Confessing Evangelical

One of Richard Dawkins' main objections to religion (see previous posts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5) is that it is "aesthetically deficient" (Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God, p.146). As Dawkins writes (cited on p.146):

The universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe-inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organised religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited.

McGrath gives this both barrels:

The logic of this bold assertion is rather hard to follow, and its factual basis astonishingly slight.

Yes, the "medieval" view of the universe may have been "more limited and restricted than modern conceptions". But this was scarcely the fault of religion:

It reflected the science of the day, largely based upon Aristotle's treatise de caelo ("on heaven"). If the universe of religious people in the Middle Ages was indeed "poky", it was because they trusted the best cosmologists of the day to tell them what it was like. This, they were assured, was scientific truth, and they accepted it. They took it on trust. They were naive enough to assume that what their science textbooks told them was right.

But in any event, medieval conceptions of the universe weren't all that "poky" to start with. The prevailing view in the Middle Ages was the Ptolemaic system, "which located the earth at the centre of a vast, ordered cosmic mechanism":

On this grand view of the universe, the earth stood at the centre of a series of concentric spheres, each of which rotates about the earth according to its own predetermined rhythm. Beyond them lies the "empyrean" - a vast, eternal, infinite, and formless void.

The picture illustrating this post is a depiction of this Ptolemaic universe, taken from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493.

As McGrath continues:

It's not today's model of the solar system, and is wrong at just about every point ... but it's hardly a "poky little universe". Most medieval writers that I have read on the topic found the thought of cosmic vastness to be really rather awesome.

(That said, by our standards the medieval concept of "cosmic vastness" does seem a little, well, poky - as does, to be honest, the young-earth creationist notion that the universe is <10,000 years old. But that doesn't take away McGrath's core points, namely (i) the medieval universe wasn't quite as "poky" as Dawkins makes out, and (ii) in any event, almost no Christians today subscribe to that view of the universe anyway.)

If anything, it is the atheistic conception of the universe that is deficient. McGrath points out there are three main aspects to the "awe" that we can all experience in relation to the universe:

1. "An immediate sense of wonder at the beauty of nature."
   


2. "A derived sense of wonder at the mathematical or theoretical representation of reality."
   


3. "A further derived sense of wonder at what the natural world points to ... that the creation bears witness to its creator"

Christians and atheists alike can share in the first two types of awe (despite Dawkins' sweeping assertion that Christians cannot accept the second, but instead "feel cheated" when the natural world is explained by science). However, atheists such as Dawkins have closed themselves off to the third category of awe - the ability to say, with Bonaventure, that (p.153):

The creatures of the world lead the souls of the wise and contemplative to the eternal God ... every creature is by its very nature [a] kind of depiction and likeness of that eternal wisdom.