Isn’t Belief in God just a Childish Myth?

‘Even without physical abduction, isn’t it a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?’

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

‘... every primitive who looks out on the world about him and wonders what god made it, is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such questions as infantile.’

David Bentley-HartAtheist Delusions

1. The problem of first cause

2. The problem of design

The anthropic principle

“There is a very tight-knit series of constraints... on the way our world must be in order that we are here to observe it.”

The Way the World IsJohn Polkinghorne

3. The problem of beauty

‘You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and then your own response to them a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes.’

C S LewisOn Living in an Atomic Age

4. The problem of religion

sehnsucht – blessed longing

“our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee”

ConfessionsAugustine

Peter Berger in Rumours of Angels cites ‘signals of transcendence’

•Order•Play•Hope•Damnation•Humour

‘I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism; if I am asked to convert others by it, I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts.’

John Henry NewmanThe Grammar of Assent

‘The word of life is offered to a man, and on its being offered, he has Faith in it. Why? Because he has a love for it, his love being strong, though the testimony is weak.’

John Henry NewmanSermons chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief