Monday 17 September 2012

The Eye of the Beholder

 Loving Father or Corrupt Cop

A "just so" story peddled by Unbelief is that the yellow brick road to the Wizard of truth is paved with objectivity.  One who seeks after truth successfully, the one who finds truth, will be marked by objectivity--the discipline of stepping outside of oneself and seeing things as they really are, in themselves. 

Of course absolute objectivity is non-existent in creatures, finite creatures.  The limitations of being a finite creature intrude upon all our attempts to be objective.  Our objectivity can always, ever, only be, of the relative kind. Relative objectivity proceeds by disclosing to self and others our limitations, cant, and biases--that is, our lack of objectivity. 

That being said every so often Unbelievers are remarkably honest about God and their subjective prejudices against Him.
  Take, for example, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel who argues for a relative objectivity which takes account of subjectivity.  In his own case, he acknowledges he is neither objective nor neutral when it comes to God:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.  [Cited in Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), p. 55.]
Nagel is relatively objective on the matter.  He is more aware of his own prejudices and subjectivity than most.  Not so in the case of the late Christopher Hitchens, whose passion frequently got the better of him:
There are . . . atheists who say that they wish the fable were truth but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or has relinquished belief only with regret.  To this I reply: who wishes that thee was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime and who regarded us as its private property even after we died?  How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. (Ibid.)
Hitchens conclusion that not a shred of respectable evidence exists for God's existence says it all.  After all, respectability is in the eye of the beholder.  And Hitchen's eye was riddled with bitter prejudice.  As Mitch Stokes puts it, where some people see a loving and caring father, others see a corrupt cop. 

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