Jose Carillo's English Forum - Advice and Dissent

ADVICE AND DISSENT

This section features discussions on education, learning and teaching, and language with particular focus on English. The primary subjects to be taken up here are notable advocacies and contrary viewpoints in these disciplines and their allied fields. Our primary aim is to clarify matters and issues of importance to language and learning, provide intelligent and useful instruction, promote rational and critical thinking, and enhance the individual’s overall capacity for discernment.

Is the world really watched over by a loving God?

What meaning, if any, could be given to the idea that the world is watched over by a loving God?

To answer this question, a British philosopher named John Wisdom wrote a short horticultural parable in 1944 for a professional journal, igniting a controversy about the existence of God that ran for several years before it finally subsided. Anthony Gottlieb, former executive editor of The Economist, revisits Wisdom’s tale in “Of God and Gardens,” an article he wrote for the Winter 2009 issue of Intelligent Life magazine.

God as Gardener

Artwork from moreintelligentlife.com

Gottlieb says that Wisdom’s parable about gardening has become timely again because religious apologists have argued themselves into a frightful muddle. “A slew of books aimed at rebutting the so-called ‘New Atheists’—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—has unintentionally given new life to an old controversy about the meaningfulness of statements about God,” he explains. He then suggests that “a wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.”

Read Anthony Gottlieb’s “Of God and Gardens” in Intelligent Life now!

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