Gairney Bridge

I recently stumbled across these letters, by a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, written to the poster child for modern atheism (at least in the UK), Richard Dawkins. The author makes some good comments. The first of these was actually posted on Dawkins’ website, followed by about 500 comments of the typical vitriolic responses. Here are the links for the letters:

Letter One

Letter Two

Here are a couple of quotes taken from the second letter:

I promise you I really tried hard to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic, but I just couldn’t get there. One New Years Eve I even prayed to a God I was not sure even existed “Oh God, if you are there, show me and I will serve you the rest of my life”.  There was no voice from heaven.  No flashing light.  And as far as I could see the prayer remained unanswered.  Until one Sunday I decided that after all I would go to church.  I went to a small Scottish Presbyterian church beside the sea, down from those same cliffs, and as I listened to the sound of the plain singing of the psalms of the Bible, and heard the waves of the sea splashing against the walls of the church, it struck me what a fool I had been. Of course God existed.  Nothing else made sense.  You cannot explain beauty or evil, creation or humanity, time nor space, without God. Or at least you can, but to my mind the materialistic, atheistic explanation is emotionally, spiritually and above all intellectually inadequate.  Indeed it takes a great deal of faith to be an atheist.

 You cite Carl Sagan from his Pale Blue Dot.  It is worth quoting in full again – “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is much better than we thought!  The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander more subtle, more elegant?  Instead they say,’ No, no, no!  My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’  A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths”.  That is brilliant.  I would shout Hallelujah if it were not for the fact that this would immediately caricature me as a tub thumping evangelical!  I think the modern Christian church in the West has on the whole to hold up its hands and admit guilt. Mea culpa.We have too often reduced God to a formula, belief to a system, and worship to a happy clappy feel good floor show.   Our God is too small.  But that is because he is our God and not the God of the Bible.  Not long after becoming a Christian I came to understand and appreciate the writings of John Calvin and others who followed his particular line of biblical teaching.  I loved it. They portrayed the God of the Bible as magnificent, powerful, deep, glorious, sovereign, worthy of praise.  They did not put him in a box, indeed they argued that by very definition God could not be boxed.

Good stuff, imho.