Monday, March 26, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
An important discussion
I am trying to find snippets of time today to watch this:
Dialogue
In it, Sir Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher and agnostic moderates a dialogue - a friendly debate - between Dr. Rowan Williams, the current [though outgoing] Archbishop of Canterbury and Professor Richard Dawkins, the well known proponent of atheism and materialism. The dialogue lasts nearly an hour and a half, and I have only managed to view the first 20 minutes so far. But it is indeed worth the time to watch.
At this early point, if I were able to pose a question to Richard Dawkins, it would be along these lines: What, as an evangelist of atheism would you have to offer someone like myself who is dysfunctionally right-brained? That is, I am religious primarily because of intuition and because for me, a sense of poetry, art and beauty exists as integral to the universe about me and is also integral to myself as a part of this universe. Logic follows beauty in my breathing in and breathing out. In what I have heard from Prof. Dawkins to this point, mechanistic and chaotic chance take precedence in the essential nature of reality, and beauty and ugliness both are irrelevant byproducts of this process.
Years ago, I had a young girl student in a class I teach called Religion and Society in the Modern World, who was one of the few admitted atheists in the class when I conducted an informal survey. For her, unlike Prof. Dawkins, beauty was the first element she saw in the mechanistic universe. For her, it was primary, without denying the ideas of full atheism. I would find this position more appealing to my right-brained dysfunction, than Prof. Dawkins's approach. Put another way, poetry trumps physics, for me.
Now to other things - I hope to view more, and to view the video again.
Dialogue
In it, Sir Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher and agnostic moderates a dialogue - a friendly debate - between Dr. Rowan Williams, the current [though outgoing] Archbishop of Canterbury and Professor Richard Dawkins, the well known proponent of atheism and materialism. The dialogue lasts nearly an hour and a half, and I have only managed to view the first 20 minutes so far. But it is indeed worth the time to watch.
At this early point, if I were able to pose a question to Richard Dawkins, it would be along these lines: What, as an evangelist of atheism would you have to offer someone like myself who is dysfunctionally right-brained? That is, I am religious primarily because of intuition and because for me, a sense of poetry, art and beauty exists as integral to the universe about me and is also integral to myself as a part of this universe. Logic follows beauty in my breathing in and breathing out. In what I have heard from Prof. Dawkins to this point, mechanistic and chaotic chance take precedence in the essential nature of reality, and beauty and ugliness both are irrelevant byproducts of this process.
Years ago, I had a young girl student in a class I teach called Religion and Society in the Modern World, who was one of the few admitted atheists in the class when I conducted an informal survey. For her, unlike Prof. Dawkins, beauty was the first element she saw in the mechanistic universe. For her, it was primary, without denying the ideas of full atheism. I would find this position more appealing to my right-brained dysfunction, than Prof. Dawkins's approach. Put another way, poetry trumps physics, for me.
Now to other things - I hope to view more, and to view the video again.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Interesting conference
Any who can make it to the U of T next week (alas, I cannot!) might find this very interesting:
Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations Symposium
Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations Symposium
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