Manchester Guardian interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury about his new book.
Dostoevsky is renowned for his remark, "Without God, everything is permitted." Does the archbishop agree? "He's saying not so much that without God everyone would be bad, as without God we have no way of connecting one act with another, no way of developing a life that made sense. It would really be indifferent whether we did this or that. And it's that sense of God being part of what you draw on to construct a life that makes sense."
I take that to be a "yes", not least because Williams writes in the book, glossing Dostoevsky: "Only love directed towards the transcendent can generate effective unselfish love in the world." Is that his view? "At the end of the day, yes it is because I believe that's how the universe is. I believe that God has made the world such that this is what we're for. Even when [people] reject that at the ideas level, they can sense that's how it is, they can act as if there were an infinite. That's one of the things that keeps the world going."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/08/religion.anglicanism
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