What I Believe by Anthony Kenny, Continuum, London – New York, 2006
What I Believe says
Compatiblism, the idea that human actions are free though
they can be pre-determined by God through physical and psychological causes, is
possible and God could know what you would do even if he doesn't look in the
future PAGE 49
My Comments
Compatiblism refutes God for it means that God could
cause us to freely make nicer decisions. He causes us anyway to make the bad
ones so it makes no difference to our freedom.
Compatiblism sounds suspiciously like hard determinism the view that our freedom
is an illusion and that all we do is caused by inner forces and that people are
just calling our actions free nevertheless.
What I Believe says
We go by our knowledge of people to be able to tell what
things like know, design and control mean. God is so different that we cannot
say he does these things and know what we mean. We cannot really say God has a
mind and when we don’t know what we are saying we are just spouting nonsense
PAGE 53
My Comments
True.
What I Believe says
The unbeliever can decide that he was wrong and start to
believe in religion. But the religious believer does not have freedom. He cannot
claim he has the right to change his mind and maybe lose the faith. This does
not make the faith of the religious person illogical or irrational or silly. A
secular liberal must hold that it would be wrong for him to become a narrow Nazi
PAGE 59
My Comments
Who is the most open to reason then? It is the
unbeliever. Who is the most humble then? It is the unbeliever. The religious
person IS irrational and arrogant. A secular liberal would indeed be very
anti-Nazi. But if he changed and became a Nazi he would then have to be very
anti-secular-liberal. When we adopt positions whether we care to admit it or not
we are rejecting and therefore hindering the power of a party or school of
thought. To say, “I am a Protestant but not anti-Catholic” is a contradiction.
If you really think you are right you want other people to believe what you
believe. And if you don’t think you are right then you are not a true Protestant
but a fake.
The liberal refuses to become a Nazi because he sees Nazism as evil. As long as
he is liberal he will hold that. But he will keep his mind open. If you believe
something you have to be in some way against other ideas. But that doesn’t mean
you are closed-minded. You would be open to accepting these ideas should the
evidence and case for them be sufficient.
The religious person has to be against other ideas that are incompatible with
his or her faith and cannot keep the mind open. They cannot say they are wrong
in matters of religious dogma. That is the difference.
What I Believe says
Papal authority is based on the idea that the pope succeeds St Peter as bishop of Rome which is dubious because there is no evidence that Peter was bishop of Rome or a bishop at all PAGE
60
My Comments
True.
What I Believe says
For centuries the official teaching of the Roman Catholic
Church was that only Catholics go to Heaven and then probably only a small
minority manage it and Augustine took Jesus to have meant that only a few are
saved when Jesus said that there are few that find the way to life. Cardinal
Newman believed that few will be saved PAGE 63
My Comments
The declaration of Pope Boniface VIII, “We declare, say,
define and proclaim to every human creature that if they are to be saved they
must of necessity be subject to the Roman Pontiff” (Unam Sanctam, 1302) is
cited. This was a message for every individual in the world. If anybody didn’t
hear the message it was to be told to him for it was his only hope. It tells us
that they have no hope without obedience to the pope and recognising him as the
head of the Church. This is very far from Roman Catholicism’s new doctrine that
invincible ignorance of the truth means that a person can be saved by doing
their best.
What I Believe says
Prayer to a God when one doesn’t believe in God but holds
that one isn’t sure if there is a God or not is no more irrational than shouting
for help when nobody might be there to hear you and agnostics may pray PAGE 64
My Comments
Then which God then should we pray to in case he exists?
Jehovah? Jesus Christ? Krishna? Satan? Zeus? The real God might be jealous and
mightn’t like the person who has the attitude, “Zeus, Jehovah etc. help me.”
God, in the Bible, says that he is a jealous God.
Kenny goes to Church to pray. This is irrational. It might be reasonable to pray
to God whose reality is doubtful in an emergency only.
Also, if you believe you cannot know if God exists right now, even if you think
there may be a possibility of finding out, isn’t it using him to pray to him?
Prayer would be seeking his help and if he wants to help he would make sure you
can know he exists.
The Bible forbids Christians to pray with idolaters. Would it not be worse to
pray with agnostics? At least the idolater is sure there is deity out there. And
Kenny does not believe in the Christian God of infinite power and love who is
outside time for he said that free will cannot agree with this God so he is
certainly an idolater for he rejects what Christendom says is the one true God
in favour of an inferior one whose existence he is not sure about.
If prayer were any good that would mean that God is powerful and helps. Then why
doesn’t he help people with their memories in matters relating to himself? If
there was such a thing as divine grace and the Catholic Church were the true
Church then clearly you would find you have an unusual ability to remember the
catechism and retain it. Memory is a thing independent of choice. We cannot make
ourselves remember anything. It just happens. God would not be interfering with
our freedom if he gave us a better memory for the realisations and evidences and
signs that point to his existence.
What I Believe says
When Descartes doubted everything he was unable to doubt
that he existed. The mind is a capacity not an activity. It is the power to gain
intellectual abilities. The most important of these abilities is the learning
and use of language. The will is the power to go after goals or ends that only
language users can formulate. Descartes did not take this seriously. When he
meditated and tried to doubt everything he would have seen that the words he
used did not come from him but from outside of him. Words and language came from
people outside of him. He tried to create a philosophy based on solely his own
ideas as if there was no external world which is impossible. PAGE 69
My Comments
Wrong. Descartes didn’t use the words in his meditations
but the concepts expressed by the words. He tried to be like a person who had
never seen, touched, heard, smelt or tasted anything. He experienced what they
experienced. There was nothing of the outside world involved in this.
What I Believe says
Behaviourism is wrong. It teaches that all that we think
or everything we do mentally just comes from the body. The way bodies behave is
not the same thing as mental life but only evidence for it PAGE 70
My Comments
The mind can be part of the body just like the brain of
the computer is a part of it. You don’t take the behaviour of a computer as
evidence that something separate from it is controlling it.
What I Believe says
Bodies and brains are physical things. Minds are not
physical for minds are capacities. This is not to say that the mind is a spirit.
The power of a round peg to fit into a round hole is not a physical thing but
nobody would imagine that it is a spirit. However the mind isn’t a physical
thing and doesn’t have length or breadth PAGE 71
I do not believe in life after death and this doesn’t bother me for it doesn’t
bother me that I was non-existent before the first moment of my existence. The
truth is that if I rise again I won’t be a member of the human species any more
if Christian descriptions of the resurrection body are anything to go by PAGE
164 - 165
My Comments
Minds are conscious and they can use a facility called
intelligence and can remember things and think. A mind that loses all things and
nothing is left only consciousness is still a mind. Such a mind is not a
capacity anymore. It is an activity. A mind with all the faculties is an
activity and is the capacity to think and remember and so on. Kenny is wrong.
The argument against resurrection is probably true. Whatever the Bible says
Jesus came back as it was not as a human being.
