Denys Turner in The Atheism Tapes

Notes from some of the things Denys Turner said in the clip Jonathan Miller in conversation with Denys Turner. 

Being a card-carrying atheist is no longer intellectually interesting in the way it still was in the 19th century. Indifference is more troubling, as it ceases to be astonished and rules out certain questions, especially “Why is there any thing at all?”

“There is all the difference in the world between a question concerning HOW things are and the question concerning THAT things are.”

Classically: creatio ex nihilo. This is an odd expression. Aquinas pointed that there isn’t a kind of thing that the name “nothing” names.

“God is not any kind of thing...We’re not talking about something that’s on the map of creation. We’re talking about something that’s off the map of creation.”

Hence the need for negative theology, “knowing that you don’t know what you’re talking about”. Theology is “the sense that on the other side of our language is something which sustains it but which can’t be contained within it.” Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein at the end of his Tractatus logico-philosophicus “What underlies how we say things cannot itself be said.” [strongly interpretative rendering of “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”]

Bertrand Russell: “the world is simply given” – better: “the world is gifted, it has been given to us by a good and loving God”

The language of gift presumes intentionality but beware the language of purpose. Gifts can be gratuitous; a thing can exist simply because this sort of thing is beautiful.

Either everything, in some way or another, including failure, reveals God, or the atheist position is correct.

Believing in God and believing in fairies

Believing in God and believing in fairies are two completely different things. David B. Hart puts it well:

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baháí, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something poised over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. …

Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact. …

At a trivial level, one sees the confusion in some of the more shopworn witticism of popular atheism: “I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden,” for instance, or “All people are atheists in regard to Zeus, Wotan, and most other gods; I simply disbelieve in one god more.” … Beliefs regarding fairies are beliefs about a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional shape and rational content as beliefs regarding one’s neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found. … God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for either photons or (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or sacramental or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principle; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.

The question of God, by contrast, is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. … Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us. (The Experience of God, pp. 30, 32, 33-34)

Cited from https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/god-elves-and-silly-atheists/