (that being the majesty of the universe and attempts to investiage it).
I ask all of you : What profit us if Einstein were a Christian or an atheist?
Or if the Founding Fathers were a cabal of secret Freemasonic Deists?
If Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Benedict XVI, Billy Graham, TD Jakes, etc. all decided to convert to Radical Islam tomorrow and praised Osama Bin Laden as their leader (a most unlikely event
):
… I would expect everyone here to be
unmoved in their positions regarding the existence or non-existence of a deity.
Mind you - i’m sure all of us would be blinking and wondering what the heck just happened ~ and perhaps we could all collectively agree they’ve gone insane.
BUT - the movement of figures to and from “teams” shouldn’t make much of a difference to anyone.
The whole “team model” is predicated on the idea that people who self identify with a religion, or even a philosophy or political ideology have their interactions shaped by
only that particular standpoint.
I’m sure the most reflective of us can agree - human interaction is neither that simplistic nor that boring.
Thank you, Atheist. I couldn’t agree more. I’m always uneasy when this conversation about the founding fathers comes up, but I can never explain why.
You have hit the nail on the head and identified the problem with this whole approach.
