I recently watched a short web-interview with Richard Dawkins on the Washington Post website. The piece was entitled: “Divine Impulses: Richard Dawkins on “the arrogance of religious persons”.

I want to make a quick observation. Let’s say that there are two general types of believers in the world: Modern and Postmodern. Yes, this is an oversimplification. However, it is useful for the purpose of this post, which is to highlight a difference in the varieties of faith and to highlight different ways of engaging with “strident atheists,” as Dawkins says.

I’ve made several OST posts that discuss what I think to be the relationship between evidence as it relates to faith in God. It is always interesting for me to see what others have to say about the topic.

Tom Gilson, over at the always engaging blog, Thinking Christian, recently posted on this very topic of evidence and religion. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say:

Among present commentators, how is Jesus related to other figures of religious devotion like the Buddha or Muhammad or even New Agers?

One popular response is to reduce the relationship between Jesus and, say, the Buddha, to one of Right versus Wrong. Let’s call this view the “many paths, one goal” model of thought. Usually, it turns out that Jesus is Right and the Buddha is Wrong. Ravi Zacharias, a popular Christian theologian, philosopher and commentator recently gave a talk that focused explicitly on the zero-sum relationship between Jesus and Eastern religions. And in turn, Tom Gilson over at the Thinking Christian blog used Zacharias’ insight to declare followers of New Age deities “contradictory” and wrong. For folks standing with Zacharias and Gilson, then, the empirically apparent plurality of religious figures is reducible to a single relationship of either Right or Wrong.

Here are 7 things that make it hard for me to believe in traditional Christianity.

But hope is a mystery untamed, immortal, and completely without finite form.