ROWAN WILLIAMS ON THE NEW ATHEISTS

I've had a chance over the last few years to have some dialogue from time to time with those who are called the new atheists including Richard Dawkins and AC gring and also of course Philip pulman the novelist I remember doing a dialogue with him when his Works were performed at the National Theater and a couple of things that strike me about the world of the new atheists I think would be these first of all how remarkably cyclical things are things come around so that a lot of the problems that are now raised as if they were very original are in fact the sort of issues that were raised 50 even 100 years ago I picked up a book A couple of years ago published in the 1930s which dealt with scientific objections to religion and it's actually very much the same as what we've been used to in the last couple of years so that's one thing I'd observe that there's not a great deal that's hugely new about this argument the second thing that strikes me is the the way in which very often the new atheists begin from what they take for granted is the Christian Viewpoint or the Christian picture of God without bothering very much to look at some of the more sophisticated or more developed ideas of God that are around in the tradition so that if you put Richard Dawkins down with s Augustine rather than what he thinks is an editorial from the Tex and Christian magazine he might a bit surprised so one of the questions is what is the god that the new atheists are attacking and very often of course it's a God that Christians themselves don't really believe in it's a god who's simply a member of the universe a thing among other things which is certainly not what Christians have traditionally thought about and the the last thing about this debate is something to do with the nature of science and the nature of explanation and the nature of religion you see I don't believe that originally religion was meant to be me about explanations it's much more that religious belief and practice are seen as a response a way of coping with and answering to something extraordinary that's coming to us a sense of of gift a sense that we are receiving a mystery a a richness from something quite Beyond us beyond our imagining and that's rather different from using religion to explain things as a kind of theory and so very often in confronting new atheists discussing with them I want to say yes of course the history of religious language and practice has often been pretty messy and sometimes corrupt and sometimes quite bad for people but within it all all the time there are these deep very profound critical principles which push us beyond what we're comfortable with intellectually and take us out into the deep

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Length: 2min 58sec (178 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2015