Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays on the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, was awarded the Writers Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996 and a Somerset Maugham Award, and also inspired a Frankfurt Ballet production and a clown show at the Edinburgh Festival 2001. His second, The Child that Books Built, was described as ‘witty, compelling and elegant’ by the New Statesman. His third, Backroom Boys, was called a ‘beautifully written book’ by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Francis was our guest on Little Atoms in January 2011 to talk about his book Red Plenty, and he returns for a second interview to talk about his latest, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.
Little Atoms 249 – Francis Spufford – Unapologetic
Posted on October 19, 2012 by
Posted in: Little Atoms
5ecular4umanist
October 27, 2012
Having listened to the New Humanist interview with Francis Spufford I kind of knew what to expect here and wasn’t disappointed.
Basically, Spufford’s form of Christianity is the typical CofE watered down variety. He wonders why secular atheists are so anti-religion, because he thinks of himself as a nice chap. He doesn’t seem to accept the harm that continues to be caused in society by differing religious beliefs.
His idea of God as abstract and personal sounds more like deism. Conveniently, he states that physical explanations of the universe have no bearing on God’s existence, making a point of avoiding the “gaps” trap.
Asked why we don’t just worship the abstract God that is everywhere, i.e. the universe, Spufford basically says (paraphrasing) “It doesn’t seem right to me. Christianity is special, has imperfections, and reflects the imperfect state of the world.” That’s his excuse for choosing Christianity over all the other religions of the world, past and present.
When asked about his conversion to religion, he describes atheism as “an experience”, as if it’s just a phase people go through before they “see the light”. Sure, of course. How silly of me not to realise.
On “religious experience”, Spufford questions why people would want to explain such things as a biological/psychological phenomena. This says a lot for Spufford’s approach to understanding the world… better to dream up some mystical meaning than apply science to a problem.
Simon
November 1, 2012
I cannot get over how strange these ideas seem, and how this chap does not see them as strange. “It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.†said Sam Harris, and I think he’s right. If this chap said Thor instead of God, or Astrology instead of Christianity, we would think not take his ideas seriously. But upon what reason is a Christian God more plausible than “Thor” or astrology…?
Now, this might seem like arguing about nothing. Why does it matter if A believes “X” while B believes “not X”? Here’s my problem with (what I understand to be) this chap’s thesis: on what basis does he form his beliefs? All the way through he talks as if he believes X because it is a nice idea, or because it helps people to cope. (He gives many examples such as that God is real and a person and cares about humans and became a human.) But that isn’t a useful criterion to decide what’s true about the world. Yes, religious extremism is something we need to worry about. But this kind of watered-down religion has the same core, namely that it is fine to believe extraordinary claims for no good reason. The keeps alive the environment in which extremism can grow and people can justify to themselves horrific actions in terms of invisible mystical forces with no grounding in reality.
Of course, some people argue that there can be no evidence (from the outside world) about the truth of religious hypotheses. Somehow, by construction, they only apply to a non-testable domain. What this really means is: the world would the the same if God exists, of if God does not exist. In which case, “a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said” (to take Wittgenstein out of context).
And, like most responses to Dawkins, I am left with the impression that this chap has either not read or not understood Dawkins’ points.