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Problems of Belief & Unbelief

Theism, History and Experience

Timothy Chappell argues that standard arguments against God miss the point.

“In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the dead all slumbering around it, under their white memorial-stones, ‘in hope of a happy Resurrection’: – dull wert thou, O reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up in darkness) it spoke to thee – things unspeakable, that went into thy soul’s soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though ‘in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,’ yet manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew.”
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Book 1, Chap II

I

First we should distinguish theism from mere belief in the supernatural. The latter, illustrated by ghost-stories, tales of second sight, rituals and sacrifices to prevent the failure of a harvest or a navy, the consulting of the sacred geese, and the throwing of the salt always over one’s left shoulder, is a human universal, and was known even to our Pleistocene ancestors. A more hostile name for this is superstition.

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