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That's one of the most damning reviews I have ever read.

The Idiot

If you divide that quote by Pi, using a post-structuralist hermeneutic and a post-Bayesian epistemology with feminst sensibilities, and then subtract the number you first thought of (after smoking some of Portwyne's mushrooms) you get some very profound thoughts.

Actually I thought that this;

"The difference between the self-aware believer ... and the conscious and deliberate atheists is not a disagreement over whether or not to add one item [God] to the sum total of really existing things. It is a conflict about the policies and possibilities for a human life: between someone who accepts the dependence of everything on divine gratuity and attempts to respond with some image of that gratuity ... and someone who denies the dependence and is consequently faced with the unanswerable question of why any one policy for living is preferable to any other"

...was very cogent and compelling, a far better quote than the one above. If there's just a few more of those thoughts, that book might be worth a read, particularly as i'm a massive Dostoevsky fan.

Flip me, that's twice in one month I've found myself agreeing with Eyebrow Williams.

It is worth noting that Andrew Brown completely misses Williams point here. Assuming Williams means what you and I take him to mean Bernard (that Theism means more than adding one more thing to your list of what exists; it involves reinterpreting everything else on the list as well.) Williams may mean something else entirely.
He may also mean that because everything that exists depends on God, the term "exists" is too weak to describe God. I can't see that this sort of language is very helpful, and it leads to situations were reviewers like Brown think you are half-way to Atheism.

Graham Veale

Oh, I don't know.

While God may be the source of all existence, He doesn't "exist" in the way that "existing things" do. Rather he is the very act of existing, that is shared in by all existing things. That is not the same as being "one existing thing", and certainly not "one existing thing among many"


Don't want to stray too far down the Portwyne route, like, but i think there is something to be said for that kind of language.
:)

Bernard

'Eyebrow'

Was that 'East London' for highbrow?

pk

Peter Klaver

Did you know the Pope was a Catholic? Just while you're stating the obvious I thought I'd join in.

Max Plank didn't interpret quanta realistically at first. Niels Bohr had a model of the hydrogen atom that was soon overturned. Things we can't see might exist. Arthur Compton did experiments that persuaded De Broglie that matter might have an associated wave. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. If you're going to weigh in with facts a good A level Physics text book might contain, why can't I join in?

I only just spotted this post by Graham a few days ago. In a thread I wasn't even commenting in. And totally off-topic for this thread. I seem to have really hit a nerve in him, haven't I?

Yummie.