30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God & Reason

Fas­ci­nat­ing! It is amaz­ing to me that infin­i­tes­i­mal per­sons on this unfath­omable earth whose very birth was deter­mined by forces oth­er than their own, should have the gall to stand up and say, “I know there is no God” by the pow­er of my own rea­son. Your rea­son is flawed by thou­sands of fac­tors and it has no author­i­ty to declare God real or imag­i­nary. God is not reli­gion. Reli­gion is man-made and we could well live with­out it. God is real, not because you say he is or is not real, but because HE said it and he has the author­i­ty to declare it. You would have no rea­son (or imag­i­na­tion, or lan­guage or sci­ence) with­out God. When men trust in their own rea­son apart from God, they become fools. Only death will reveal what what is real to them because their hearts are hard­ened and they will not lis­ten to the truth.

Jan, you say that god is real because “he said it”?

Wow–I must’ve missed that announce­ment.

Well, you can have your own beliefs–but you can­not have your own facts. The fact is this: all gods are imag­i­nary.

Good luck with your delu­sion!

i love your posts! keep them com­ing :)

I have nev­er posed “the ques­tion”, but the answer giv­en is not very sat­is­fy­ing. It is cer­tain­ly fine to address the top­ic of the­ol­o­gy on a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to cul­ture and edu­ca­tion. It is also fine to do so through “writ­ers, aca­d­e­mics and sci­en­tists”. But if the point is to edu­cate (rather than indoc­tri­nate), it strikes me as a dis­ser­vice to read­ers to neglect the argu­ments of the writ­ers, aca­d­e­mics, and sci­en­tists (to say noth­ing of out­stand­ing the­olo­gians) who have offered remark­ably pow­er­ful chal­lenges to those who pro­fess the athe­ist posi­tion. This stuff is not hard to find.

Good one. An hour­long mon­tage rep­re­sent­ing a wide swathe of opin­ions on the divine… from not­ed athe­ists to, well, oth­er not­ed athe­ists.
It’s fun­ny that for hun­dreds of years you guys bitched about reli­gious exclu­sion and dog­ma, and then as soon as you accede to dom­i­nance you imme­di­ate­ly begin enshrin­ing your dog­ma and exclud­ing your oppo­nents from dis­course. A Sam Har­ris or a Richard Dawkins burns with an ide­o­log­i­cal dis­like of dis­sent as fierce­ly and pure­ly as a Torque­ma­da or a Salem town coun­cil ever did. Ah, the woes of an embit­tered and embat­tled pet­ty intel­lec­tu­al.

Hanoch and James…thank you for adding your two cents..you both offered more sense than the 100 com­bined “intel­lec­tu­als”.

First off, I agree with the Socrat­ic Dia­logue that” an unex­am­ined life is not worth liv­ing.” That being said, I com­mend all that remain teach­able, yet have a belief one way or anoth­er, from empir­i­cal evi­dence, rea­son, his­tor­i­cal data, per­son­al impact, etc. my belief, which should not be con­fused with the idea of faith, has been sus­pend­ed until fur­ther research enlight­ens. I sup­posed that would cat­e­go­rize me as an agnos­tic like Bertrand Rus­sel. How­ev­er, I did not say I com­plete­ly agree with him. On the con­trary, I would like to think a benev­o­lent God exist­ed and played a fun­da­men­tal role in our lives. Yet, one is not much of a metic­u­lous researcher of the sub­ject with­out tak­ing into account both argu­ments. Fur­ther­more, I must say that Chris­t­ian Apolo­get­ics, like C.S. Lewis, have them­selves pro­vid­ed thought­ful counter-argu­ments to anti-the­ists that I find intrigu­ing and per­sua­sive. I will quote Lewis so as not to mis­rep­re­sent him and to add sub­stance in this end­less debate. In “Mere Chris­tian­i­ty” Lewis declares,” Athe­ism turns out to be too sim­ple. If the whole uni­verse has no mean­ing, we should nev­er have found out that is has no mean­ing: just as, if there were no light in the uni­verse and there­fore no crea­tures with eyes, we should nev­er know it was dark. “. The oth­er I leave to you to look up if inter­est­ed and unin­formed, Lewis’ argu­ment from desire holds weight for my per­son­al pur­suit. Again, I must assert that I have sus­pend­ed judge­ment.