Professor John Cottingham came for a talk to Netherhall today to speak on Religion and Analytic Philosophy. He spoke about five features characterizing God:

1. Pascal’s stress on the accessibility conditions to experience God. In other words, God is hidden and it reveals itself only to those who seek sincerely. This hidden factor seems to be existent in all religions. If God were not hidden there would be no mystery. No function of religion.
2. God is transcendent. There may be many gods, but there is only One mystery. The creator cannot be a part of what it creates.
3. God is like a mountain. You can touch it but not grasp it. God exists regardless of all creatures, like an independent entity.
4. Wittgenstein: “It appears to me as though a religious belief could only be (something like) passionately committing oneself to a system of reference.” However, most philosophers have taken this to mean that religion is merely a frame of reference about which one is passionate. It lacks cognitive content. But, Wittgenstein really meant that religion has content and the above characteristics are an important feature that is essential to religion.
5. Life can educate on to a belief in God. (Wittgenstein)

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has a scene in which an atheist person spontaneously starts to ask for help from God when his wife is in labour. All believings in reason were blown off his soul like dust.

Fr Joe asked a question: “Do you think people now have forgotten how much reason there is in belief and how much belief there is in reason?”