Richard Dawkins has likened belief in God to belief in the tooth fairy. I have often encountered arguments from intolerant atheists on these lines. The atheist comes up with a definition of what constitutes 'God' that is simplistic and naïve. He then points to the naivety of this concept of 'God' and then argues on this basis that to believe in God is absurd - the 'straw man' technique. Dawkins' technique often involves taking the beliefs of fundamentalist fringe religious groups as representative of religious beliefs in general and then claiming that religion is, in general, absurd.
In Catholic and Orthodox churches the place of scripture, the place of the Bible, is central, along with the Apostolic tradition that, in part, created canonical scripture. The authority of scripture is validated by the history of the Church. On the other hand a Unitarian may pick up a copy of the Bible and 'warm' to it as a source of religious inspiration. For the Unitarian the Bible, and any other scripture or source of spiritual inspiration, is validated by its usefulness in pragmatic terms. However the central Reformation dogma could be summed up by the phrase 'scripture alone'. Scripture, canonical scripture, is regarded as God's interface with mankind. Here, I believe, the Reformed churches fall between these two stools. By what authority is the Bible deemed to be God's Word? The answer is, it seems, by the authority of the individual Protestant in his act of deeming this book to be God's Word. Well, by his faith, perhaps.
Around the time of the Reformation other changes in the way people perceived reality took place. The mechanistic, and of course very successful, science of Descartes, Bacon and especially Isaac Newton created the perception in much of Western humankind that the world was an essentially material place with a God that was separate, unseen and unknowable except through the study of the Bible. This was in contrast with the medieval paradigm where mankind perceived reality as a hierarchy of being involving a continuum of states from the inanimate material, the living, the faithful departed and on to the angelic and to God at the summit. Indeed the modern physical sciences could be seen as closer to this model than the naïve materialism of Newtonian physics in that they describe a layered reality that incorporates spirit. Newton's model gave rise to the perception of an entirely deterministic universe which gave support to the Calvinistic concept of predestination.
Outside Biblical tradition, from an anthropological standpoint, the legend of Eden could refer to the tribal societies for which the forces of evolution designed humanity. Loving ones neighbour as oneself in such social settings is near to automatic. Self interest and group interest overlap to an extreme degree. The transition to civilization creates a situation where our essential and original nature becomes perverted. However Calvinism holds that it has become utterly depraved. This is patently untrue. Unless one is a psychopath one has some concept of good and evil which can be updated as new information becomes available, and one has the capacity to chose to at least attempt to put this knowledge into practice. Practical faith in Jesus involves striving to act in this way even if the good effects of our actions are not always immediately apparent. If we strive to forward God's plan by acting on the advice of Jesus as best we can we will have done our duty.
The Calvinist interpretation of the Christian message involves the idea that we are, since the Fall, incapable of good. The belief that the Sacrifice of God's Only Son on Calvary has purchased salvation for those who firmly hold this to be true is surely an exercise in vacuous metaphysics. Jesus died, as Socrates died, in order to live authentically. Salvation does not occur in a reality separate from this world.
The first Western philosopher Thales said, not without an element of ambiguity, that "everything is full of gods." That mainstream modern Western man tends to regard experience of God as pathological is an entirely culturally relative situation. Dawkins' blindness is an extreme example of a way of looking at reality, a model by which we negotiate reality, that has long become dysfunctional.
And if we forget to pray for the angels, as Leonard Cohen puts it, the angels will forget to pray for us.

Brendan Burke MA(Phil)
2 October 2008 Cork Unitarian Church.