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Document Type
Video
Interview Date
2-16-1999
Abstract
Is it possible to prove the existence of a Supreme Being?
Dr. Ninian Smart discusses if it is possible to prove the existence of a Supreme Being. He says as we think of the world today, the idea you could prove the existence of God makes no sense. Dr. Smart notes that even if you could, which God would you be proving existed? He says thinking that the Bible proves the existence of God is not valid because the Bible is based on faith which always includes an element of uncertainty. What is obvious to one religious faith may not at all be obvious to another. “Maybe” becomes a very important word.
Recommended Citation
Smart, Ninian and Benney, Alfred. Created by Alfred Benney. "Dr. Ninian Smart Engages with the Question: Is it Possible to Prove the Existence of a Supreme Being?" February 1999. DigitalCommons@Fairfield. Web. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/asrvideos/311
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Playing Time: 5:27
About the Interviewee:
Dr. Ninian Smart was educated at Glasgow University and at Queen’s College, Oxford. He held teaching appointments at Yale University, London University, Banaras Hindu University and Birmingham University. He became the founding Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 1967 and in 1976 he came to the University of California at Santa Barbara as the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions and spent part of each year at that institution and at Lancaster University until his retirement from Lancaster in 1982.
A prolific author/lecturer, his book The World’s Religions (1989) reached a considerable popular readership. He pioneered the defense of religious studies as a secular discipline which helped the formation of departments in many public universities, especially in the United States. During his life-time of scholarship, he held the presidencies of major learned societies in the study of religions, notably the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional society for Religious Studies in the Americas. Dr. Smart died in his native England in 2001.
About the Interviewer:
Dr. Alfred Benney is a professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. He has a Ph.D in Theology from the Hartford Seminary Foundation and teaches courses in Non-Traditional American Religions and Christian Religious Thought. His research interests include "how people learn"; "the appropriate use of technology in teaching/learning" and "myth as explanatory narrative". He has published work on teaching with technology.