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Dawkins and Anselm 1
Wednesday 31 October 2007
In his book “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins refers on pages 80-84 to Anselm and the ontological argument for God. Unfortunately Dawkins fails to do justice to Anselm and what he was saying. This blog entry is the first in a series which will attempt to put the record straight. Anselm was born at Aosta, Italy, in 1033, entered the monastery of Bec in Normandy in 1060, succeeded Lanfranc as Abbot in 1078, and as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. He died in 1109 and left a large number of writings, the most important of which are: the Dialogus de grammatico, the Monologium de divinitatis essentia sive Exemplum de ratione fidei, the Proslogium sive Fides quoerens intellectum, the De veritate, the De fide trinitatis, and the Cur Deus Homo?
“The second Augustine”, as Anselm had been called, starts out from the same principle as the first: he holds that faith precedes all reflection and all discussion concerning religious things. Unbelievers, he says, strive to understand because they do not believe; we, on the contrary, strive to understand because we believe. They and we have the same object in view; but inasmuch as they do not believe, they cannot arrive at their goal, which is to understand truth. The unbeliever will never understand.
In religion, faith plays the part played by experience in the understanding of the things of this world. Not to believe means not to perceive, and not to perceive means not to understand. Hence, we do not reflect in order that we may believe; on the contrary, we believe in order that we may arrive at knowledge. What a Christian should do is to strive, as humbly as possible, to understand Christian truth by believing it, to love it, and resolutely to observe it in his or her daily life.
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