Hi Chris, I am finding this a fascinating discussion, and appreciate robust comment when statements are unclear. Too often people read something and jump to conclusions without opening a dialogue, especially with loaded words like cosmic. It reminds me of a talk I went to last year where a leading theologian (NT Wright) was getting stuck into new-age Gnosticism, and used as his example Joni Mitchell's song Woodstock, which he claimed had the line 'we are starlight'. He saw this as an example of an airy new age falsity. I pointed out to him that Mitchell's statement was 'we are stardust' which is empirically correct, a point he didn't really appreciate.Chris OConnor wrote:Robert, I may have been reading too much into your writing style. Some of us are just too damn literal. When I heard "child of the cosmos" I thought of supernatural...metaphysical... magical...mumbo-jumbo, and from your follow-up post this wasn't what you were saying at all. So I apologize for not asking for clarification before I gave my premature assessment of your post. I was starting to get frustrated by a few other discussions happening concurrently in this forum and I jumped on your words as an emotional response. Your clarification was helpful.
I got my copy of Harrison's book yesterday and have read about eighty pages. He is an engaging and entertaining writer, but I think a basic flaw in his approach is that he defines God out of existence. By saying that only scientific evidence can be used to assess God claims, he ignores the issue of how evidence needs to be integrated into a coherent world view. My opinion is that coherence requires a religious outlook, in the original meaning of "re-binding" (legare is Latin for connect), in that the cosmos has a deep complexity and unity that science barely scratches.
Where Harrison points out contradictions between faiths, he gives a valuable guide to critical thinking in religion. However, a purely literal interpretation is inadequate to address belief, as many religious ideas are essentially mythic