Cardinals religious and secular

Hard not be irritated by Dawkins, with his smug, killer question about the 'evidence' for 'God'. He must have read the standard theological rebuttals scores of times, that he is still treating the question of the existence of God as though it were a scientific hypothesis in competition with other and better ones. So maybe he doesn't get it. Not that I am persuaded, either, by the rebuttals, I mean.

Some of my best friends want to say that God is an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing? and it is certainly clear that this is not a scientific answer to a scientific question about why things are thus and so and not otherwise. But then, what kind of question is it, really?

It would perhaps be too crude to say something like, well, if there were a God then we should have an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, so long as we assume that God is not as it were a thing among other things. But then there is hardly an independent route by which we establish that there is a God whose existence gives us an answer to the question. It seems to me that talking of God at all here is an expression of wonder and wonder can be expressed in other ways, including by silence, a silence, moreover, within which possibilities present themselves that would not otherwise be available. But the God-talk just looks too like a reading back into Being of our own nature as rational and creative beings, so the mythological story is of rational and creative agency. The Buddhist turn, by contrast, equally following the silence, is to question the causalities of experience and selfhood.

But the fact, if it is a fact, that we can ask the question doesn't guarantee that there is an answer. And anyway, it's not so clear that the question is intelligible. It looks like the most general form of the question why are things like this rather than like something else? which is really the trick that Herbert McCabe relies upon. But there being nothing is not one of the ways in which things are ...

Nor does this leave us with the conclusion that it is 'just a brute fact, then, that there is anything at all' since 'brute fact' gets its sense of arbitrariness from a context in which there are reasons and explanations. How Wittgensteinian.


As for the official Cardinal who properly notes that God is not one thing among others ... the usual things, the Catholic Church can be socially and politically progressive, it stands for justice, is anti-war and against the death penalty, but then there are the no-go areas of the official teaching about homosexuality, contraception. women priests and so forth, about which it is not possible to have a public conversation because these public men and women have to speak like politicians committed to a policy whether they agree with it in private or not. And thank God the Church has no power.

Enough, this is just displacement activity. To the Self Evaluation Document. Once these were called self assessment documents until 'they' noticed what the acronym would be.