The morning began with New York City heaving its traffic in the normal way. With cameras tagging along, Hitchens and Wilson found themselves a coffee shop ...
To Gabe
"What standard are you using to say that something is beautiful?"
The same standard everyone else use, their own. Everyone, atheists and theists, have their own personal standard. A work of art may be beautiful to one Christian/atheist, and ugly to another Christian/atheist. Beauty is largely in the eye of the beholder. You don't have to believe in God to be a beholder.
This sounds like a variation of the transcendental arguement to me. (ie Standards of beauty/music/art/wisdom/[insert whatever you want] exists, therefore God exists.
It's pretty weak.
lori
Posted: November 04, 2008 3:17 PM
I do agree with one of you, Edward Aldrich, who says, "After all, if you got a present in the mail, you'd send a thank you note back, you wouldn't just tack it up to your door to notify the general public of your state of "thankfulness". " Implicit in the word (or feeling) of thankfulness, is the assumption of and object of that thanks. HOWEVER, I think we're missing the larger point here which goes beyond mere thankfulness and on to a sense of awe that such incredible design and perfection of beauty exist at all. I tried to very hard to be an athiest, but the final straw came one night when, living on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the moonflowers outside my window woke me up; they open only by the light of the moon and on that night the stars, always larger than life on the equator and a partial moon combined to make these flowers more than transluscent and irredescent; they positively burned with an unearthly white light that I new it was no 'accident'.
Jon
Posted: November 04, 2008 12:47 PM
Something as subjective as a sense of asthetics is a very weak rationale for a belief in a deity.
Another Atheist
Posted: November 04, 2008 5:54 AM
"The difference, and never so stark as in this debate, is that one man reacts into extreme gratitude and thankfulness for the marvels of reality, while the other struggles to prevent that reaction, but is unable to even check his use of religious language and vocabulary in doing so." No, the difference is that one man yearns for something beyond reality, while the other likes it as it is. That doesn't mean it's paradoxical of Hitchens to express his love for the universe in near-transcendent terms, for the beauty in the physical world (including our perception of it) has risen from simplistic and indifferent materials, thus transcended itself into something more grand and elegant. The atheist sees this as extraordinary enough without bringing a deity who cares about human affairs into the equation. In the words of a smart man: "The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies".
Edward Aldrich
Posted: November 03, 2008 4:32 PM
How can one just "be thankful," without an object? It's not like "being short" or "being happy," things which are self-contained. Thanks implies an object. After all, if you got a present in the mail, you'd send a thank you note back, you wouldn't just tack it up to your door to notify the general public of your state of "thankfulness".
Jason
Posted: November 03, 2008 3:51 PM
I think a more honest assessment of the difference between the two men would be to say that one feels compelled to direct feelings of gratitude & thankfulness at someone or something, while the other is content to admire the same marvels with a general feeling of awe and wonder. There is a difference between thanking someone and just being thankful, after all - every feeling we have doesn't necessarily have to be directed at some being or other.
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