Voltaire vs. The Bible
One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker. — Voltaire (1694-1778)
Who is Voltaire? Exactly. (for the curious, he was a Big Name philosopher)
There is an anecdote around, that within 50 years of Voltaire’s death his house was owned by the Geneva Bible Society and his printing press used to pump out the very thing whose demise he declared. The anecdote is false (see page 14 of this journal [pdf]) but nevertheless illustrative.
No book has been subject to such attack, so often banned or burnt, so scrutinised, so despised, or so challenged as has the Bible. Yet, 200 years after Voltaire, he is forgotten and the Bible is trusted by more people than ever before. It has withstood the attacks of millenia.
Why?
Comments
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 am
Because in between being banned, burnt, scrutinised, despised and challenged, it’s loved, revered, printed out of all proportion (it was the first output of the very first printing press), distributed to everyone possible (look in your hotel room drawer), methodically defended (nothing on earth has more apologists or apologetics organisations), accepted without question (not everybody needs or bothers to look for a defensible reason), forced upon people (childhood indoctrination via home schooling, Sunday school and sectarian private schools, and going further back, the Christianisation of African slaves on American plantations was used as a rationale for slavery itself) and generally wielded as a symbol, a prerequisite to salvation and a blunt instrument. Not everybody does the above, but it’s been done and it is done.
So the implication that the Bible has lasted for two thousand years all by itself simply because it’s true rings a bit hollow. You have to give your proselytising predecessors some credit.
You’re also very hard on Voltaire. He’s not exactly forgotten if you’re talking about him, is he? In France he’s revered as a champion of civil rights. Elsewhere, of course, he’s right up there with all the ”Big Name” philosphers, and his books are in most university libraries. He wasn’t even an atheist; he was against most organised religion, hence the quote, but he believed in his own way:
“What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”
Doesn’t gel with your own definition of faith, but still…
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:56 am
“You’re also very hard on Voltaire.”
That’s true. I was over doing it for effect.
“So the implication that the Bible has lasted for two thousand years all by itself simply because it’s true rings a bit hollow. You have to give your proselytising predecessors some credit.”
Another good point. But there must have been something for the apologists to defend, as well as something for the people to love. The way some people go on about the Bible that statement alone would sound like a stretch.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Eventhough voltaire is not forgotten,the Bible also is not forgotten..Look around and you see in nature things that must have been created by a highly intelligent being.Romans 1:20
I see it hard to believe that some accident could create the sky,the oceans,the sun,stars,the cycles of life that occur after its kind as told in Genesis 1..
I’d rather take a chance on the Bible and go to Heaven than to reject God and burn in Hell Rev.20:10-14,Luke 16 ch.,starting at vs.19
If we believe in a man like voltaire,whom we have never seen,how can we not believe in God who we never have seen but left his handy work in our very nature.
Thanks
December 22nd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Could you be more specific, Calvin? Perhaps give us an example of something in nature which must have been created by a highly intelligent being? Or a sign of His handiwork in our own nature?
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 am
Hello Friend,
I was talking about the trees,sky,weather,birth cycle of humans and of animals..they all occur at a specific time over and over.like trees and vegetation will produce it’s own kind like God mentions in Genesis chapter 1..
Gen.8:22 as long as the world stands we will experience hot and cold weather..To me how can a big boom create accuracy and certain seasons of the year.Because if you don’t believe it it does not make sense.but have you ever wondered how birds know how to migrate and find better weather in the cold seasons and come back in the warm seasons?this is what I mean in Rom.1:20
Thanks again for your reply,have a very great day and holiday season..
Calvin
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:54 am
Calvin, what if certain weather happens at certain times because the similar atmospheric conditions and temperature resulting from a similar position of the Earth relative to the sun and moon causes it to happen?
What if trees have been selected by nature over a very long time which keep to a yearly schedule to prevent their seeds from dying in the winter?
What if some birds didn’t migrate in the winter, and died, and migrating birds today are the descendants of those who felt the cold and flew away in time?
What if the Big Bang contained an almost unlimited amount of matter and energy, and when left to its own devices for billions of years, these substances had the opportunity to draw together and combine in every possible way until some regularly rotating systems emerged?
What if the author of Genesis, who was a human living on Earth, observed that these things always happen, and then decided to give God the credit for all of it whether or not He actually did anything?
What if the fact that you can’t see how something could have happened naturally doesn’t actually mean there’s no possible way?
Merry Christmas.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Well my friend,This is what I believe (what’s been said earlier) but I can’t force you to believe it just because I do..I was trained up in church from a small child and I’m now a preacher and a teacher..I firmly believe in God and his Son Jesus and that the Bible is true..but Jesus says “Whosoever will come to him freely” Revelation 22:17.. Anyway thanks for your comments and I hope you enjoy the holidays and the new year..you’re welcome to write back any time..I always hope and like to make new friends,have a great evening..
Take care,Calvin:)
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Interesting exchange – I commend you both on your civility! I hope I may chime in with my thoughts?
Creation is one big reason I believe in a Creator, but with a slightly different emphasis to Calvin.
For me, looking at Creation is like looking at a jumbo jet. I would imagine that a person who had never before seen a plane would be amazed to watch it, and more amazed still to ride in it. They might well suppose some magic is at work. I, however, can explain how its motor works, I understand the physics of lift, and have some idea of the process of its construction.
This knowledge removes the need to jump to magic as an explanation. Yet, the more I understand the plane, the more amazed I become, and the more certain I am that it has some intelligence behind its design.
So it is with Creation. It isn’t (usually) the gaps that reinforce my theism, but rather the explanations! Studying physics at uni, reading New Scientist, I constantly find that the more I learn about our world, its phenomena and their explanations, the more I think ‘this has been created!’
I want to emphasise that knowing how something happens or even how it came to happen so, does not in any way diminish my wonder at the fact that it happens and the conviction that it happens so for a reason.
The sheer, unnecessary beauty of things blows my mind – a sunset, a wave, snow covered trees against a blue sky, the milky way, a rose (a rose!), DNA, fundamental equations, everywhere you turn, big or small, you find beauty. God is an artist!
The improbability of… well… most things. (Noteably, the cosmological constants)
That anything exists at all – one gap I’m happy to rest in. There was a beginnning, so there!
Us. Our intelligence, creativity, personality, compassion, and, above all, thirst for meaning.
I’m aware that this is shot through with Paley’s Watch. I remember at uni they seemed to shoot it down, but I did a quick google and couldn’t really come up with what was wrong with it (I’m sure you can help me out, SmartLX =D). Arguments from analogy are weak, it’s true, but it can be formulated without using an analogy-based argument. One criticism was that we can explain the ‘watch’s’ formation in terms of naturalistic principles, (natural selection), but, as I’ve already said, knowing how it formed doesn’t address why it keeps time, or why it is beautiful, or even why those naturalistic processes produce that object in the first place.
I guess, I could sum up my thoughts by saying: when you think about physics or sit on your surfboard in at an amazing beach at dawn… it takes more faith to be an atheist.
December 24th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Yeah, thanks for your comments too, Calvin. Happy 2009.
Before I forget, henceforth my name in each post is a link to something on my own site with a similar subject to the post.
Hayesy, since you asked, there are two main problems with Paley’s watchmaker argument.
- The argument declares that we simply know that the watch is created, but doesn’t say how we know that. The main indicator is not the watch’s complexity at all, but its artificiality. It consists of tiny pieces of pure, shaped, polished metal and glass, which we know cannot appear in nature, at least not together.
- As you say, we can explain the formation of many complex natural objects in terms of naturalistic principles. Their formation often DOES explain their function, as they survived because they evolved handy abilities. Their beauty is in the eye of human beholders, whose sense of beauty has itself evolved to appreciate colour, smoothness, regularity and symmetry as indicators of overall health in living things (mates, pets, edible plants).
When you switch targets and ponder possible sources for the processes themselves, the origins of chemistry and biology, you’re making a larger argument concerning the whole universe, and it’s a whole other kettle of fish. Importantly, you’ve conceded that those processes can have happened, however they came about, and the watchmaker argument has failed its specific objective.
A big issue with the way you’ve phrased your own argument, which is the Argument from Design applied to anything you can think of, is that you call the universe “Creation”. It gives away that you’ve already assumed on some level that everything was created, before you even begin to argue. It’s not on the level of Ray Comfort, who apparently thinks “Creation must have had a Creator” is a perfect self-contained argument, but there’s still an element of circular reasoning.
To a lesser extent you may be doing the same thing when you rhetorically ask “why”; perhaps you simply mean “how”, but if you mean there’s some kind of intent behind these phenomena then you’re already presuming a guiding intelligence.
Think of the “sheer, unnecessary beauty” around you. These things aren’t trying to be beautiful, they just are, and only to us. Beauty, like morality, likely doesn’t exist outside of human perception. The core physical attributes (mentioned above) which give the impression of beauty are so common that we see them everywhere.
It’s useful for us to apply our sense of beauty to the world at large, because we notice immediately when it’s marred somehow. Dark clouds across the sunset tell us to head for shelter. A gray shape in the smooth water tells us to paddle for shore and yell, “SHARK!” A dot of the wrong colour on a rose tells us we might get stung if we get too close. A dot of the wrong colour on a microscope slide, on the other hand, might be a new kind of antibody which cures a disease.
Of course the world is amazing. Of course nature is beautiful. But that’s only because we find it so. It’s an entirely subjective premise, which is tough to base an argument on.
I’ll tell you what, being an atheist doesn’t take faith, but it does make use of a sense of the sublime – the realisation that things outside of you are so much bigger than you. The universe has near-infinite space, near-infinite materials and possibly infinite time, so the eventual natural occurrence of anything at all is hard to see as unlikely. If the universe itself seems unlikely, there are a truly infinite number of other universes which might exist as well. Of course we’re in a comfortable one, or we wouldn’t exist ourselves.
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
In physics, the second law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) This law describes the fact that all systems and elements in our Universe tend to disintegrate over time, dissipating energy as they go and falling to a lower order of available energy or organisation.
Therefore the second law of Thermodynamics proves that the theory of evolution is scientifically untenable…
God created everything!!
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Not exactly proof. Systems tend to get more disorganised over time, yes, but its possible for one system to get more ordered, as long as the total entropy in the universe increases.
Water freezing is an example of this. The entropy of that particular system decreases, but energy is released, which makes entropy increase in the surrounding environment.
So its possible that the universe started off ordered, and as part of its progressive loss of order some bits got what we see as order, as long as the rest of the universe got more disorganised, so that the total entropy of the universe still increases.
2nd law proves no such thing, but I still agree with your conclusion
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Nice one Hayesy. Seriously.