Monthly Archives: September 2019

4 OCTOBER 2014 The closed mind of Richard Dawkins His atheism is its own kind of narrow religion. Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins (Ecco Press)

The closed mind of Richard Dawkins

His atheism is its own kind of narrow religion.

Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins (Ecco Press)

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

Among these traits, it is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.

Dawkins may not be Victorian, but the figure who emerges from An Appetite for Wonder is in many ways decidedly old-fashioned. Before Dawkins’s own story begins, the reader is given a detailed account of the Dawkins family tree—perhaps a natural prelude for one involved so passionately with genes, but slightly eccentric in a twenty-first-century memoir. Dawkins’s description of growing up in British colonial Africa, going on to boarding school and then to Oxford, has a similarly archaic flavor and could easily have been written before World War II. The style in which he recounts his early years has a labored jocularity of a sort one associates with some of the stuffier products of that era, who—dimly aware that they lacked any sense of humor—were determined to show they appreciated the lighter side of life.

Born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, and growing up in Nyasaland, now Malawi, Dawkins writes of life in the colonies in glowingly idyllic terms: “We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants. … Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover weighted down with periwinkle shells sewn around the edges.” He remembers with special fondness the head servant, Ali, who “loyally accompanied” the family in its travels, and later became Dawkins’s “constant companion and friend.” Unlike the best of the colonial administrators, some of whom were deeply versed in the languages and histories of the peoples they ruled, Dawkins displays no interest in the cultures of the African countries where he lived as a boy. It is the obedient devotion of those who served his family that has remained in his memory.

Loyal servants turn up at several points in Dawkins’s progress through life. When he arrives at Oxford, the porter at Balliol—a college that had demonstrated its intellectual credentials by admitting three members of his family—recalls Dawkins’s father and two uncles but mistakes them for Dawkins’s brothers. This, Dawkins tells us, showed the “timeless view” characteristic of “that loyal and bowler-hatted profession.” He goes on to recount an anecdote about a new recruit to the profession, who recorded in his log-book of his duties how he could hear “rain banging on me bowler hat while I did me rounds.” The tone of indulgent superiority is telling. Dawkins is ready to smile on those he regards as beneath him as long as it is clear who is on top.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

Exactly how Dawkins became the anti-religious missionary with whom we are familiar will probably never be known. From what he writes here, I doubt he knows himself. Still, there are a few clues. He began his pilgrimage to unbelief at the age of nine, when he learned from his mother “that Christianity was one of many religions and they contradicted each other. They couldn’t all be right, so why believe the one in which, by sheer accident of birth, I happened to be brought up?” But he was not yet ready to embrace atheism, and curiously his teenage passion for Elvis Presley reinforced his vestigial Christianity. Listening to Elvis sing “I Believe,” Dawkins was amazed to discover that the rock star was religious. “I worshipped Elvis,” he recalls, “and I was a strong believer in a non-denominational creator god.” Dawkins confesses to being puzzled as to why he should have been so surprised that Elvis was religious: “He came from an uneducated working-class family in the American South. How could he not have been religious?” By the time he was sixteen, Dawkins had “shed my last vestige of theistic credulity.” As one might expect, the catalyst for his final conversion from theism was Darwinism. “I became increasingly aware that Darwinian evolution was a powerfully available alternative to my creator god as an explanation of the beauty and apparent design of life. … It wasn’t long then before I became strongly and militantly atheistic.”

What is striking is the commonplace quality of Dawkins’s rebellion against religion. In turning away from the milk-and-water Anglicanism in which he had been reared—after his conversion from theism, he “refused to kneel in chapel,” he writes proudly—he was doing what tens of thousands of Britain’s young people did at the time. Compulsory religious instruction of the kind that exists in British schools, it has often been observed, creates a fertile environment for atheism. Dawkins’s career illustrates the soundness of this truism. If there is anything remarkable in his adolescent rebellion, it is that he has remained stuck in it. At no point has Dawkins thrown off his Christian inheritance. Instead, emptying the faith he was taught of its transcendental content, he became a neo-Christian evangelist. A more inquiring mind would have noticed at some point that religion comes in a great many varieties, with belief in a creator god figuring in only a few of the world’s faiths and most having no interest in proselytizing. It is only against the background of a certain kind of monotheism that Dawkins’s evangelical atheism makes any sense.

Even more remarkable is Dawkins’s inveterate literal-mindedness. He tells us that “the Pauline belief that everybody is born in sin, inherited from Adam (whose embarrassing non-existence was unknown to St. Paul), is one of the very nastiest aspects of Christianity.” It is true that the idea of original sin has become one with a morbid preoccupation with sexuality, which has been part of Christianity throughout much of its history. Even so, it is an idea that contains a vital truth: evil is not error, a mistake of the mind, a failure of understanding that can be corrected by smarter thinking. It is something deeper and more constitutive of human life itself. The capacity and propensity for destruction goes with being human. One does not have to be religious to acknowledge this dark fact. With his myth or metaphor of the death instinct thanatos, Freud—a lifelong atheist—recognized that impulses of hatred and cruelty are integral to the human psyche. As an atheist myself, it is a view I find no difficulty in sharing.

Quite apart from the substance of the idea, there is no reason to suppose that the Genesis myth to which Dawkins refers was meant literally. Coarse and tendentious atheists of the Dawkins variety prefer to overlook the vast traditions of figurative and allegorical interpretations with which believers have read Scripture. Both Augustine and before him the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria explicitly cautioned against literalism in interpreting the biblical creation story. Later, in the twelfth century, Maimonides took a similar view. It was only around the time of the Reformation that the idea that the story was a factual account of events became widely held. When he maintains that Darwin’s account of evolution displaced the biblical story, Dawkins is assuming that both are explanatory theories—one primitive and erroneous, the other more advanced and literally true. In treating religion as a set of factual propositions, Dawkins is mimicking Christianity at its most fundamentalist.

There is an interesting inconsistency between Dawkins’s dismissal of religion as being little more than a tissue of falsehood and his adherence to an evolutionary account of human behavior. In the later chapters of An Appetite for Wonder, Dawkins recounts his work on the behavior of blowflies, and later mice, guppy fish, and crickets. As always, what he describes as his “Darwin-obsessed brain” analyzed these behaviors in terms that were meant to be consistent with Darwinian orthodoxy. His best-selling manifesto The Selfish Gene originated in 1973, when strike action by miners led to a “three-day week” in which there were frequent power-cuts. Dawkins needed electricity for his work on crickets, but he could do without it for writing, which he did on a portable typewriter, so he began to write instead. By 1982, we find him “trying to push Universal Darwinism”—the view that genes are not the only replicators in natural selection—a theme he had explored in the last chapter of his best-seller, where he presented his theory of memes. Dawkins’s suggestion is that memes “leap from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” and it is clear that he sees this process at work throughout human culture, including religion.

There are many difficulties in talk of memes, including how they are to be identified. Is Romanticism a meme? Is the idea of evolution itself a meme, jumping unbidden from brain to brain? My suspicion is that the entire “theory” amounts to not much more than a misplaced metaphor. The larger problem is that a meme-based Darwinian account of religion is at odds with Dawkins’s assault on religion as a type of intellectual error. If Darwinian evolution applies to religion, then religion must have some evolutionary value. But in that case there is a tension between naturalism (the study of humans and other animals as organisms in the natural world) and the rationalist belief that the human mind can rid itself of error and illusion through a process of critical reasoning. To be sure, Dawkins and those who think like him will object that evolutionary theory tells us how we got where we are, but does not preclude our taking charge of ourselves from here on. But who are “we”? In a passage from The Selfish Gene that Dawkins quotes in this memoir, he writes:

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, these replicators. Now they come by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

If we “are” survival machines, it is unclear how “we” can decide anything. The idea of free will, after all, comes from religion and not from science. Science may give us the unvarnished truth—or some of it—about our species. Part of that truth may prove to be that humans are not and can never be rational animals. Religion may be an illusion, but that does not mean science can dispel it. On the contrary, science may well show that religion cannot be eradicated from the human mind. Unsurprisingly, this is a possibility that Dawkins never explores.

For all his fervent enthusiasm for science, Dawkins shows very little interest in asking what scientific knowledge is or how it comes to be possible. There are many philosophies of science. Among them is empiricism, which maintains that scientific knowledge extends only so far as observation and experiment can reach; realism, which holds that science can give an account of parts of the world that can never be observed; irrealism, according to which there is no one truth of things to which scientific theories approximate; and pragmatism, which views science theories as useful tools for organizing and controlling experience. If he is aware of these divergent philosophies, Dawkins never discusses them. His attitude to science is that of a practitioner who does not need to bother with philosophical questions.

It is worth noting, therefore, that it is not as a practicing scientist that Dawkins has produced his assaults against religion. As he makes clear in this memoir, he gave up active research in the 1970s when he left his crickets behind and began to write The Selfish Gene. Ever since, he has written as an ideologue of scientism, the positivistic creed according to which science is the only source of knowledge and the key to human liberation. He writes well—fluently, vividly, and at times with considerable power. But the ideas and the arguments that he presents are in no sense novel or original, and he seems unaware of the critiques of positivism that appeared in its Victorian heyday.

Some of them bear re-reading today. One of the subtlest and most penetrating came from the pen of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative statesman, British foreign secretary, and sometime prime minister. Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time. If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal? A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess. As he framed the problem in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, “We have not merely stumbled on truth in spite of error and illusion, which is odd, but because of error and illusion, which is even odder.” Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga. Again, one does not need to accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.

Balfour’s contributions to the debate about science and religion are nowadays little known—compelling testimony to the historical illiteracy of contemporary philosophy. But Balfour also testifies to how shallow, crass, and degraded the debate has become since Victorian times. Unlike most of those who debated then, Dawkins knows practically nothing of the philosophy of science, still less about theology or the history of religion. From his point of view, he has no need to know. He can deduce everything he wants to say from first principles. Religion is a type of supernatural belief, which is irrational, and we will all be better off without it: for all its paraphernalia of evolution and memes, this is the sum total of Dawkins’s argument for atheism. His attack on religion has a crudity that would make a militant Victorian unbeliever such as T.H. Huxley—described by his contemporaries as “Darwin’s bulldog” because he was so fierce in his defense of evolution—blush scarlet with embarrassment.

If religion comes in many varieties, so too does atheism. Dawkins takes for granted that being an atheist goes with having liberal values (with the possible exception of tolerance). But as the Victorians well knew, there are many types of atheism, liberal and illiberal, and many versions of atheist ethics. Again, Dawkins imagines an atheist is bound to be an enemy of religion. But there is no necessary connection between atheism and hostility to religion, as some of the great Victorian unbelievers understood. More intelligent than their latter-day disciple, the positivists tried to found a new religion of humanity—especially August Comte (1798–1857), who established a secular church in Paris that for a time found converts in many other parts of the world. The new religion was an absurdity, with rituals being practiced that were based on the pseudo-science of phrenology—but at least the positivists understood that atheism cannot banish human needs that only faith can meet.

One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s. He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable. “I am not a good observer,” he writes modestly. He is referring to his observations of animals and plants, but his weakness applies more obviously in the case of humans. Transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind, Dawkins misses much that is of importance in human beings—himself and others.

To the best of my recollection, I have met Dawkins only once and by chance, when we coincided at some meeting in London. It must have been in late 2001, since conversation at dinner centered around the terrorist attacks of September 11. Most of those at the table were concerned with how the West would respond: would it retaliate, and if so how? Dawkins seemed uninterested. What exercised him was that Tony Blair had invited leaders of the main religions in Britain to Downing Street to discuss the situation—but somehow omitted to ask a leader of atheism (presumably Dawkins himself) to join the gathering. There seemed no question in Dawkins’s mind that atheism as he understood it fell into the same category as the world’s faiths.

In this, Dawkins is surely right. To suppose that science can liberate humankind from ignorance requires considerable credulity. We know how science has been used in the past—not only to alleviate the human lot, but equally to serve tyranny and oppression. The notion that things might be fundamentally different in the future is an act of faith—one as gratuitous as any of the claims of religion, if not more so. Consider Pascal. One of the founders of modern probability theory and the designer of the world’s first mass-transit system, he was far too intelligent to imagine that human reason could resolve perennial questions. His celebrated wager has always seemed to me a rather bad bet. Since we cannot know what gods there may be (if any), why stake our lives on pleasing one of them? But Pascal’s wager was meant as a pedagogical device rather than a demonstrative argument, and he reached faith himself by way of skeptical doubt. In contrast, Dawkins shows not a trace of skepticism anywhere in his writings. In comparison with Pascal, a man of restless intellectual energy, Dawkins is a monument to unthinking certitude.

We must await the second volume of his memoirs to discover how Dawkins envisions his future. But near the end of the present volume, an inadvertent remark hints at what he might want for himself. Darwin was “never Sir Charles,” he writes, “and what an amazing indictment of our honours system that is.” It is hard to resist the thought that the public recognition that in Britain is conferred by a knighthood is Dawkins’s secret dream. A life peerage would be even better. What could be more fitting for this tireless evangelist than to become the country’s officially appointed atheist, seated alongside the bishops in the House of Lords? He may lack their redeeming tolerance and display none of their sense of humor, but there cannot be any reasonable doubt that he belongs in the same profession.

This piece originally appeared in the New Republic

John Gray is the New Statesman’s lead book reviewer. His latest book is The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom.

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (8)

Did Albert Einstein Believe in a Personal God? by Rich Deem

September 10, 2019 – 7:29 pm

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Did Albert Einstein Believe in a Personal God?
by Rich Deem

Introduction

I get a fair amount of e-mail about Albert Einstein’s quote¹ on the homepage of Evidence for God from Science, so I thought it would be good to clarify the matter. Atheists object to the use of the quote, since Einstein might best be described as an agnostic.² Einstein himself stated quite clearly that he did not believe in a personal God:

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.”³

No personal God

So, the quick answer to the question is that Einstein did not believe in a personal God. However, it is interesting how he arrived at that conclusion. In developing the theory of relativity, Einstein realized that the equations led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning. He didn’t like the idea of a beginning, because he thought one would have to conclude that the universe was created by God. So, he added a cosmological constant to the equation to attempt to get rid of the beginning. He said this was one of the worst mistakes of his life. Of course, the results of Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe was expanding and had a beginning at some point in the past. So, Einstein became a deist – a believer in an impersonal creator God:

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”⁴

However, it would also seem that Einstein was not an atheist, since he also complained about being put into that camp:

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”⁵

“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”⁶

Einstein on Jesus

Albert Einstein received instruction in both Christianity (at a Roman Catholic school) and Judaism (his family of origin). When interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post in 1929, Einstein was asked what he thought of Christianity.

“To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?”
“As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”
“Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus?”
“Emil Ludwig’s Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot!”
“You accept the historical existence of Jesus?”
“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”⁷

So, although Einstein was not a Christian, he had great respect for Jesus, and recognized that He was an amazing figure in history. Personally having grown up as an atheist in a non-religious home, I initially saw Jesus as a brilliant teacher when I read the gospels for the first time at age 32.

Why no personal God?

So, what was the reason Einstein rejected the existence of a personal God? Einstein recognized the remarkable design and order of the cosmos, but could not reconcile those characteristics with the evil and suffering he found in human existence. How could an all-powerful God allow the suffering that exists on earth?

Einstein’s error

Einstein’s failure to understand the motives of God are the result of his incorrect assumption that God intended this universe as His ultimate perfect creation. Einstein could not get past the moral problems that are present in our universe. He assumed, as most atheists do, that a personal God would only create a universe which is both good morally and perfect physically. Where Einstein erred was in that thinking that there was a god who designed the universe, but designed it in such as way as to allow evil without a purpose. If the universe were designed and it included evil, then there must have been a purpose for that evil. However, according to Christianity, the purpose of the universe is not to be morally or physically perfect, but to provide a place where spiritual creatures can choose to love or reject God – to live with Him forever in a new, perfect universe, or reject Him and live apart from Him for eternity. It would not be possible to make this choice in a universe in which all moral choices are restricted to only good ones. Einstein didn’t seem to understand that one could not choose between good and bad if bad did not exist. It’s amazing that such a brilliant man could not understand such a simple logical principle.

Conclusion

No, Albert Einstein was not a Christian or even a theist (one who believes in a personal God), probably because he failed to understand why evil existed. These days, those who fail to understand the purpose of evil not only reject the concept of a personal God, but also reject the concept of God’s existence altogether. If you are an agnostic or atheist, my goal for you would be to recognize what Albert Einstein understood about the universe – that its amazing design demands the existence of a creator God. Then, go beyond Einstein’s faulty understanding of the purpose of the universe and consider the Christian explanation for the purpose of human life and why evil must exist in this world.

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Richard Dawkins on Ecclesiastes

September 10, 2019 – 7:13 pm

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Richard Dawkins: ‘I want all our children to read the Bible’

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BY YUKIO STRACHAN

MAY 21, 2012 IN RELIGION

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Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, who argues that the God of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, thinks the government’s plan to send a free copy of the King James Bible to every state school in England is a great idea.

Last year, marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.

To celebrate this occasion, the Guardian says that education secretary Michael Gove, hoped to send a free copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country by Easter.

“It’s a thing of beauty, and it’s also an incredibly important historical artifact,” Gove said of the 1611 translation. “It has helped shape and define the English language and is one of the keystones of our shared culture. And it is a work that has had international significance.”

As you could imagine, not everyone embraced Gove’s vision.

“This is not simply another piece of literature, it is the holy scripture of one particular religion,” Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said. “Is it really the job of the Government to be promoting one particular religion in schools that are increasingly multi-faith?”

Since schools were already “awash with Bibles,” he said, the National Secular Society suggested a compromise: a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

“I fear that many of these supporters of the project are more interested in the proselytizing opportunity than in the literary value of this book,” Sanderson said.

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The Bible

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To let the Bible Society tell it, it’s the National Secular Society that’s guilty of proselytizing.

“National Secular Society has revealed its not-so hidden agenda,” the Society wrote in an op-ed, “to stop Britain’s children reading the Bible.”

But the government ran into another snag.

At the time of the announcement last November, the Department for Education estimated the cost of the scheme at £375,000 (585,821.00 US dollars), and sought philanthropic sponsorship.

However, the Department for Education’s plans ran into trouble in January when government sources reported that David Cameron had told Gove to avoid using taxpayers’ money for the £370,000 initiative. At the time, Gove had not found private philanthropists to sponsor the enterprise.

It has now emerged that leading millionaire Conservative party donors have clubbed together to rescue the plan by footing the bill, the Guardian reported.

But after hearing the news, one person was surprised he didn’t make Gove’s list of potential donors: atheist Richard Dawkins.

“For some reason the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) was not approached for a donation in support of Michael Gove’s plan to put a King James Bible in every state school,” writes Dawkins in the Guardian. “We would certainly have given it serious consideration, and if the trustees had not agreed I would gladly have contributed myself.”

Richard Dawkins?

Dawkins even agrees with Gove’s assertion that the 1611 translation is a “thing of beauty.”

Ecclesiastes, in the 1611 translation, is one of the glories of English literature. The whole King James Bible is littered with literary allusions, almost as many as Shakespeare.

In The God Delusion I have a section called “Religious education as a part of literary culture” in which I list 129 biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise and many use without knowing their provenance: the salt of the earth; go the extra mile; I wash my hands of it; filthy lucre; through a glass darkly; wolf in sheep’s clothing; hide your light under a bushel; no peace for the wicked; how are the mighty fallen.

He adds: “A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”

Richard Dawkins?

This is the same arch-atheist whose best-selling book The God Delusion says that the Bible is “a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” he writes in another passage, “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Did Dawkins have a road to Damascus experience?

“I have an ulterior motive for wishing to contribute to Gove’s scheme,” Dawkins writes in his op-ed. “People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality.”

“I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem.

The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.”

Bingo.

Dawkins gives us examples:

●”Honour thy father and thy mother.” Well and good. But honour thy children? Not if God tells you, as he did Abraham in a test of his loyalty, to kill your beloved son for a burnt offering. The lesson is clear: when push comes to shove, obedience to God trumps human decency

●In any case, the commandment meant only “Thou shalt not kill members of thine own tribe”. It was perfectly fine – indeed strongly encouraged throughout the Pentateuch – to kill Canaanites, Midianites, Jebusites, Hivites etc, especially if they had the misfortune to live in the Promised Lebensraum. Kill all the men and boys and most of the women. “But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:18). Such wonderful moral lessons: all children should be exposed to them.

●”Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy”: this commandment is regarded as so important that (as our children will learn when they flock into the school library to read the Gove presentation copy) a man caught gathering sticks on the sabbath was summarily stoned to death by the whole community, on direct orders from God.

Things for Dawkins aren’t any better in the New Testament, either. He says, “theologians will accept that the Old Testament is pretty horrible but will point with pride, and nods of approval from all sides, to the New Testament as a truly righteous moral guide. Really?”

●The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam’s sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn’t exist.

●But the unmistakable message is clear. We are all “born in sin” even if we no longer literally believe, with Augustine, that Adam’s sin came down to us via the semen. And God, the all-powerful creator, capable of moving mountains and of begetting a universe with all the laws of physics, couldn’t find a better way to lift the burden of sin than a blood sacrifice.

Dawkins adds: “Whatever else the Bible might be – and it really is a great work of literature – it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite,” he writes. “Not a bad way to find out what’s in a book is to read it, so I say go to it.”

The Department for Education says copies of the King James Bible will be distributed to schools starting on May 14. All schools are expected to have received their copies by May 28.

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” How can you want more than that ?” Richard Dawkins and Bill Moyers

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Second Article

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Bill Moyers Interviews Richard Dawkins on NOW. 12.03.04 MOYERS: At least half of America is going to take issue with the cover story of the November issue of the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine. There it is, with the provocative question boldly displayed, “Was Darwin Wrong?” The article inside answers just as boldly, “No. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.”But try telling that to this red-state mom in Cobb County, Georgia in the suburbs of Atlanta.ROGERS: I believe that God created the world in six literal days about 6,000 years ago.MOYERS: She’s not alone. A recent CBS/NEW YORK TIMES poll found that more than half of Americans believed that human beings were created by God just as we are today, and 65% said that biblical creation should be part of the curriculum, along with evolution. These Bible-based beliefs about the origins of life are churning American politics.As USA TODAY reported recently, there have been efforts in 24 states this year to challenge the teaching of evolution in public schools. Because the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creationism is a religious belief and can’t be taught in public schools, this biblical worldview is being repackaged under a new banner.They call it “intelligent design,” the notion that our world is far too complex not to have been issued from some higher power. A school district in Dover, Pennsylvania has become the first in the nation to require that students be taught the theory of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution.With me now is a man who is puzzled by America’s seeming retreat from what science has to say about the world we live in. From his teaching base at Oxford University Richard Dawkins holds forth as one of the world’s foremost advocates for the public understanding of science. His books on the subject have been acclaimed by literary and scientific peers alike. They make science so clear and engaging that even a journalist like me gets it. My favorite among them is A DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN and now, the latest, THE ANCESTOR’S TALE: A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DAWN OF EVOLUTION.A zoologist by training, Richard Dawkins was recently described by an influential British magazine as his country’s leading public intellectual. Welcome to NOW.DAWKINS: Thank you.

MOYERS: What strikes me about this is that you have offered this trip back to the dawn of evolution at the very moment, in this country, there is a huge backlash against the very notion of evolution. Are you aware of walking into that buzzsaw of religion and politics here?

DAWKINS: Yes, I am. I mean I’m aware that the subject of evolution is, itself, controversial. I also feel that perhaps the fact that it’s a sweep of four billion years helps to get things in perspective. I mean, this is the real long-term view of life. Whereas temporary politics perhaps we cannot exactly shrug this off. But at least get it into perspective.

MOYERS: Even as you speak about the four billion years of evolution, I can hear minds going off in the audience that says, “Yes, but we can’t think that long. We’re concerned right now with this controversy in this country.”

One of the largest school districts in Georgia created a real stir, not long ago, when they insisted on putting a warning sticker on biology books saying, and I’ve got the exact quote here, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” What’s your response to that?

DAWKINS: All materials should be studied with an open mind, studied critically, etcetera. I’m all for that. What’s wrong is to single out evolution as though that is any more open to doubt than anything else. Of course, in science, there have been sort of open to doubt and things that need to be discussed.

And, of course, everything needs to be approached with an open mind. But, among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know. And that, of course, as you know, is accepted by responsible educated churchmen, as well as scientists.

MOYERS: When you say it’s about as certain as anything we know, how do we know it?

DAWKINS: We know it from a massive evidence, not just fossil evidence, which is actually rather less important, nowadays, than molecular evidence. There’s a huge quantity of evidence. Everything about the distribution of animals and plants over the earth’s surface. The distributions on genes within the animal and plant kingdoms, everything points to the overwhelming conclusion that evolution is true. That doesn’t mean that every detail of the theoriesÖ the details are necessarily true. But the fact that we and chimpanzees are cousins, the fact that we and amoebas are cousins, is beyond all educated dispute.

MOYERS: What do we have in common with jellyfish?

DAWKINS: We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish. At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes. We can actually measure how long ago the common ancestor of jellyfish and ourselves lived. Well, I say measure… estimate.

MOYERS: Yeah.

DAWKINS: Öwith a fair degree of plausibility. There’s not the slightest shadow of a doubt that we are cousins of jellyfish, albeit, rather distant cousins.

MOYERS: But how do you account for the fact that human beings have this intimation of something beyond us that, you know, apparently a jellyfish doesn’t entertain?

DAWKINS: Well, we have big brains. We have all sorts of things that jellyfish don’t have. We have language, we have culture, we have music, we have mathematics, we have philosophy. And we have these intimations which you describe. We are a very, very unusual speciesÖ

MOYERS: What’s the source of those intimations do you think? Wishful thinking?

DAWKINS: Well, I really don’t know. I mean I think that when you’ve got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from? Why can we think?

Those are very, very deep questions. And it’s natural for us to hanker after solutions to that. And many solutions have been offered. And I think that’s what you’re seeing when you talk about those intimations.

MOYERS: Is evolution a theory, not a fact?

DAWKINS: Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.

MOYERS: What do you mean it’s been observed.

DAWKINS: The consequences of. It is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene. And youÖ the detective hasn’t actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue. Now, any detectiveÖ

MOYERS: Circumstantial evidence.

DAWKINS: Circumstantial evidence, but masses of circumstantial evidence. Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English. Evolution is true. I mean it’s as circumstantial as that, but it’s as true as that.

MOYERS: As you probably know, back in 1987, our Supreme Court ruled that creationism, the belief that the earth was created by a transcendent God in six days 4,004 years ago, thereof, that the Supreme Court ruled that creationism was a religious belief that, therefore, could not be taught in public schools. So now creationism has been repackaged, as I’m sure you know, along the line of intelligent design, the notion that life on earth results from a purposeful design, rather than random selection. And that a higher intelligence is actually guiding this progress. Is there any circumstantial evidence to support that claim?

DAWKINS: I suppose it is possible that one might look at the evidence of life, as we see it on this planet, and try to find some sort of evidence that it was intelligently designed. The evidence that has been offered just doesn’t even begin to suggest that it is intelligently designed. Once you understand how Darwinism works, then you could easily see that that’s a far better, far more parsimonious, far more scientific explanation than intelligent design.

MOYERS: To what extent is this important? I remember the story of the professor who was talking about evolution in class, and the student raises his hand and says, “Professor what difference does it make if some distant grandfather of mine was an ape?” And the professor said, “Well, it would make a difference to your grandmother.” But other than that, what is the practical consequence of presuming this?

DAWKINS: Well, I’m not sure about practical consequence. I take a rather more poetic view that when you’re in the world, and you’re only in the world for a matter of some decades, to have the privilege of understanding where you came from, what your antecedents are, what the reason for your existence is, is such a magnificent privilege. That not to have that, even if it doesn’t actually help you in practice, even if the knowledge and understanding of evolution doesn’t actually help you to do whatever you do, and you play football, or be a businessman, or whatever it might be.

Yet, you die impoverished. You die having not had a proper life if you have failed to understand what’s on offer. And what’s on offer today, in the 21st century, is a huge amount, far more than any of our predecessors in previous centuries had. And so I think it’s rather like saying, “What’s the use of music? What’s the use of poetry?” They may not be useful, but what’s the point of living at all if you don’t have them. To me, that is firmly planted in the real world. The real world is so wonderful that I don’t want more than that. And I think there is no more than that. But anybody who thinks they want more than that, I’m inclined to say, “How could you possibly want more than the real world? If you only you could understand how grand and beautiful and immense, and yet still incomprehensible the real world is. How can you want more than that?”

MOYERS: Where does this poetic sensibility come in you?

DAWKINS: I’m shot through with it, all the way through. Everything that I write isÖ

MOYERS: I know, that’s obvious. But where does that come from? You were a choir boy I believe. You read the Psalms, sang the songs?

DAWKINS: Don’t try and make it come from religion. It certainly didn’t come from religion. No, I think it comes from science itself. It comes fromÖ

MOYERS: I mean I’m talking about the Psalms, I mean the literature.

DAWKINS: Yeah.

MOYERS: Psalms as the literature.

DAWKINS: I appreciate very much the literature of the psalms of Ecclesiastes, some of the prophets of Genesis I appreciate very much. But I don’t think that’s where the sense of wonder comes from. That’s just great poetry.

MOYERS: When you were drawn to science, but, at the same time, you write with the clarity that marches in the service of the English language. I just wondered where, that can’t just be DNA.

DAWKINS: Oh, of course it isn’t. It’s DNA filtered through the brain, education, culture. We both read the Bible, we both read Shakespeare, we both get to our language from sources which in, although they may ultimately, in some sense, be based upon DNA, it would be demeaning to say it’s just DNA. In the same sort of way you can say that a computer contains huge quantities of literature and knowledge and encyclopedias and dictionaries, but the computer is nothing but ones and naughts. High voltage and low voltage fluctuating up and down.

I mean you know, at one level, that’s true. But you know that that’s a totally inadequate description of what’s going on in the computer. And that’s the same thing about a human mind.

MOYERS: What do you think about scientists who try to reconcile science and religion?

DAWKINS: Well, I think there are various ways of doing that. And Einstein, for example, was, as you know, always using the word God. Einstein used the word God as a kind of personification, a sort of literary personification of that which we don’t yet understand. And so he recognized, and was awestruck by the deep problems of the universe, and the things that we don’t understand. And he used the word God for that. And Einstein described himself as a very religious man. And in Einstein’s sense, I too am a very religious man.

MOYERS: How is that?

DAWKINS: Because I too feel there’s something deep and incomprehensible, and so far, uncomprehended at least. But what Einstein was not, and what I am not, is a believer in anything supernatural. Because I think that actually brings it down to a lower level. I think that the level of Einstein, where he was actually awestruck by the universe, and by the fundamental unsolved problems of the universe. To bring that down to the level of a personality who takes decisions, who designs things, who listens to prayers, who forgives sins, all of the things that supernatural gods are supposed to do, I think it diminishes it, and demeans it.

MOYERS: I’ve often thought it rather presumptuous to imagine God concerned about the outcome of the New York Jets or a New York Giants game, or even an American election.

DAWKINS: Yes, exactly.

MOYERS: Yet, religion, by its nature, according to the Christian tradition is the hope for things unseen.

DAWKINS: Well, that’s the Christians’ problem. I mean, that’s not my problem. Why should you believe in something for which there is no reason to believe. Where it becomes positively dangerous is if you start fighting with somebody else who has a different faith from yours.

And each of you is equally convinced that you are right and the other one is wrong. And because, precisely because it appeals only to faith, and not evidence, there is no way you could settle the argument other than killing each other. Whereas, if you disagree, as two scientists disagree, two scientists can sit down together, look at the evidence, and say, “Oh, I was wrong. I overlooked that bit of evidence.”

Or, “Here’s a new bit of evidence just come in which shows that my previous theory was wrong.” Scientists, at least in principle, will come to an agreement when all of the evidence is in. But that’s not what faith-based people do. They say, “I know I’m right. End of story.” That’s dangerous.

MOYERS: Is this why there’s no place in your world view for the supernatural, for religious tradition and authority?

DAWKINS: No, that’s right. There is a place for religious literature, and religious art, and religious music.

MOYERS: Why?

DAWKINS: Because it’s so beautiful. I mean, the B minor mass, or the Sistine Chapel, or the book of Ecclesiastes are beautiful works of art.

MOYERS: So beauty is very important as a result of faith.

DAWKINS: Beauty arises out of human inspiration. Humans take their inspiration from where it’s going. And in many cases, it has, indeed, come from religion. I’m not so sure it really comes from faith as, in many cases, it probably comes from the money that the church was able to command in order to commission these works.

MOYERS: How do explain the fact that there seems to be no room, or little room in America today, for challenging this, you know, the great faith as we say? For challenging religious authority expression? People back away from it.

DAWKINS: I’m, yeah, I’m a bit baffled by that. I really don’t understand it. I mean it shows itself in the fact that I probably not a single member of Congress or the Senate would ever dare to say that they don’t believe in a supernatural God.

MOYERS: No atheist would be elected president.

DAWKINS: That’s right. But they must be there. I mean it’s just not reasonable, that in an advanced, educated civilization, the people who rise to the top politically would be different in this country than every other country in the western world.

MOYERS: Don’t underestimate Richard Hofstadter book on anti intellectualism as a main current in American lifeÖ

DAWKINS: I don’t. And it’s very clear that a politician, in order to get elected, has to pretend to believe in a supernatural God. That doesn’t mean they actually do. If you look at the figures for the scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This is the elite of American scientists. Which means they’re the elite of the world scientists. And something like 90 percent of them don’t believe in a supernatural god. Ninety percent. Whereas, if you look at the population at large, it’s about 90 percent who do. Well, that’s an astonishing mismatch between the intellectual elite, and the rest of the population.

And if the Congress is 100 percent believers in supernatural as they allege, I just don’t believe it. They’ve got to be at least a certain way in the direction of the elite scientists. Because they’re obviously clever enough to get elected to Congress.

MOYERS: What do you think happens to a society that tolerates the belief that the universe was created in six days?

DAWKINS: Well, I’m all for tolerance, but I’m worried about a society where a sufficiently large number of the electorate can actually swing the vote, not of course that the age of the earth actually affects current politics directly. But it shows such a divorce from reality. Such an inability to apprehend the real world in which people live.

That I really worry about the judgments that people will make in other fields, such as when they come to when they comeÖ When you think about how young the world is supposed to be, according to this view, it’s 6,000Ö it’s less than 10,000 years old. This means the entire universe began sometime after the middle stone age. I mean, what kind of a grasp on reality does that suggest?

MOYERS: But don’t you think people who say they believe in that, or they think they believe in it, don’t you think they are not really sure, and that what they’ve substituted for that kind of a certainty, is the consolation that they find in belief. I mean religion as consolation is a very powerful forceÖ

DAWKINS: It is. But it’s one thing to get consolation from a belief that there is a supernatural being who looks after you, perhaps takes care of you when you’re dead, that kind, that gives consolation.

How can it be consoling to believe in something which is just straight counterfactual? Just simply goes against the facts? Mind you, I just read recently that a substantial number of people who voted Republican this time believe that there is evidence that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

They believe they were actually found in Iraq. It’s one thing to say, “I believe there were weapons of mass destruction. But they were spirited over the Syrian border or something. They were smuggled away.”

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying they believe they have been found. Which contradicts everything that the evidence shows. I’m worried about people who are so out of the real world, that they delude themselves about evidence. Not about their opinions. But about evidence.

MOYERS: My favorite essay, in my favorite book of yours, A DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN, is the letter you wrote to your daughter when she was 10 years old. The title of it is “Good Reasons and Bad Reasons for Believing.” Would you read the last paragraph of that letter?

DAWKINS: I’d be pleased to.

“What can we do about all of this? It’s not easy for you to do anything because you are only 10. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself, ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them, ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say. Your loving Daddy.”

MOYERS: Thank you very much.

DAWKINS: Thank you very much.

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Third Article

Al Mohler article:

FRIDAY • October 26, 2007

The Dawkins Delusion

“I do not, by nature, thrive on confrontation,” declares Richard
Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of
Science at Oxford University and one of the world’s leading skeptics
concerning Christianity and belief in God.

Dawkins is well known as an intellectual adversary to all forms of
religious belief–and of Christianity in particular. He is one of the
world’s most prolific scientists, writing books for a popular audience
and addressing his strident worldview of evolutionary theory to an
expanding audience. Put simply, Richard Dawkins aspires to be the
“devil’s chaplain” of Darwinian evolution.

All this is what makes Dawkins’ denial of a confrontational approach
so ludicrous. It is simply false at face value. This is a man who has
taken every conceivable opportunity to make transparently clear his
unquestioned belief that the dominant theory of evolution renders any
form of belief in God irrational, backward, and dangerous.

Dawkins set out the basic framework of his worldview in best-selling books including, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and, most famously, The Selfish Gene. Now, in The God Delusion,
Dawkins brings his attack on Christianity to a broader audience.
Interestingly, Dawkins’ new book is released close on the heels of two
similar works. Fellow skeptics Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have
written similar books released since late summer. Taken together, these
three books represent something of a frontal attack upon the legitimacy
of belief in God.

There are few surprises in The God Delusion. Dawkins is a
gifted writer who is able to popularize scientific concepts, and he
writes with an acerbic style that fits his purpose in this volume. His
condescending and sarcastic tone set the stage for what he hopes will
be a devastating attack upon theism.

Dawkins admits his “presumptuous optimism” in hoping that his book
will cause persons to set aside their faith. “If this book works as I
intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it
down,” he asserts. Time will tell.

Though The God Delusion is intended more as an attack upon
theism than as a defense of evolutionary theory, the framework of
evolution is never far from Dawkins’ mind. In his opening chapter, he
argues that most legitimate scientists–indeed all who really
understand the issues at stake–are atheists of one sort or another. He
defines the alternatives as between a stark atheism (such as that
Dawkins himself represents) and a form of nonsupernatural religion, as
illustrated by the case of Albert Einstein. “Great scientists of our
time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine
their beliefs more deeply,” he explains. As examples, Dawkins offers
not only Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking but also Martin Rees,
currently Britain’s Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal
Society. According to Dawkins, Rees “goes to church as an ‘unbelieving
Anglican . . . out of loyalty to the tribe.’” As Dawkins explains, Rees
“has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the
cosmos provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. He cites
Einstein to the effect that he was a “deeply religious
nonbeliever”–moved by the majesty of the cosmos but without any
reference whatsoever to a supernatural being.

As Dawkins explains, real scientists are naturalists. As
such, they eliminate entirely the question of a supernatural being’s
existence. “The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is
light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking,
thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of
priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to
confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.”

As Dawkins then makes clear, his attack upon belief is explicitly and exclusively directed toward belief in supernatural
gods. As he explains, “the most familiar” of these deities is Yahweh.
Put simply, Dawkins holds no respect for those who believe in the God
of the Bible, whom he describes as ruthless, cruel, selfish, and
vindictive.

Accordingly, Dawkins does not understand why social etiquette requires respect for those who believe in God.

In one of the central chapters of his book, Dawkins attempts to
accomplish two simultaneous purposes: to undermine the intellectual
movement known as Intelligent Design and, in a twist of its logic, to
suggest that belief in God is itself a refutation of the very notion of
an intelligent design. As Dawkins sees it, “the existence of God is a
scientific hypothesis like any other.” As he sets out his case, he
denies that there could be any legitimate basis for belief in
God. The very notion of a supernatural agent flies directly in the face
of his presuppositional naturalism. Therefore, by definition, such a
God cannot exist and those who believe in such a God prove their
intellectual inadequacy or gullibility.

In accordance with his own evolutionary theory, Dawkins acknowledges
that the universe displays appearances of design. Nevertheless, he
suggests that these appearances are false, and that any example of
apparent design is actually due to the Darwinian engine of natural
selection. He considers the traditional proof for God’s existence
offered by the philosophers and rejects each out of hand. Finally, he
considers the argument that the existence of God can be proved by
Scripture–but then launches a broadside attack upon Scripture itself.

When it comes to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, Dawkins
displays absolute amazement that any intelligent person could even
entertain the notion that such teachings might be true. Pointing back
to the nineteenth century, Dawkins asserts that the Victorian era was
“the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to
believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment.” He
adds: “When pressed, many educated Christians today are too loyal to
deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them
because their rational minds know it is absurd, so they would much
rather not be asked.”

Since Dawkins considers the existence of God to be nothing more than
a scientific hypothesis–just like any other–he presents his case that
“the factual premise of religion–the God Hypothesis–is untenable.” In
other words, “God almost certainly does not exist.”

So why do so many persons believe in Him? Consistent with his
evolutionary worldview, Dawkins must offer a purely naturalistic
interpretation for the origin and function of religion. He argues that
religion must be, like all other human phenomena, a product of
Darwinian evolution. Nevertheless, he understands that the existence of
religious belief poses some interesting Darwinian questions. “Religion
is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually
targets and eliminates waste,” Dawkins explains. Therefore, there must
be some fascinating Darwinian explanation for how religious belief
emerged and survives. Citing his colleague Daniel Dennett, Dawkins
suggests that religious belief is “time-consuming, energy-consuming”
and “often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a bird of
paradise.” He sees no good in it at all. “Thousands of people have been
tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for
what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith.
Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval
cathedral could consume a hundred man centuries in its construction,
yet it was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizable useful
purpose.”

In his own twist, Dawkins argues that belief in God is simply a
by-product of some other evolutionary mechanism. He suggests that one
possible source of belief in God (understood in purely physicalist and
natural terms) is the need for the brains of children to accept on
faith the teachings of their elders. Thus, he argues that evolution may
have “psychologically primed” the human brain for some form of belief
in God. Nevertheless, whatever function this may have served the
process of evolution in the past, Dawkins now believes that it has
become a dangerous liability.

“I surmise that religions, like languages, evolved with sufficient
randomness, from beginnings that are sufficiently arbitrary, to
generate the bewildering–and sometimes dangerous–richness of
diversity that we observe. At the same time, it is possible that a form
of natural selection, coupled with the fundamental uniformity of human
psychology, sees to it that the diverse religions share significant
teachers in common.” In the end, Dawkins sees all these forms as
dangerous.

Along the way, Dawkins insists that morality is not based in
absolute truth but in a consequentialist form of reasoning that is
itself a monument of evolutionary development. He plays with categories
and concepts–no doubt intentionally–in order to confuse the question.
Christians do not argue that those who believe in God always act in a
way that is morally superior to those who do not. Atheists may behave
better than Christians. This is to our shame, but it does not pose an
intellectual challenge to the validity of the Christian faith. The more
urgent question has to do with how any form of moral
absolute–including even a prohibition on murder or incest–can survive
if all morality is merely a natural phenomenon of human evolution.
Dawkins simply embraces the relativity of morality, arguing that this
explains why Christians are so dangerous. Believing in moral absolutes,
Christians are led to defend the sanctity of human life at every level
and to believe that, of all things, the Creator actually has set forth
moral commandments and expectations concerning our sexuality. Dawkins
rejects these ideas altogether.

At the same time, he suggests that the morality revealed in the
Bible is actually immoral when judged against the enlightened standards
of our current moral Zeitgeist. Furthermore, Dawkins argues
that modern persons do not actually derive their morality from the
Bible, no matter how much they may claim to do so.

In a sweeping rejection of biblical Christianity, Dawkins expresses
outrage at the morality of both the Old and New Testaments. “I have
described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious,
sado-masochistic and repellant. We should also dismiss it as barking
mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our
objectivity,” he asserts. Dawkins would dispense with the Ten
Commandments and replace these with a new set of commandments more
attuned to modern times. Among his proposed commandments are these:
“Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave
others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which
are none of your business;” “Do not discriminate or oppress on the
basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.” Another of
Dawkins’ commandments hits close to home: “Do not indoctrinate your
children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate
evidence, and how to disagree with you.”

Amazingly, Dawkins denies that he is himself an absolutist.
Accordingly, he expresses incredulity at the fact that he is seen as a
particularly ardent opponent of Christianity.

“Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have
acquired a reputation for pugnacity towards religion. Colleagues who
agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to
be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of
morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back to me in gentle
puzzlement. Why are you so hostile?”

Dawkins denies that he is a “fundamentalist atheist.” “Maybe
scientists are fundamentalists when it comes to defining in some
abstract way what is meant by ‘truth.’ But so is everybody else,” he
insists. “I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than
when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere.”

In the end, Richard Dawkins will surely fail in his quest to turn
theists in to atheists. His book represents nothing fundamentally
new–just the same old arguments repeated over and over again. Dawkins
is quick to label his intellectual adversaries as fundamentalists, but
he conveniently redefines the term so that it does not apply to his own
position. He claims to live life solely on the basis of scientific
evidence, but is so fundamentally committed to the theory of evolution
that we cannot take his protestations to the contrary seriously.

The God Delusion is sure to garner significant attention
in the media and in popular culture. Dawkins, along with the other
fashionable skeptics and atheists of the day, makes for good television
and creates an instant media sensation. In one sense, we should be
thankful for the forthrightness with which he presents his arguments.
This is not a man who minces words, and he never hides behind his own
argument. Furthermore, at several points in the book he correctly
identifies weaknesses in many of the arguments put forth by theists. As
is so often the case, we learn from our intellectual enemies as well as
from our allies.

The tone of the book is strident, the content of the book is
bracing, and the attitude of the book is condescending. Nevertheless,
Dawkins insists that his strident attack upon the faith is limited to
words. “I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn
them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers,
just because of a theological disagreement,” he insists. He even allows
that “we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary
traditions” of organized religion, “and even participate in religious
rituals such as marriages and funerals,” he asserts. Nevertheless, all
this must be done without buying into the supernatural beliefs that
historically went along with those traditions.” Further: “We can give
up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.”All
this raises more questions than Dawkins answers. If belief in God is so
intellectually abhorrent, why would anyone want to retain the
traditions associated with these beliefs? Why does Dawkins acknowledge
that all this amounts to “a treasured heritage?” It must be because, in
the end, even Richard Dawkins is not as much of an atheist as he
believes himself to be. If Dawkins is so certain that theism is dead,
why would he devote so much of his time and energy to opposing it? A
man who is genuinely certain that Christianity is passing away would
feel no need to write a 400-page book in order to urge its passing.

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Fourth Article

“Merry Christmas” —- Richard Dawkins Says More than He Means

TUESDAY • December 19, 2006

Roger Kennedy of The New York Times wondered how some of the “New Atheists” now popular in the media and bookstores would be observing the “holiday” season. Presumably, these vigorous opponents of Christianity would treat the observance of Christmas like a disease and stay as far away as possible.

Not so, it seems. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and the more recent Letter to a Christian Nation has a Christmas tree in his living room, complete with ornaments. As Kennedy explains, Mr. Harris and his wife are observing “a (relatively) holly, jolly atheistic Christmas.”

“It seems to me to be obvious that everything we value in Christmas — giving gifts, celebrating the holiday with our families, enjoying all of the kitsch that comes along with it — all of that has been entirely appropriated by the secular world,” he said, “in the same way that Thanksgiving and Halloween have been.”

Well, the problem is evident in Mr. Harris’ judgment that gift giving, family gatherings, and “kitsch” represent “everything we value at Christmas.” He can speak for himself, of course, but that is not the sum total of what Christmas means for Christians. That statement reveals a great deal more about Sam Harris than about Christmas. Christians can do without the gifts and gatherings, but not without the remembrance and celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, seriously-minded Christians should be far more offended by the kitsch than Mr. Harris is.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor who aggressively opposes all belief in God as dangerous, seems to agree with Sam Harris. As Kennedy explains:

Mr. Dawkins, reached by e-mail somewhere on a book tour, was asked about his own Christmas philosophy. The response sounded almost as if he and Mr. Harris — and maybe other members of a soon-to-be-chartered Atheists Who Kind of Don’t Object to Christmas Club — had hashed out a statement of principles. Strangely, these principles find much common ground with Christians who complain about the holiday’s over-commercialization and secularization, though the atheists bemoan the former and appreciate the latter.

“Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”

He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

The self-identified “post-Christian atheist” argues that Christmas long ago ceased to be a “religious festival.” He dislikes silly Christmas songs on the basis of aesthetic judgment (a judgment shared, by the way, by many Christians) and is happy to “wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

How charitably secular of him. Nevertheless, Professor Dawkins should be more careful. He obviously misses a fascinating irony here. The title “Christ” is a transliteration of the Greek word for “the anointed one” — the Messiah. He mocks the holiday but declares the fact that Jesus is the Messiah every time he wishes anyone “Merry Christmas” — whether that is his intention or not.

The book of Ecclesiastes declares that “the voice of a fool [comes] through many words” [Eccl. 5:3]. For Richard Dawkins, it just takes two words. Merry Christmas.

____________________

Fifth Article

An Argument Against the Atheists — Dinesh D’Souza on Christianity

TUESDAY • November 6, 2007

“Today’s Christians know that they do not, as their ancestors did, live in a society where God’s presence was unavoidable. No longer does Christianity form the moral basis of society. Many of us now reside in secular communities, where arguments drawn from the Bible or Christian revelation carry no weight, and where we hear a different language from that spoken in church.” That is the opening salvo from author Dinesh D’Souza in his new book,What’s So Great About Christianity.

D’Souza’s book is written, at least in part, as a response to the frontal attacks on Christianity launched by figures such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. He writes with a clear and uncluttered style and his arguments should attract considerable attention.

D’Souza chides believers for taking “the easy way out,” sheltering themselves in Christian intellectual enclaves rather than engaging the issues. They live separate secular and sacred lives without recognizing that this is incompatible with the Gospel.

Here is how he sees the challenge:

This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather, it is a time to drive the moneychangers out of the temple. The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control school curricula so they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion – and especially the Christian religion – disappear from the face of the earth.

In fact, the new atheists are frustrated that belief in God has not passed away. They had great confidence that the theory of secularization would promise a new secular age, with belief in God relegated to humanity’s past. Nevertheless, this isn’t happening. Europe may be overwhelmingly secular, but Americans are still a deeply religious people — even if this does not represent an embrace of authentic Christianity.

Meanwhile, traditional religion is growing all over the world. The world is not becoming more secular, but more religious in a myriad of forms.

D’Souza sees this in his own personal story:

I have found this to be true in my own life. I am a native of India, and my ancestors were converted to Christianity by Portuguese missionaries. As this was the era of the Portuguese Inquisition, some force and bludgeoning may also have been involved. When I came to America as a student in 1978, my Christianity was largely a matter of birth and habit. But even as I plunged myself into modern life in the United States, my faith slowly deepened. G.K Chesterton calls this the “revolt into orthodoxy.” Like Chesterton, I find myself rebelling against extreme secularism and finding in Christianity some remarkable answers to both intellectual and practical concerns. So I am grateful to those stern inquisitors for bringing me into the orbit of Christianity, even though I am sure my ancestors would not have shared my enthusiasm. Mine is a Christianity that is countercultural in the sense that it opposes powerful trends in modern Western culture. Yet it is thoroughly modern in that it addresses questions and needs raised by life in that culture. I don’t know how I could live well without it.

The continent of Europe is now the great exception — the secular continent. D’Souza explains:

Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birth rates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded, and Eastern European birth rates are comparably low. Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable “last man” devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche’s “last man” is finally here, and his name is Sven.

D’Souza’s strongest analysis comes when he considers the true character of the new atheism. It is, he suggests, a “pelvic revolt against God.” In other words, it is a revolt against Christian morality — especially sexual morality. This is not a new observation or argument, but D’Souza makes it exceptionally well:

My conclusion is that contrary to popular belief, atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don’t find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren’t adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to fit their desires. This is something we can all identify with. It is a temptation even for believers. We want to be saved as long as we are not saved from our sins. We are quite willing to be saved from a whole host of social evils, from poverty to disease to war. But we want to leave untouched the personal evils, such as selfishness and lechery and pride. We need spiritual healing, but we do not want it. Like a supervisory parent, God gets in our way. This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets rid of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.

D’Souza’s argument here is very insightful. These atheists are not so much struggling with intellectual doubts but feel limited by moral constraints. They are repulsed by the very idea of divine judgment, so they get rid of the Judge.

Christians will find Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book to be both interesting and helpful. His apologetic model is G. K. Chesterton, and he writes with a similar style and verve. I found his argument that Christians should embrace evolution while rejecting Darwinism to be unconvincing and unhelpful. The dominant model of evolutionary theory is just as atheistic and incompatible with Christianity as classical Darwinism.

Nevertheless, the book is filled with interesting and helpful arguments offered by a Christian intellectual who is heavily engaged in the great battle of ideas. What’s So Great About Christianity is a helpful addition to our public debate.

Sixth Article

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AL Mohler article:

TUESDAY • November 21, 2006

The New Atheism?

2006 has been a big year for atheism. The release of several major books–all widely touted in the media–has put atheism on the front lines of current cultural conversation. Books such as Richard Dawkins’The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Sam Harris’Letter to a Christian Nation are selling by the thousands and prompting hours of conversation on college campuses and in the media.

Now, WIRED magazine comes out with a cover story on atheism for its November 2006 issue. In “The New Atheism,” WIRED contributing editor Gary Wolf explains that this newly assertive form of atheism declares a very simple message: “No heaven. No hell. Just science.”

WIRED is itself a cultural symbol for the growing centrality of technology in our lives. On the other hand, the magazine is not simply a celebration of emerging technologies nor a catalogue of soon-to-be-released marvels. Instead, the magazine consistently offers significant intellectual content and it takes on many of the most controversial issues of the times. Considering the relatively young readership of the magazine, the decision to put atheism on the front cover indicates something of where they think the society is headed–at least in interest.

Wolf accomplishes a great deal in his article, thoughtfully introducing the work of militant atheists such as Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett. At the same time, he probes more deeply into the actual meaning of the New Atheism as a movement and a message.

At the beginning of his article, he gets right to the point: “The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respectfor belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.”

In order to understand the New Atheism, Wolf traveled to visit with Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett. His interviews with the three are illuminating and analytical.

He met Dawkins in Oxford, which Wolf describes as the “Jerusalem” of human reason. Accordingly, he labels Dawkins “the leading light of the New Atheism movement.”

In one sense, this is hardly news. Richards Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has been the most ardent and well-publicized intellectual opponent of Christianity for decades now. He was first famous for the evolutionary argument he presented in his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, now decades old. In his more recent work, Dawkins appears to have left his scientific career something in the background as he attempts to write as something of a philosopher and (a)theologian.

Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, reached the best-seller list in recent weeks, and he has made media appearances on everything from the mainstream media to Comedy Central. Unlike many journalists, Wolf understands what makes Dawkins unique. It is not so much that Dawkins is attempting to convince believers that they should no longer believe in God. To the contrary, Dawkins is attempting a very different cultural and political move. He wants to make respect forbelief in God socially unacceptable.

“Dawkins is perfectly aware that atheism is an ancient doctrine and that little of what he has to say is likely to change the terms of this stereotyped debate,” Wolf writes. “But he continues to go at it. His true interlocutors are not the Christians he confronts directly but the wavering nonbelievers or quasi believers among his listeners–people like me, potential New Atheists who might be inspired by his example.”

As Dawkins explains himself, “I’m quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism.” The Oxford professor also understands that atheism is a political issue as well as a theological question. “The number of nonreligious people in the US is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million. That’s more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people who had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists. They’re more numerous than anybody realizes.”

For a man who is supposedly an exemplar of the humble discipline of science, Dawkins is capable of breathtaking condescension. Consider these words: “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists . . . . Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everyone knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

Note his argument carefully–highly intelligent people are most likely to be atheists.

The political dimensions of Dawkins’ thought become immediately apparent when he speaks of how children should be protected from parents who believe in God. “How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?,” Dawkins asks. “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society to be stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”

Wolf has successfully captured the essence of what animates Richard Dawkins. He is an evangelist for atheism.

“Evangelism is a moral imperative,” Wolf explains. “Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.” As Dawkins sees it, belief in God is a dangerous “meme.” Dawkins is famous for arguing that memes serve as a major driving force in evolution. Memes, cultural replicators like ideas, can spread like a virus through society. Wolf understands that Dawkins claims to believe in democracy and freedom and thus accepts “that there are practical constraints on controlling the spread of bad memes.” Nevertheless, “Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them.”

In a very real sense, Richard Dawkins grabs the headlines precisely because he is willing to say what many other atheists think. Indeed, he is willing to say what other atheists must think, but are unwilling to say for one political reason or another. Dawkins is spectacularly unconcerned about public relations.

On the link between evolution and atheism, for example, Dawkins is unrepentant and direct–evolutionary theory must logically lead to atheism. While other evolutionists argue before courts and in the media that this is not so, Dawkins states that he cannot worry about the public relations consequences.

As he told Wolf: “My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The ‘sensible’ religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side.” As Wolf explains, Dawkins himself insisted that the word “sensible” should be in quotes. In other words, Dawkins seems to have less respect for theological liberalism than for those who are theologically orthodox. At least the true believers know what they truly believe.

This attack on religious moderates is what made The End of Faith, Sam Harris’ 2004 book, so interesting. Harris, whose second book,Letter to a Christian Nation, was released just weeks ago, argues that religious moderates and theological liberals function as something like “enablers” of orthodoxy and fundamentalism. As Wolf keenly observes, the New Atheists oppose agnostics and liberal believers as those who help orthodox believers build and retain a cultural powerbase. Agnostics and theological liberals may be fellow travelers with the atheists, these figures admit, but they actually serve to confuse rather than to clarify the issues at stake. On this, the New Atheists and orthodox believers are in agreement.

Sam Harris is even more apocalyptic than Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. He argues that, unless belief in God is eradicated, civilization is likely to end in a murderous sea of religious warfare. As an alternative, Harris proposes a “religion of reason.” As he explains, “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously–a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without [expletive deleted].”

Wolf helpfully offers his version of such a prayer: “that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.”

Harris’ self-proclaimed religion of reason bears uncanny resemblances to the features of New Age thought–something that offends many of his fellow New Atheists. Still, Harris’ books have sold by the thousands and he has transformed himself into a poster child for militant atheism. Like Dawkins, Harris sees time on his side. “At some point, there’s going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be tooembarrassing to believe in God.”

The third major figure in Wolf’s article, Daniel Dennett, teaches at Tufts University. As Wolf explains, “Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever.” Wolf describes Dennett as offering more humorous examples and thought experiments than Dawkins and Harris. “But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation. In fact, he argues that neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school. After all, he argues, ‘if you have to hoodwink–or blindfold–your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.’” Like Harris, Dennett believes that something like a religion of reason might be possible. But, in some contrast to Dawkins and Harris, Dennett does not see faith as something that can be intellectualized away. To the contrary, he sees belief in God to have served an evolutionary purpose. Even as he now believes that evolutionary purpose is no longer helpful, he argues that such an evolutionary feature is not likely to be eradicated quickly. Therefore, Dennett suggests replacing belief in God with something of a secular substitute.

In his wide-ranging article, Wolf considers the emergence of the New Atheism from multiple perspectives. He deals not only with Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, but with a host of others, including some who believe in God. He understands that the New Atheists stand in contrast with the older atheism more in terms of mood and mode of public engagement. He also understands that those who attempt to rebut the New Atheism on scientific grounds can find themselves facing considerable complexity. As Wolf explains, when defenders of faith accept science as the arbiter of reality, atheists are left “with the upper hand.”

Throughout the article, Wolf also admits his own doubts. He seems to identify himself more with agnosticism than atheism, and he reveals some discomfort with the stridency of the New Atheism.

In his words: “The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance that we could turn out to be wrong.”

The very fact that Wolf remains unconvinced by the arguments promoted by the New Atheists is itself significant. What Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett–along with the other New Atheists–really demand is that society must place itself in the hands of a new and militant atheistic priesthood. Science as defined by these new priests, would serve as the new sacrament and as the means of salvation.

What this article reveals is that those arguing that human beings need to be saved from belief in God are facing a tough sell–even in WIREDmagazine.

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Books In Review Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 95 (August/September 1999): 55-56.

September 10, 2019 – 7:05 pm

Books In Review

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder

Prophet of Pointlessness

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. By Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin. 337 pp. $26.

Reviewed by Stephen M. Barr

In reading Richard Dawkins I am reminded of an anecdote told by Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg and several other great physicists were sitting around one evening talking about God and religion. The discussion ended up being dominated by Paul Dirac, who went into a long diatribe declaring religion to be the opiate of the masses. At the end of the evening someone turned to the brilliant Wolfgang Pauli and said, “You have been very quiet tonight, Pauli. What do you think of what Dirac has been telling us?” Pauli responded, “If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.”

Richard Dawkins was not always a prophet. In his early days he wrote well–regarded papers on the rules for grooming in flies and the nesting strategies of digger wasps. It was while toiling in the vineyards of zoological science that he apparently heard the call to preach. His pulpit is an endowed chair in “the Public Understanding of Science” at Oxford, and the message he proclaims in his elegantly written, if somewhat waspish, books and articles is that the universe and life have no meaning. “The universe we observe,” he says, “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.”

The root of Dawkins’ philosophy is the insight, derived from neo–Darwinian theory, that life has no ulterior purpose, biologically speaking. Mosquitoes exist to replicate mosquito DNA and dung beetles to replicate dung beetle DNA. The whole drama of life is a meaningless genetic competition. Not surprisingly, many people find Dawkins’ vision of a pointless universe rather repellant. He has been accused of spreading a cold and joyless message, a pessimistic nihilism. The present book seems to have been written to respond to these charges. Its preface begins thus:

A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless.

This preface filled me with the keenest anticipation. I had always wondered what consolations could be found in a philosophy like Dawkins’. What would he have to say to that sleepless publisher or that desperate girl? Not what you might have expected. Here is a passage from chapter one, in which he is describing the time–line of life on earth:

Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria.

Many–celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole history of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust of one light stroke of a nail file.

Vivid, striking, accurate, but hardly consoling.

Indeed, what Dawkins has to say to troubled souls is, basically, to grow up and stop snivelling: “The adult world may seem a cold and empty place,” he writes, “with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels—guardian or garden variety. . . . Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive.”

Dawkins believes that the charge of nihilism and coldness leveled against his philosophy stems from a certain view of science which sees it ridding the world of poetry and romance by explaining things previously steeped in wonder. The title of his book is taken from Keats’ poem “Lamia”: “Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy? / . . . / Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow . . .” The word “philosophy” here refers to “natural philosophy,” i.e., science, and the “unweaving” to Isaac Newton’s explanation of the rainbow as being due to the prismatic effect of raindrops.

The greater part of Dawkins’ book is devoted to answering Keats. Dawkins points out—and here he is quite right—that an increased understanding of nature should heighten rather than diminish our sense of wonder at it. He uses Keats’ own example of the rainbow to make his point. The rainbow is a spectrum of light, and Dawkins explains how understanding this spectrum has enabled scientists to make remarkable discoveries. For example, decoding the spectra of light from stars allows astrophysicists to infer what stars are made of, a feat which one might have thought utterly impossible. And decoding the spectra from distant galaxies is what revealed to Edwin Hubble in 1929 the astonishing fact that the universe is expanding.

Dawkins develops this theme through many variations. Not only light but sound has a spectrum. He describes how the human brain is able to “unweave” the exceedingly complex patterns of sound vibrations that impinge upon our ears and interpret or “reweave” them. He goes on to describe the amazing ability of bats to see with sound, and the way that crickets’ song is “cunningly pitched and timed to be hard for vertebrate ears to locate, but easy for female crickets, with their weathervane ears, to home in upon.” Dawkins is at his best when describing the wonders which science has learned about living things. In his view, far from ridding the world of poetry, science reveals to us fit subjects for the great poetry of the future.

Dawkins contrasts this with a sense of wonder that feeds on the irrational and the inexplicable. He describes an audience at a magic show that grew angry when the magician’s tricks were explained to them. It is this kind of degraded hankering after mystification that lies behind superstitions of all kinds, he alleges, including, of course, religion. What science has done is take the natural appetite for wonder and satisfy it with something true and worthy. Much of the book is taken up with the debunking of superstition in the manner of The Skeptical Inquirer.

In contrasting the two senses of wonder, the scientific and the obscurantist (which includes for him the religious), Dawkins directs his scorn at those “who are content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery we were not ‘meant’ to understand.” This is a strange reproach, since it is the heart of Dawkins’ own creed that we were not “meant” to do anything, let alone to understand. This is but one instance of a curious disjunction that exists between the tenets of Dawkins’ philosophy and the values he wishes to base on them.

One sees this also in his discussion of astrology, which he attacks not only as false, but as fraught with “sad human consequences.” But one of the problems with materialism is that it is little different from astrology in its human consequences. What is the difference between believing that one’s actions are dictated by the orbits of the planets and believing that they are dictated by the orbits of the electrons in one’s brain?

This book is based in its entirety on a simple mistake. It is not often that one can find exactly the point where an author goes off the track, but here one can. It is in the fifth sentence of the preface of the book, which begins, “Similar accusations of barren desolation, of promoting an arid and joyless message, are frequently flung at science in general.” However, what people object to in Dawkins is not the science but the atheism. Because he cannot see the difference, he writes a book that is a 300–page non sequitur. In answering the charge that his atheism is a joyless creed, he says, in essence, that his atheism allows him to derive pleasure from the beauty and magnificence of Nature as revealed by science. He may as well have said that his atheism allows him to enjoy a good steak or a game of baseball, or that his atheism gives him the great advantage of having a nose, two eyes, and ten fingers.

Those who believe in God, including the very substantial proportion of scientists who do, are every bit as able to thrill to scientific discovery as Dawkins is. They embrace scientific understanding and rejoice in it, as he does. But they have as well the joy of their faith, which tells them that the beauty of Nature points to something higher, to a Wisdom greater than their own. For Dawkins it points to nothing. He is welcome to that conclusion, but there is not the slightest reason why any scientist or scientifically minded person should share it.

Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware.

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 157a Bertrand Russell’s perfect implicit unqualified faith in an uniformity of natural causes in a closed system

September 10, 2019 – 1:13 am

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 149 SSSS Sir Bertrand Russell

Image result for bertrand russell

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

(Harry Kroto pictured below)

Image result for harry kroto nobel prize

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend, Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross, Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman, Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison, Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann, Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert, Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku, Stuart Kauffman, Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus, Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow, Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff, Jonathan Parry, Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse, Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees, Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg, Lee Silver, Peter Singer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple, Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson, .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and Lewis Wolpert,

In the first video below in the 14th clip in this series are his words and I will be responding to them in the next few weeks since Sir Bertrand Russell is probably the most quoted skeptic of our time, unless it was someone like Carl Sagan or Antony Flew.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

Quote from Bertrand Russell:

Q: Why are you not a Christian?

Russell: Because I see no evidence whatever for any of the Christian dogmas. I’ve examined all the stock arguments in favor of the existence of God, and none of them seem to me to be logically valid.

Q: Do you think there’s a practical reason for having a religious belief, for many people?

Russell: Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true. That’s quite… at least, I rule it out as impossible. Either the thing is true, or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment. But you can’t… it seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful, and not because you think it’s true._

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Francis Schaeffer noted concerning the IMPLICIT FAITH of Bertrand Russell:

I was lecturing at the University of St. Andrews one night and someone put forth the question, “If Christianity is so clear and reasonable then why doesn’t Bertrand Russell then become a Christian? Is it because he hasn’t discovered theology?”

It wasn’t a matter of studying theology that was involved but rather that he had too much faith. I was surrounded by humanists and you could hear the gasps. Bertrand Russell and faith; Isn’t this the man of reason? I pointed out that this is a man of high orthodoxy who will hold his IMPLICIT FAITH on the basis of his presuppositions no matter how many times he has to zig and zag because it doesn’t conform to the facts.

You must understand what the term IMPLICIT FAITH means. In the old Roman Catholic Church when someone who became a Roman Catholic they had to promise implicit faith. That meant that you not only had to believe everything that Roman Catholic Church taught then but also everything it would teach in the future. It seems to me this is the kind of faith that these people have in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system and they have accepted it no matter what it leads them into.

I think that these men are men of a high level of IMPLICIT FAITH in their own set of presuppositions. Paul said (in Romans Chapter One) they won’t carry it to it’s logical conclusion even though they hold a great deal of the truth and they have revolted and they have set up a series of universals in themselves which they won’t transgress no matter if they conform to the facts or not.

Here below is the Romans passage that Schaeffer is referring to and verse 19 refers to what Schaeffer calls “the mannishness of man” and verse 20 refers to Schaeffer’s other point which is “the universe and it’s form.”

Romans 1:18-20 Amplified Bible :

18 For God’s [holy] wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness repress and hinder the truth and make it inoperative. 19 For that which is known about God is evident to them and made plain in their inner consciousness, because God [Himself] has shown it to them. 20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature and attributes, that is, His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the things that have been made (His handiworks). So [men] are without excuse [altogether without any defense or justification].

We can actually see the two points makes playing themselves out in Bertrand Russell’s own life.

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[From a letter dated August 11, 1918 to Miss Rinder when Russell was 46]

It is so with all who spend their lives in the quest of something elusive, and yet omnipresent, and at once subtle and infinite. One seeks it in music, and the sea, and sunsets; at times I have seemed very near it in crowds when I have been feeling strongly what they were feeling; one seeks it in love above all. But if one lets oneself imagine one has found it, some cruel irony is sure to come and show one that it is not really found.
The outcome is that one is a ghost, floating through the world without any real contact. Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God and to refuse to enter into any earthly communion—at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was a God. It is odd isn’t it? I care passionately for this world, and many things and people in it, and yet…what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I don’t believe there is. I am haunted—some ghost, from some extra-mundane region, seems always trying to tell me something that I am to repeat to the world, but I cannot understand the message.

There was evidence during Bertrand Russell’s own life that indicated that the Bible was true and could be trusted.

Here is some below:

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnotes #97 and #98) written by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop

A common assumption among liberal scholars is that because the Gospels are theologically motivated writings–which they are–they cannot also be historically accurate. In other words, because Luke, say (when he wrote the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts), was convinced of the deity of Christ, this influenced his work to the point where it ceased to be reliable as a historical account. The assumption that a writing cannot be both historical and theological is false.

The experience of the famous classical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay illustrates this well. When he began his pioneer work of exploration in Asia Minor, he accepted the view then current among the Tubingen scholars of his day that the Book of Acts was written long after the events in Paul’s life and was therefore historically inaccurate. However, his travels and discoveries increasingly forced upon his mind a totally different picture, and he became convinced that Acts was minutely accurate in many details which could be checked.

Men Who Were Converted Trying to Disprove the Bible – Part 2 of 3

April 5, 2017

David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org

This is Part 2. Read Part 1

Above all other books combined, the Bible has been hated, vilified, ridiculed, criticized, restricted, banned, and destroyed, but it has been to no avail. As one rightly said, “We might as well put our shoulder to the burning wheel of the sun, and try to stop it on its flaming course, as attempt to stop the circulation of the Bible” (Sidney Collett, All about the Bible, p. 63).

In A.D. 303, the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict to stop Christians from worshipping Jesus Christ and to destroy their Scriptures. Every official in the empire was ordered to raze the churches to the ground and burn every Bible found in their districts (Stanley Greenslade, Cambridge History of the Bible). Twenty-five years later Diocletian’s successor, Constantine, issued another edict ordering fifty Bibles to be published at government expense (Eusebius).

In 1778 the French infidel Voltaire boasted that in 100 years Christianity would cease to exist, but within 50 years the Geneva Bible Society used his press and house to publish Bibles (Geisler and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 1986, pp. 123, 124).

Robert Ingersoll once boasted, “Within 15 years I’ll have the Bible lodged in a morgue.” But Ingersoll is dead, and the Bible is alive and well.

In fact, many who set out to disprove the Bible have been converted, instead. The following are a few more examples:

Sir William Mitchell Ramsay,(1851 – 1939)

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WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY (1851-1939)

William Ramsay was a renowned archaeologist and New Testament scholar from Scotland. He was knighted by the British crown for his work in archaeology.

He was raised an atheist, and as a brilliant student at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and at Oxford University in England, he sat at the feet of theological modernists and skeptics who disbelieved the Bible. It was assumed that the Bible is not historically accurate and that it contains a large portion of mythology. It was thought that the book of Acts was not written until 150 A.D., about a century after the events it describes.

When Ramsay began archaeological and historical research in Asia Minor beginning in 1881, he expected and hoped to find more evidence against the Bible. Instead, he discovered fact after fact that supported the Bible. He eventually concluded that the book of Acts was written during the lifetime of the apostles and that it is historically accurate. His discoveries led to his conversion to Christianity.

“He had spent years deliberately preparing himself for the announced task of heading an exploration expedition into Asia Minor and Palestine where he would [find] the evidence that the book was the product of ambitious monks, and not the book from heaven it claimed to be. He regarded the weakest spot in the whole New Testament to be the story of Paul’s travels. These had never been thoroughly investigated by one on the spot. Equipped as no other man had been, he went to the home of the Bible. Here he spent fifteen years digging. Then in 1896 he published a large volume, Saint Paul, the Traveler and the Roman Citizen. … The book caused a furor of dismay among the skeptics of the world. Its attitude was utterly unexpected because it was contrary to the announced intention of the author years before. For twenty years more, book after book from the same author came from the press, each filled with additional evidence of the exact, minute truthfulness of the whole New Testament as tested by the spade on the spot. And these books have stood the test of time, not one having been refuted, nor have I found even any attempt to refute them” (Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p. 62).

Ramsay testified:

“The present writer takes the view that Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness. At this point we are describing what reasons and arguments changed the mind of one who began under the impression that the history was written long after the events and that it was untrustworthy as a whole” (The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, 1915).

VIGGO OLSON

The following is excerpted from “From Agnostic to Ambassador to Bangladesh,” Thanthropos.org:

Viggo Olsen was a brilliant surgeon who graduated cum laude from medical school and later became a diplomat of the American Board of Surgery and a fellow of the American College of surgeons. In 1951 he was challenged by his wife’s parents to examine the claims of Christianity for himself.
Olsen recalled, ‘Just alike a surgeon incises a chest, we were going to slash into the Bible and dissect out all its embarrassing scientific mistakes.’

After he started his investigation he ran into problems. He remembers that he had trouble finding scientific mistakes. ‘We’d find something that seemed to be an error, but on further reflection and study, we saw that our understanding had been shallow. That made us sit up and take notice.’

After examining the evidence, Olsen became a Christian and later gave his life to be a missionary in Bangladesh. He was later honored with Visa #001 for his contributions to the country.

This is a man who was extremely educated, a brilliant surgeon, someone who was not willing to take a blind leap of faith, and after exhaustive research he was willing to admit, like so many others have, that the historic Christian faith is much more than a religion, it is based on a man who walked this Earth as the Theanthropos, the God-Man. The evidence that supports the resurrection of Jesus is so overwhelming it demands a verdict and Christianity lives and dies by the fact of the resurrection–without it, Christianity does not hold water.

Olsen went from an agnostic to giving up his career, his entire life, to serve people in Bangladesh. Olson testified:

‘It was the greatest adventure we could ever have. When you’re in a hard place, when you’re in over your head again and again, when you’re sinking and beyond yourself and praying your heart out–then you see God reach out and touch your life and resolve the situation beyond anything you could have ever hoped. … That’s living it up! In my opinion, finding the purpose for which God made you–whatever it may be–and then fully pursuing it is simply the very best way to live.’

Olsen documented his life in the famous book called Daktar.

JOSH MCDOWELL

Josh McDowell, the author of Evidence That Demands a Verdict, was a skeptic when he entered university to pursue a law degree. There he met some Christians who challenged him to examine the evidence for the Bible and Jesus Christ. Following is his testimony:

As a teenager, I wanted the answers to three basic questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? … So as a young student, I started looking for answers.

I thought that education might have the answer to my quest for happiness and meaning. So I enrolled in the university. What a disappointment! I have probably been on more university campuses in my lifetime than anyone else in history. You can find a lot of things in the university, but enrolling there to find truth and meaning in life is virtually a lost cause.

I used to buttonhole professors in their offices, seeking the answers to my questions. When they saw me coming they would turn out the lights, pull down the shades, and lock the door so they wouldn’t have to talk to me. I soon realized that the university didn’t have the answers I was seeking. Faculty members and my fellow students had just as many problems, frustrations, and unanswered questions about life as I had. A few years ago I saw a student walking around a campus with a sign on his back: ‘Don’t follow me, I’m lost.’ That’s how everyone in the university seemed to me. Education was not the answer!

Prestige must be the way to go, I decided. It just seemed right to find a noble cause, give yourself to it, and become well known. The people with the most prestige in the university, and who also controlled the purse strings, were the student leaders. So I ran for various student offices and got elected. It was great to know everyone on campus, make important decisions, and spend the university’s money doing what I wanted to do. But the thrill soon wore off, as with everything else I had tried.

Every Monday morning I would wake up with a headache because of the way I had spent the previous night. My attitude was, Here we go again, another five boring days. Happiness for me revolved around those three party-nights: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then the whole boring cycle would start over again.

Around this time I noticed a small group of people on campus–eight students and two faculty–and there was something different about them. They seemed to know where they were going in life. And they had a quality I deeply admire in people: conviction. But there was something more about this group that caught my attention. It was love. These students and professors not only loved each other, they loved and cared for people outside their group.

About two weeks later, I was sitting around a table in the student union talking with some members of this group. … I turned to one of the girls in the group and said, ‘Tell me, what changed your lives? Why are you so different from the other students and faculty?’

She looked me straight in the eye and said two words I had never expected to hear in an intelligent discussion on a university campus: ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Jesus Christ?’ I snapped. ‘Don’t give me that kind of garbage. I’m fed up with religion, the Bible, and the church.’

She quickly shot back, ‘Mister, I didn’t say ‘religion’; I said ‘Jesus Christ.’

Then my new friends issued me a challenge I couldn’t believe. They challenged me, a pre-law student, to examine intellectually the claim that Jesus Christ is God’s Son. I thought this was a joke. These Christians were so dumb. How could something as flimsy as Christianity stand up to an intellectual examination? I scoffed at their challenge.

I finally accepted their challenge, not to prove anything but to refute them. I decided to write a book that would make an intellectual joke of Christianity. I left the university and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to gather evidence to prove that Christianity is a sham.

One day while I was sitting in a library in London, England, I sensed a voice within me saying, ‘Josh, you don’t have a leg to stand on.’ I immediately suppressed it. But just about every day after that I heard the same inner voice. The more I researched, the more I heard this voice. I returned to the United States and to the university, but I couldn’t sleep at night. I would go to bed at ten o’clock and lie awake until four in the morning, trying to refute the overwhelming evidence I was accumulating that Jesus Christ was God’s Son.

I began to realize that I was being intellectually dishonest. My mind told me that the claims of Christ were indeed true, but my will was being pulled another direction. I had placed so much emphasis on finding the truth, but I wasn’t willing to follow it once I saw it. I began to sense Christ’s personal challenge to me in Revelation 3:20: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.’ But becoming a Christian seemed so ego-shattering to me. I couldn’t think of a faster way to ruin all my good times.

I knew I had to resolve this inner conflict because it was driving me crazy. I had always considered myself an open-minded person, so I decided to put Christ’s claims to the supreme test. One night at my home in Union City, Michigan, at the end of my second year at the university, I became a Christian.

I said, ‘Lord Jesus, thank You for dying on the cross for me.’ I realized that if I were the only person on earth, Christ would have still died for me.’ … I said, ‘I confess that I am a sinner.’ No one had to tell me that. I knew there were things in my life that were incompatible with a holy, just, righteous God. … I said, ‘Right now, in the best way I know how, I open the door of my life and place my trust in You as Saviour and Lord. Take over the control of my life. Change me from the inside out. Make me the type of person You created me to be’ (Josh McDowell, “He Changed My Life,” The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Thomas Nelson, 1999, pp. xxv).

McDowell concludes:

“After trying to shatter the historicity and validity of the Scripture, I cam to the conclusion that it is historically trustworthy. If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then one must discard almost all literature of antiquity.

“One problem I constantly face is the desire on the part of many to apply one standard or test to secular literature and another to the Bible. One must apply the same test, whether the literature under investigation is secular or religious.

“Having done this, I believe we can hold the Scriptures in our hands and say, ‘The Bible is trustworthy and historically reliable” (The New Evidence, p. 68).

RICHARD LUMSDEN

Richard Lumsden (1938-97), Ph.D., converted from Darwinian atheist to Bible-believing Christian at the apex of his professional career when, challenged by one of his students, he decided to check out the evidence for himself.

A professor of parisitology and cell biology, Lumsden was dean of the graduate school at Tulane University. He trained 30 Ph.D.s., published hundreds of scholarly papers, and was the winner of the highest award for parasitology.

The following is excerpted from “The World’s Greatest Creation Scientists” by David Coppedge, which is available from Master Plan Association, http://www.creationsafaris.com/products.htm —

“Dr. Richard D. Lumsden was fully grounded in Darwinian philosophy, and had no reason or desire to consider Christianity. Science was his faith: the facts, and only the facts. But at the apex of his professional career, he had enough integrity to check out the facts, and made a difficult choice to go where the facts led him, against what he had been taught, and against what he himself taught. His life took a dramatic turnaround, from Darwinist to creationist, and from atheist to Christian.

“All through his career he believed Darwinian evolution was an established principle of science, and he took great glee in ridiculing Christian beliefs. One day, he heard that Louisiana had passed a law requiring equal time for creation with evolution, and he was flabbergasted–how stupid, he thought, and how evil! He used the opportunity to launch into a tirade against creationism in class, and to give them his best eloquence in support of Darwinism. Little did he know he had a formidable opponent in class that day. No, not a silver-tongued orator to engage him in a battle of wits; that would have been too easy. This time it was a gentle, polite, young female student.

“This student went up to him after class and cheerfully exclaimed, ‘Great lecture, Doc! Say, I wonder if I could make an appointment with you; I have some questions about what you said, and just want to get my facts straight.’ Dr. Lumsden, flattered with this student’s positive approach, agreed on a time they could meet in his office. On the appointed day, the student thanked him for his time, and started in. She did not argue with anything he had said about evolution in class, but just began asking a series of questions: ‘How did life arise? . . . Isn’t DNA too complex to form by chance? . . . Why are there gaps in the fossil record between major kinds? . . . What are the missing links between apes and man?’ he didn’t act judgmental or provocative; she just wanted to know. Lumsden, unabashed, gave the standard evolutionary answers to the questions. But something about this interchange began making him very uneasy. He was prepared for a fight, but not for a gentle, honest set of questions. As he listened to himself spouting the typical evolutionary responses, he thought to himself, This does not make any sense. What I know about biology is contrary to what I’m saying. When the time came to go, the student picked up her books and smiled, ‘Thanks, Doc!’ and left. On the outside, Dr. Lumsden appeared confident; but on the inside, he was devastated. He knew that everything he had told this student was wrong.

“Dr. Lumsden had the integrity to face his new doubts honestly. He undertook a personal research project to check out the arguments for evolution, and over time, found them wanting. Based on the scientific evidence alone, he decided he must reject Darwinism, and he became a creationist. But as morning follows night, he had to face the next question, Who is the Creator? Shortly thereafter, by coincidence or not, his daughter invited him to church. It was so out of character for this formerly crusty, self-confident evolutionist to go to church! Not much earlier, he would have had nothing to do with religion. But now, he was open to reconsider the identity of the Creator, and whether the claims of the Bible were true. His atheistic philosophy had also left him helpless to deal with guilt and bad habits in his personal life. This time he was open, and this time he heard the Good News that God had sent His Son to pay the penalty for our sins, and to offer men forgiveness and eternal life.

“A tremendous struggle was going on in Dr. Lumsden’s heart as he listened to the sermon. When the service ended, the pastor gave an invitation to come to the front and decide once and for all, publicly, to receive Christ. Dr. Lumsden describes the turmoil he was in: ‘With flesh protesting every inch of the way, I found myself walking forward, down to the altar. And there, found God! Truly, at that moment, I came to know Him, and received the Lord Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.’ There’s room at the cross even for know-it-all science professors, if they are willing to humble themselves and bow before the Creator to whom the scientific evidence points.

“Dr. Lumsden rejoiced in his new-found faith, but found out there is a price to pay also. He was ejected from the science faculty after his dynamic conversion to Christ and creationism. The Institute for Creation Research invited him to direct their biology department, which he did from 1990 to 1996. Dr. Henry Morris said of him, ‘He had a very vibrant testimony of his conversion only a few years ago and of the role that one of his students played in confronting his evolutionism with persistent and penetrating questions. He became fully convinced of the bankruptcy of his beliefs and realized that the only reasonable alternative was that there must be a Creator.’ Dick Lumsden was also appointed to the science faculty of The Master’s College, and used his intimate knowledge of electron microscopy to help the campus set up an operational instrument for training students. There was a joy present in his life and manner that made his lectures sparkle, and he loved to demonstrate design in the cell that could not have arisen by Darwinian processes. In discussions with evolutionists, he knew ‘just where to get them’ (he would say with a smile), having been in their shoes. His students appreciated the training his depth and breadth of knowledge and experience brought to the class and to the lab.”

Before he died Lumsdens testimony was video recorded and it is now available at the following location:https://vimeo.com/11466124

Read Part 3

The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)

You want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.,

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RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Pausing to take a look at the life of HARRY KROTO Part C (Kroto’s admiration of Bertrand Russell examined)

June 21, 2016 – 1:12 am

Today we look at the 3rd letter in the Kroto correspondence and his admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Below The Nobel chemistry laureates Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley) It is with sadness that I write this post having learned of the death of Sir Harold Kroto on April 30, 2016 at the age of […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Tagged .Alexander Vilenkin, Aaron Ciechanover, Alan Dershowitz, Alan Guth, Alan Macfarlane, Alison Richard, Alva Noe, Arif Ahmed, Barry Supple, Bart Ehrman, Brian Greene, Brian Harrison, Bruce Hood, C.J. van Rijsbergen, Carolyn Porco, David Friend, David J. Gross, Douglas Osheroff, Elizabeth Loftus, Frank Wilczek, Gareth Stedman Jones, George Lakoff, Haroon Ahmed, Harry Kroto, Herbert Huppert, Herman Philipse, Hermann Hauser, Horace Barlow, Hubert Dreyfus, Ivar Giaever, J. L. Schellenberg, John Searle, John Sulston, Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Parry, Lawrence Krauss, Lee Silver, Leonard Mlodinow, Leonard Susskind, Lewis Wolpert, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees, Marcus du Sautoy, Mark Balaguer, Marvin Minsky, Michael Bate, Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Sacks, Patricia Churchland, Peter Millican, Peter Singer, Raymond Tallis, Rebecca Goldstein, Riccardo Giacconi, Roald Hoffmann, Robert M. Price, Ronald de Sousa, Roy Glauber, Saul Perlmutter, Shelly Kagan, Simon Schaffer, Sir David Attenborough, Sir John Walker, Sir Patrick Bateson, Stephan Feuchtwang, Stephen F Gudeman, Steve Jones, Steven Weinberg, Stuart Kauffman, Susan Greenfield, Theodor W. Hänsch, Victor Stenger, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Yujin Nagasawa | Edit | Comments (0)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 52 The views of Hegel and Bertrand Russell influenced Gareth Stedman Jones of Cambridge!!

November 17, 2015 – 5:37 am

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said: …Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975 and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them. Harry Kroto _________________ Below you have picture of Dr. Harry Kroto: Gareth Stedman […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Tagged (Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Alan Macfarlane (1941-), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Bette Chambers (1930-), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Christopher C. French (1956-) Walter R. Rowe, Edward O. WIlson (1929-), Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Geoff Harcourt (1931-), George Wald (1906-1997), Gerald Holton (1922-), Glenn Branch, Gordon Stein (1941-1996), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Harry Kroto (1939-), Herbert Kroemer (1928-), James Terry McCollum (1936-), John Hospers (1918-2011), John J. Shea (1969-), John R. Cole (1942-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Lewis Wolpert (1929), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Martin Rees (1942-), Marty E. Martin (1928-), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Matt Cartmill (1943-), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Michael Martin (1932-)., Milton Fingerman (1928-), Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-), Paul Quincey, Ray T. Cragun (1976-)., Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Richard Rubenstein (1924-), Roald Hoffmann (1937-), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Susan Blackmore (1951-), Thomas Gilovich (1954-), Thomas H. Jukes (1906-1999), Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Wolf Roder |Edit | Comments (0)

WOODY WEDNESDAY John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!!

October 28, 2015 – 12:00 am

Top 10 Woody Allen Movies __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 (More On) Woody Allen’s Atheism As I wrote in a previous post, I like Woody Allen. I have long admired his […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Woody Allen | Edit | Comments (0)

John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were two atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!!

September 24, 2015 – 12:55 am

______ Top 10 Woody Allen Movies PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 01 PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 02 __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were two atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Woody Allen | Edit | Comments (0)

Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston debate transcript (Part 4)

January 7, 2013 – 4:55 am

THE MORAL ARGUMENT BERTRAND RUSSELL But aren’t you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good — the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you’re […]

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Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston debate transcript (Part 3)

January 5, 2013 – 4:52 am

Great debate Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, […]

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Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston debate transcript and audio (Part 2)

January 3, 2013 – 4:48 am

Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of UK/BBC copyright. Pardon the hissy audio. It was recorded 51 […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston debate transcript and audio (Part 1)

January 1, 2013 – 4:43 am

Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

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115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

Published on Dec 21, 2012

Neste vídeo: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath
Curta nossa página no facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/multiversosp…

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At the 40 minute mark Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath discuss Deena Burnett’s assertion that her husband Tom was an instrument carrying out God’s will in stopping the plane from hitting the White House.

Wikipedia noted:

United Airlines Flight 93[edit]

On September 11, 2001, while on board United Airlines Flight 93, Burnett sat next to passenger Mark Bingham. Burnett called his wife, Deena, after hijackers took control of the plane. During his second call to her, she relayed to him that the Towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed.^[7] Upon learning of the situation, Deena, a former flight attendant, recalled her training and urged Burnett to sit quietly and not draw attention to himself, but Burnett instead informed her that he and three other passengers, Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer and Jeremy Glick, were forming a plan to take the plane back from the hijackers, and leading other passengers in this effort.^[5]^[6]^[8] He also told Deena not to worry.^[9] Burnett and several other passengers stormed the cockpit, foiling the hijackers’ plan to crash the plane into the White House or Capitol Building,^[5]^[10] and forced it to crash in a Pennsylvania field, killing all 44 people on board.^[5]^[6]

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Let me make a few points here. I am told that Tom and Deena used to attend Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock when they were visiting her parents in Little Rock. Deena actually grew up in a Southern Baptist Church like I did. It is a common view in many evangelical circles that the problem of evil must be explained in light of the events of Genesis chapter 3 and the fall of man. You can see this pointed out in the Evangelism Explosion leader’s guide written by Dr. D. James Kennedy. Francis Schaeffer and Ravi Zacharias have written much on this subject too and some their work is below:

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So many tragic things happen in this world and many ask ” How can a good God allow evil and suffering?”

Here is an explanation from the Evangelism Explosion leader’s guide:

Their thinking is that either God is not powerful enough to prevent evil or else God is not good. He is often blamed for tragedy. “Where was God when I went through this, or when that happened.” God is blamed for natural disasters, Even my insurance company describes them as “acts of God.” How to handle this one- (O.N.E.)
a. Origin of evil— man’s choice- God created a perfect world…
b. Nature of God—He forgives, I John 1:9—He uses tragedy to bring us to Himself, C.S. Lewis, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to arouse a deaf world.”
c. End of it all—Bible teaches that God will one day put an end to all evil, and pain and death. “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).As Christians we have this hope of Heaven and eternity. Share how it has made a tremendous difference in your life and that you know for sure that when you die you are going to spend eternity in Heaven. Ask the person, “May I ask you a question? Do you have this hope? Do you know for certain that when you die you are going to Heaven, or is that something you would say you’re still working on?”How could a loving God send people to Hell?
(O.N.E.)
a. Origin of hell—never intended for people. Created for Satan and his demons. Jesus said, “Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt 25:41). Man chooses to sin and ignore God. The penalty is death (eternal separation from God) and, yes, Hell. But God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, we choose it by refusing or ignoring God in attitude and action. b. Nature of God—“ God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). He is so loving that He sent His own Son to die and pay the penalty for our sin so that we could avoid Hell and have the assurance of Heaven. No one in Hell will be able to blame God. He doesn’t send people there, it’s our own choice. We must choose to repent, to stop ignoring God in attitude and action, accepting His salvation and yielding to His leadership.c. End of it all—Bible teaches that God will one day put an end to all evil, pain, death, and penalty of Hell. “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).As Christians , we need not worry about Hell. The Bible says, “these things have been written . . . so that you may know you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). I have complete confidence that when I die, I’m going to Heaven. May I ask you a question?___________________________-

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In his article “A Conversation with an Atheist,” Rick Wade notes:

The problem of evil is a significant moral issue in the atheist’s arsenal. We talk about a God of goodness, but what we see around us is suffering, and a lot of it apparently unjustifiable. Stephanie said, “Disbelief in a personal, loving God as an explanation of the way the world works is reasonable–especially when one considers natural disasters that can’t be blamed on free will and sin.”{17}

One response to the problem of evil is that God sees our freedom to choose as a higher value than protecting people from harm; this is the freewill defense. Stephanie said, however, that natural disasters can’t be blamed on free will and sin. What about this? Is it true that natural disasters can’t be blamed on sin? I replied that they did come into existence because of sin (Genesis 3). We’re told in Romans 8 that creation will one day “be set free from its slavery to corruption,” that it “groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” The Fall caused the problem, and, in the consummation of the ages, the problem will be fixed.

Second, I noted that on a naturalistic basis, it’s hard to even know what evil is. But the reality of God explains it. As theologian Henri Blocher said,

The sense of evil requires the God of the Bible. In a novel by Joseph Heller, “While rejecting belief in God, the characters in the story find themselves compelled to postulate his existence in order to have an adequate object for their moral indignation.” . . . When you raise this standard objection against God, to whom do you say it, other than this God? Without this God who is sovereign and good, what is the rationale of our complaints? Can we even tell what is evil? Perhaps the late John Lennon understood: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” he sang. Might we be coming to the point where the sense of evil is a proof of the existence of God?{18}

So,… if there is no God, there really is no problem of evil. Does the atheist ever find herself shaking her fist at the sky after some catastrophe and demanding an explanation? If there is no God, no one is listening.

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Francis Schaeffer and Gospel of Christ in the pages of the Bible

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER’S WORDS BELOW:

The Personal Origin of Man
The Scriptures tell us that the universe exists and has form and meaning because it was created purposefully by a personal Creator. This being the case, we see that, as we are personal, we are not something strange and out of line with an otherwise impersonal universe. Since we are made in the image of God, we are in line with God. There is continuity, in other words, between ourselves, though finite, and the infinite Creator who stands behind the universe as its Creator and its final source of meaning.
Unlike the evolutionary concept of an impersonal beginning plus time plus chance, the Bible gives an account of man’s origin as a finite person make in God’s image, that is, like God. We see then how man can have personality and dignity and value. Our uniqueness is guaranteed, something which is impossible in the materialistic system. If there is no qualitative distinction between man and other organic life (animals or plants), why should we feel greater concern over the death of a human being than over the death of a laboratory rat? Is man in the end any higher?
Though this is the logical end of the materialistic system, men and women still usually in practice assume that people have some real value. All the way back to the dawn of our investigations in history, we find that man is still man. Wherever we turn, to the caves of the Pyrenees, to the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and even further back to Neanderthal man’s burying his dead in flower petals, it makes no difference: men everywhere show by their art and their accomplishments that they have been and have considered themselves to be unique. They were unique, and people today are unique. What is wrong is a world-view which fails to explain that uniqueness. All people are unique because they are made in the image of God.
The Bible tells us also, however, that man is flawed. We see this to be the case both within ourselves and in our societies throughout the world. People are noble and people are cruel; people have heights of moral achievement and depths of moral depravity.
But this is not simply an enigma, nor is it explained in terms of “the animal in man.” The Bible explains how man is flawed, without destroying the uniqueness and dignity of man. Man is evil and experiences the results of evil, not because man is non-man but because man is fallen and thus is abnormal.
This is the significance of the third chapter of Genesis. Some time after the original Creation (we do not know how long), man rebelled against God. Being made in the image of God as persons, Adam and Eve were able to make real choices. They had true creativity, not just in the area we call “art” but also in the area of choice. And they used this choice to turn from God as their true integration point. Their ability to choose would have been equally validated if they had chosen not to turn away from God, as their true integration point, but instead they used their choice to try to make themselves autonomous. In doing this, they were acting against the moral absolute of the universe, namely, God’s character – and thus evil among people was born.
The Fall brought not only moral evil but also the abnormality of (1) each person divided from himself or herself; (2) people divided from other people; (3) mankind divided from nature; and (4) nature divided from nature. This was the consequence of the choice made by Adam and Eve some time after the Creation. It was not any original deformity that made them choose in this way. God had not made them robots, and so they had real choice. It is man, therefore, and not God, who is responsible for evil.
We have to keep pointing out, because the idea is strange to a society by which the Bible has been neglected or distorted, that Christianity does not begin with a statement of Christ as Savior. That comes later in its proper setting. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created….” Christianity begins with the personal and infinite God who is the Creator. It goes on to show that man is made in God’s image but then tells us that man is now fallen. It is the rebellion of man that has made the world abnormal. So there is a broken line as we look back to the creation of man by God. A chasm stands there near the beginning, the chasm which is the Fall, the choice to go against God and His Word.
What follows from this is that not everything that happens in the world is “natural.” Unlike modern materialistic thought on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Christianity does not see everything in history as equally “normal.” Because of the abnormality brought about by man, not everything which occurs in history should be there. Thus, not all that history brings forth is right just because it happens, and not all personal drives and motives are equally good. Here, then, is a marked difference between Christianity and almost all other philosophies. Most other philosophies do not have the concept of a present abnormality. Therefore, they hold that everything now is normal; things are now as they always have been.
By contrast, Christians do not see things as if they always have been this way. This is of immense importance in understanding evil in the world. It is possible for Christians to speak of things as absolutely wrong, for they are not original in human society. They are derived from the Fall; they are in that sense “abnormal.” It also means we can stand against what is wrong and cruel without standing against God, for He did not make the world as it now is.
This understanding of the chasm between what mankind and history are now and what they could have been – and should have been, from the way they were made – gives us a real moral framework for life, one which is compatible with our nature and aspirations. So there are “rules for life,’ like the signs on cliff tops which read: DANGER – KEEP OUT. The signs are there to help, not hinder us. God has put them there because to live in this way, according to His rules, is the way for both safety and fulfillment. The God who made us and knows what is for our best good is the same God who gives us His commands. When we break these, it is not only wrong, it is also not for our best good; it is not for our fulfillment as unique persons made in the image of God.

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Below is a transcript of the discussion between a student at Nottingham and Ravi Zacharias about evil and morality and it also discussed in the video clip above.

Student: There is too much evil in this world; therefore, there cannot be a God!
Speaker: Would you mind if I asked you something? You said, “God cannot exist because there is too much evil.” If there is such a thing as evil, aren’t you assuming that there is such a thing as good?
Student: I guess so.
Speaker: If there is such a thing as good, you must affirm a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil.
Speaker: In a debate between the philosopher Frederick Copleston and the atheist Bertrand Russell, Copleston said, “Mr. Russell, you do believe in good and bad, don’t you?” Russell answered, “Yes, I do.” “How do you differentiate between good and bad?” challenged Copleston. Russell shrugged his shoulders and said, “On the basis of feeling – what else?” I must confess, Mr. Copleston was a kindlier gentleman than many others. The appropriate “logical kill” for the moment would have been, “Mr. Russell, in some cultures they love their neighbors; in other cultures they eat them, both on the basis of feeling. Do you have any preference?”
Speaker: When you say there is evil, aren’t you admitting there is good? When you accept the existence of goodness, you must affirm a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But when you admit to a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver. That, however, is
who you are trying to disprove and not prove. For if there is no moral lawgiver, there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, there is no good. If there is no good, there is no evil. What, then, is your question?
Student: What, then, am I asking you?

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The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported on Sept 10:

When Deena Burnett Bailey spoke of the last time she heard her late husband’s voice, the rattle of silverware against china, the whispers and the general noise of a luncheon ceased.

Bailey is the widow of Tom E. Burnett, who led resistance efforts on United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.

Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of Tom Burnett who orchestrated the resistance against the terrorists aboard Flight 93, talks during the Salvation Army Women's Auxiliary's God Bless America Luncheon on Wednesday at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn.

PHOTO BY JIM WEBER
BUY THIS PHOTO »Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of Tom Burnett who orchestrated the resistance against the terrorists aboard Flight 93, talks during the Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary’s God Bless America Luncheon on Wednesday at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn.

The story of Burnett’s heroism is still a difficult one to tell, Bailey said, especially so close to the anniversary. But she wants to share it to inspire others, she said.

Bailey is the co-author of “Fighting Back: Living Life Beyond Ourselves,” a book about her husband and the others who took action against the terrorists who held the passengers hostage on Flight 93.

Bailey and former New York City police officer Jim Shepherd spoke Wednesday at a Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary luncheon.

Bailey, now remarried and living in Little Rock, was living in California on Sept. 11. She was waiting with their three daughters for her husband to return from a business trip.

As Bailey watched the two terrorist-controlled planes collide with the World Trade Center in New York, Burnett called and told her he was on a third plane that had been hijacked, and that the hijackers had “already knifed a guy.” He told her to call the authorities.

Bailey called 911 and was eventually connected with the FBI.

Her husband called again, asking questions about the World Trade Center, and then a third time to tell her passengers were hatching a plan to overtake the plane.

He called one last time to say the passengers were waiting until the plane was over a rural area before moving in on the hijackers. While everyone on the airplane was ultimately killed, no one on the ground was injured when Flight 93 went down.

Now, Burnett is honored as an American hero. Bailey says it’s a word her husband felt was overused. She says he believed in making good choices and making a difference in the lives of others.

“Tom’s last words to me were ‘Do something.’ They ring true for each of us to stand up, fight back, do something,” she said.

For Shepherd, who now lives in Memphis, the fateful day began as he drank coffee at the gym. He saw the first airplane circle but assumed it was out of its flight pattern and looking for an airport.

“At the last moment I thought, ‘Oh my God I hope he misses the buildings,’” Shepherd said.

By the time he reached his precinct, the second plane had hit the South Tower.

Later, rescuers found three stories of the building compacted into a pile only 12 feet high, with easily distinguishable layers of concrete floor, carpet and debris, he said.

Shepherd thanked the Salvation Army, which marched quietly into New York and got to work.

“You really felt like you weren’t alone,” he said. “You had another army behind you to help.”

Tom Burnett: A Hero on Flight 93 | An interview with Deena Burnett, author (with Anthony Giombetti) of Fighting Back: Defining Moments in the Life of an American Hero, Tom Burnett

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Fighting Back is the timely and inspiring story of Thomas Burnett, the ringleader of the small group of courageous men that fought back against the terrorists on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, that crashed in the fields in Pennsylvania. His wife Deena tells about the incredible details ofthat horrific day, the now famous four cell phone calls her husband made to her from the plane, his quick assessment of the alarming suicidal flight plan, and his decision to “do something.” She tells about all that happened to her and her children in the days and months after that devastating day, and how the love, faith and strength of her departed husband helped her to fight back to find purpose and joy in her life again.

She also tells about Tom’s life story, showing how he was an ordinary American who was deeply patriotic, a very good athlete, a loving father and husband, a successful businessman, and a devout Catholic and daily communicant. This powerful book reveals the inspiring courage, character, faith and integrity that Tom Burnett showed in all the aspects of his life as a father, husband and businessman, and how his valor and leadership in that perilous plane were the result of how he lived his life every day. His story will strengthen and inspire all “ordinary” Americans, and Catholics, to imitate this man’s life of commitment to excellence, patriotism, devotion to family, and love of God. It is a story of suffering, sacrifice and of rebirth.

Carl E. Olson, editor of IgnatiusInsight.com, recently spoke with Deena Burnett about her late husband, the events of 9/11, and her faith in God.

IgnatiusInsight.com: When and how did you first decide to write Fighting Back?

Deena Burnett: I was approached right after Tom had died, and my first reaction was, “No, I don’t want to write anything.” But after a few months I realized that it would be important to write it down for my children. In January [of 2006], Anthony [Giombetti] and I got together and started writing. He would interview me and record the interviews, and then he would transcribe those interviews and then we would get together and edit it. That’s really when we started. And the idea was to chronicle Tom’s life and what had happened on September 11th, and talk about what he did and why he did it. In my mind, it was for my children, to record it, so that they would not forget. Then it evolved into something that I believe with inspire the reader to make a difference.

IgnatiusInsight.com: What do you hope readers will learn from reading the book?

Deena Burnett: Actually, just that; I hope that they are inspired to make a difference, that they see the value of having faith in God and know the importance of passing that faith on to their children.

IgnatiusInsight.com: A central theme of the book is that seemingly ordinary people can do extraordinary things. How did Tom exemplify that it in his ordinary life and in his extraordinary actions on Flight 93?

Deena Burnett: I think that is found throughout the whole book. You certainly see that I try to stress that it wasn’t just what he did on September 11th, but that he lived his life with integrity, and I think that it was certainly his upbringing in the Faith that made him kind and attentive and concerned about other people. And I think that those are the values that he brought into the way that he lived, that helped him be a hero everyday of his life, and not just on September 11th.

Deena Burnett: Well, as early as the morning of September 11th, I was requesting to hear the cockpit voice recorder. I felt like it would just give me some answers as to what happened in those final moments. I didn’t know how to go about finding someone who could allow me to hear it. Anyone who had anything to do with the government, I’d just ask them, “Help me.” Very early on I met a lady, Ellen Tauscher, a representative from California, who really took me on as her project and helped me. She helped me go through the channels, writing the letters and making the phone calls and putting the pressure on different channels within the FBI and our government to release that cockpit voice recorder. I have told her so many times, “You know, Ellen, that you did this; it was you, but I’m getting all the credit for it.” And she would just laugh and say, “That’s okay, because I’m just here to help you.” She’s a great lady, absolutely a great lady. She guided me through the channels and made it happen.

We went to New Jersey in April 2002. We were allowed four family members, each family. We went in to hear it and I went through it twice. They had a transcript on the wall that we were able to see and read in sequence with hearing the audio. And I heard Tom’s voice for the first time in several months, and it gave me this incredible sense of peace that I had not expected to find through listening to it. And the peace came because, I think, for the first time in months I knew exactly what had happened by hearing the sounds and being able to visualize what he experienced. After that, it just gave me the energy and the strength to keep moving forward, to keep doing the things that needed to be done, in raising my family and making sure that those responsible for September 11th came to justice.

IgnatiusInsight.com: In the months following 9/11 you gave numerous interviews on high profile televisions programs and dealt with the media quite often. What is your impression, in general of the mainstream media, and how do you think they’ve handled coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath?

Deena Burnett: I think that almost immediately the press was very respectful, and I was incredibly grateful for that. I initially was very afraid of the media. I kind of laugh about that now because I had a degree in journalism, and yet I was scared to death. But they were very respectful. One thing that I have found during the five years is that they have been very interested in different family members — any family members, it doesn’t matter who they are — who had something to do with September 11th, and they have created this aura of casting 9/11 family members as authorities on different issues, whether it be political issues, or issues dealing with the war on terrorism. Anything happening with our government having to do with immigration laws, the transportation department, or the war on terrorism, the first thing they do is pull a 9/11 family member away and start interviewing them: “What do you think?”

They have cast them in roles of authority, and I think that is odd, that there would be so much interest in the opinion of 9/11 family members. You know, we have this one experience to fall back upon; I’m sure there are people who are far better qualified than we are to answer most of the questions the media asks concerning these issues.

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We can fix the IRS problem by going to the flat tax and lowering the size of government

May 27, 2013 – 1:27 pm

We can fix the IRS problem by going to the flat tax and lowering the size of government. Why the IRS Persecuted the Tea Party and How to Fix the Problem May 27, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Did President Obama and his team of Chicago cronies deliberately target the Tea Party in hopes of thwarting free speech […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Cato Institute, Economist Dan Mitchell, spending out of control, Taxes | Edit | Comments (0)

How can a loving God allow evil like the Boston Marathon explosions to happen?

April 15, 2013 – 4:36 pm

How can a loving God allow evil like the Boston Marathon explosions to happen? Here are some of the details of the explosions: Boston Marathon Explosion 04/15/2013 Published on Apr 15, 2013 Prayers go out to the victims and their families! View this image › Via: @theoriginalwak The Boston Globe is reporting that at least a […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Answers to historical problems in the Book of Daniel (Part 2)

March 19, 2013 – 1:15 am

The Bible and Archaeology (1/5) For many more archaeological evidences in support of the Bible, see Archaeology and the Bible . (There are some great posts on this too at the bottom of this post.) Till Is Batting Around .250 on Daniel by Everette Hatcher III 1999 / March-April Let me address three of the […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit | Comments (0)

Taking on Ark Times bloggers about abortion on the 40th anniversary date of Roe v. Wade (Part 6) For many pro-abortionists ” …the problem is not determining when actual human life begins, but when the value of that life begins to out weigh other considerations”

January 28, 2013 – 6:30 pm

Here are videos from the HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? film series: Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | TaggedVanessa | Edit | Comments (1)

Taking on liberal Ark Times Blogger about America’s debt problem

October 26, 2012 – 6:45 am

Is the USA endanger of going broke? The answer is yes, although liberals don’t want to admit it. Elwood from the Arkansas Times Blog objected, take a look below: How many paid attention to Cager Griffin on AETN debates using the familiar FEAR TACTIC of “AMERICA IS BROKE” in danger of becoming another “GREECE?” …Fayetteville […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Cato Institute, spending out of control | Edit| Comments (0)

The Founders believed national leaders should believe in a God that will punish evil

July 11, 2012 – 10:51 am

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) Roger Ebert called this flick one of Allen’s best. The director, pictured with cinematographer Sven Nykvist on set, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including best director and writing. “Who else but Woody Allen could make a movie in which virtue is punished, evildoing is rewarded and there is a lot of […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (3)

Humanist asserts: “Neither am I an advocate of Hitler; however, by whose criteria is he evil?” (Hitler’s letter from 1919 revealed)

June 8, 2011 – 4:15 pm

The Associated Press reported today: The signature under the typewritten words on yellowing sheets of nearly century-old paper is unmistakable: Adolf Hitler, with the last few scribbled letters drooping downward. The date is 1919 and, decades before the Holocaust, the 30-year-old German soldier — born in Austria — penned what are believed to be […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Francis Schaeffer | Comments (0)

Al Mohler on Daniel Dennett

September 9, 2019 – 9:16 pm

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WEDNESDAY • July 19, 2006

Belief Meets the Universal Acid—Daniel Dennett Strikes Again

Daniel C. Dennett is at it again. In his new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett applies his radical vision of Darwinism to belief in God, and the entire question of faith and belief. As you might expect, Dennett doesn’t think much of belief in God.

Dennett is famous for his idea that Darwinism functions as a “universal acid” in contemporary thought–an idea that relativizes all other ideas and reshapes the intellectual culture so that all other ideas must give way or disappear.

Atheism is a central tenet of Dennett’s faith, and he has previously argued that the belief in a personal and self-existent God–any kind of God for that matter–must simply give way to the inexorable progress of evolution. As he sees it, belief in God is a “meme” that functioned for some time as an evolutionary advantage, but has long since outlived its usefulness and now serves as an impediment to the forward progress of the human species.

Accordingly, the concept of God might continue as an intellectual concept that offers a mythological explanation for wonder and beauty, but not in the form of theism or theological realism. In other words, it’s alright to believe in God so long as you do not actually believe that He exists.

In his new book, Dennett calls for what he calls a “common-sense” understanding of religion. For too long, this issue has been avoided out of social politeness, he argues, and now is the time to confront believers with the danger of their belief and the nonsensical nature of their convictions.

The persistence of belief in God does pose something of a difficult question for evolutionists like Daniel Dennett. “According to surveys, most of the people in the world say that religion is very important in their lives. Many would say that without it, their lives would be meaningless,” Dennett concedes. “It’s tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that nothing more is to be said–and to tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning?”

Nevertheless, Dennett argues that to do that is to willfully ignore serious questions. He suggests that some forms of religious belief are more inherently dangerous than others, but wonders whether right-minded (which is to say atheistic) observers should leave believers “to their comforts and illusions” or, in the service of humanity, “blow the whistle?”

Never underestimate Dennett’s capacity for condescension. “Dilemmas like that are all too familiar in somewhat different context, of course. Should the sweet old lady in the nursing home be told that her son has just been sent to prison? Should the awkward 12-year-old boy who wasn’t cut from the baseball team be told about the arm-twisting that persuaded the coach to keep him on the squad? In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others–unless those illusions are themselves the cause of even greater ills.”

The diversity of religious beliefs and the persistence of belief itself provides Dennett with evidence that faith in some form must have served as an evolutionary meme that helped the species to perpetuate itself against the fear of death and tragedy. In other words, the experience of death, he argues, provided the need for some mythological projection of an afterlife in order to assist survivors to continue life and productive work. In an interview with The New York Times, Dennett said: “When a person dies, we can’t just turn that off. We go on thinking about that person as if that person were still alive. Our inability to turn off our people-seer and our people-hearer naturally turns into our hallucinations of ghosts, our sense that they are still with us.”

But make no mistake, Dennett does not allow for a moment that the afterlife, or the soul, can possibly be real. “I don’t believe in the soul as an enduring entity,” Dennett told the Times. “Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.” Got it?

Dennett’s biological reductionism is almost breathtaking in its inflexibility. Throughout Breaking the Spell, Dennett applies biological reductionism to every conceivable aspect of life–from a parent’s commitment to take care of children to the experience of love. Beyond this, he seems even to suggest that parents should provide their children with an adequate sex education in order to give evolution something of a boost.

One of the most interesting aspects of Dennett’s new book is his suggestion that belief is a less interesting question than “belief in belief.” Accordingly, he attempts to take something of an intellectual step back from the question of belief (at least at some points) and suggests that many persons who appear to be believers actually do not believe in the tenets of their faith, but only in belief itself.

He enters this issue through the prism of the modern cult of tolerance. He suggests that those who call themselves believers in God but advocate tolerance of other belief systems are either disingenuous or confused. That is to say that those who believe in God but are satisfied to see others accept alternative belief systems either do not understand the importance of the question or they do not actually believe in the God they claim as the object of their worship.

Dennett is on to something here, but not what he thinks. He seems to lack any understanding of religious liberty as a social compact and he avoids the idea that persons can be sincere believers and still accept the right of others to disagree. Christians can never be satisfied to know that others reject faith in the one true and living God and resist the gospel of Jesus Christ, but we can accept the fact that we have no power to coerce the soul and we would seek no state coercion, even if available.

A key insight from Dennett’s eccentric theory is the fact that “moderates” in matters of belief are truly in a most awkward situation. “There are moderates who revere the tradition they were raised in, simply because it is their tradition, and who are prepared to campaign, tentatively, for the details of their tradition, simply because, in the marketplace of ideas, somebody should stick up for each tradition until we can sort out the good from the better and settle for the best we can find, all things considered.”

A close look at that statement reveals something of genuine importance–there are persons who believe in the tradition simply because it is traditional–whether or not it is true. To a great extent, this explains the quandary of mainline Protestantism and the inherent weakness of revisionist theologies.

As Dennett looks at the moderates, he sees their faith as something more like “allegiance to a sports team.” Such “belief” can give zest and meaning to life, but is not to be taken seriously as a worldview. He refers to his own allegiance to the Boston Red Sox as “enthusiastic, but cheerfully arbitrary and undeluded.” “The Red Sox aren’t my team because they are, in fact, the Best,” he concedes. Instead, “they are the Best (in my eyes) because they are my team.”

Those who hold to such moderated views of theistic belief are actually affirming belief in belief, rather than the truths themselves. They see religious conviction as something that can provide meaning to life and solace in the midst of sorrow, but not something that is to be understood in terms of a realist conception of truth. In other words, belief in God is helpful and potentially healthy even if untrue.

This is the very formulation Dennett just will not accept. His own self-designated intellectual superiority leads him to look upon moderates with disdain even as he looks upon true believers with pity. Belief in belief is actually no less dangerous than belief itself, if for no other reason than it helps to foster the illusion of widespread faith in God.

As in his previous writings, Dennett straightforwardly suggests that theists should be excluded from all public conversation. Those who base their worldview in theism “should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously,” Dennett argues. Believers are “excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.”

Those who base their worldview on the existence of God and the centrality of that belief are “taking a personally immoral stand,” he asserts.

In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dennett suggests that those who believe in God are “disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate.” So, “your declarations of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.”

His conclusion: “It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God–in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. Here is what we should say to people who follow such a tradition: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purportive God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love, is worthy of worship.”

All this verbiage amounts to a display of Dennett’s own Darwinist fundamentalism. He is at least as unbending and fideistic in his acceptance of the central tenets of Darwinism as any orthodox believer in God.

This point was eloquently made by Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic in his review of Breaking the Spell in the February 19, 2006 edition of The New York Times. Wieseltier describes Dennett’s book as “a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.” As Wieseltier explains, Dennett’s book is not even based, “in any strict sense,” on scientific research. Instead, Dennett is telling a story and Breaking the Spell “is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology.” Wieseltier asserts that Dennett provides “no scientific foundation” for the book’s basic argument. “I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion . . . . We don’t yet know,” Dennett admits.

Wieseltier’s rejoinder is classic: “So all of Dennett’s splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and ‘generating further testable hypotheses’ not withstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.”

Even more important, Wieseltier points to the central flaw in Dennett’s argument. “He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing state. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason,” Wieseltier concludes.

Our contemporary world is a circus of competing worldviews, and Daniel C. Dennett is, along with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, one of the most radical theorists in the Darwinian camp. Nevertheless, we owe him his due in acknowledging that he (and Dawkins) are simply more willing to say what other evolutionists surely think, for the strident and condescending atheism of Dennett and Dawkins is actually the logical conclusion of the Darwinian project.

In this sense, Breaking the Spell is a truly revealing book, but it doesn’t reveal much insight concerning belief in God. Instead, it reveals the hardening contours of the Darwinian worldview.

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

Brett Kunkle of STR quotes Niles Eldridge on Evolution

September 9, 2019 – 9:12 pm

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Brett Kunkle of STR quotes Niles Eldridge on Evolution

Stand to Reason Speaker

Brett Kunkle

If you would like to schedule Brett Kunkle to speak to your group, please contact:
Dawnielle at dawnielle@str.org
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I grew up in a Christian home. I came to Christ at five and was baptized at six. My family was very committed to the local church. I was a leader in my youth group and a ministry intern as a senior in high school. I had plans to serve God in vocational ministry.

But then I met Dr. David Lane.

It was my freshman year in college and the course was Philosophy 101. Dr. Lane systematically dismantled the Christianity I grew up with. In class. In front of everyone. And I was not ready.

Neither are most of our young people.

Now you know why I am so passionate about training the next generation. I’m preparing students so they will be equipped to face their own Dr. Lane. High schoolers, college students, and yes, even wild little junior highers. I’m not just training students but parents and leaders too, those who are responsible for teaching our youth.

So check out some of the unique work I’ve been doing with adults and students. And let’s partner very soon.

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The Fossil Record Proves Evolution. Right?

No. The fossil record provides no evidence for macroevolution.

Scientists suggest there is evidence for macroevolution. They point to the fossil record. They argue we have transitional forms. These are intermediate fossils that demonstrate gradual change from one type of species to another. Scientists hold up examples like Archaeopteryx. Maybe you’ve seen this lizard-like-bird fossil in your biology book (if not, google it). Supposedly, it’s a transitional form between lizards and birds. But there’s a major problem with transitional forms in general.

A few potential transitional examples here and there are not enough. Evolutionists need a lot more. Darwin said so himself in Origin of the Species. “The number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great (emphasis mine).” In other words, if Darwin’s theory is true we should find tons of transitional forms in the fossil record. But we don’t.

Take Archaeopteryx as an example. Where are the “inconceivably great” number of fossils showing the evolution from lizard to Archaeopteryx? Don’t have them. And where are the “inconceivably great” number of fossils showing the evolution from Archaeopteryx to bird? Don’t have them either. The fossil record should show how you get all the way from lizard to bird. Only one fossil? C’mon. In fact, many scientists today consider Archaeopteryx nothing more than an extinct species of bird. Yeah, maybe it’s a weird-looking animal but so is the duck-billed platypus. And nobody considers it a transitional form between ducks and beavers.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask a paleontologist, the scientists who study the fossil record. Better yet, ask one of the world’s leading paleontologists, Niles Eldredge. When it comes to paleontology, Niles is a rock star. He says the fossil record has produced no evidence of transitional forms. In a moment of honesty, Niles writes that it is no surprise “paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen.”

No gradual changes from one type of species to another in the fossil record. No “inconceivably great” number of transitional forms. No, the fossil record is not evidence of macroevolution

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

What Does Richard Dawkins Mean When He Says Love Thy Neighbour? By Mike J King

September 9, 2019 – 9:05 pm

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115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

Published on Dec 21, 2012

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What Does Richard Dawkins Mean When He Says Love Thy Neighbour?

By Mike J King

Richard Dawkins discusses the concept of ‘Love thy neighbour’ in The God Delusion in order to debunk the claim of religion that it’s main message is love and compassion. How independent do we think this analysis is? Let’s look at this analysis as objectively as we can.

Dawkins begins with the assertion that ‘neighbour’ in biblical terms only refers to the Jews, and that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really means ‘Thou shalt not kill Jews’. The merit of the idea of ‘Love thy neighbour’ itself is, of course, ignored. Dawkins is far too concerned with the prosecution of his agenda. With regard to truth of the matter, he draws most of his quoted ‘evidence’ from a paper by John Hartnung. Dawkins provides no substantive proof but simply claims that Hartnung’s research demonstrates it to be the case. By way of example of this ‘evidence’, Hartnung refers to a study of Jewish children’s attitudes by an Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. This draws a contrast between the group’s attitude towards the deaths of Jews and non-Jews in the Old Testament. Not surprisingly, the children were much more prepared to countenance the killing of non-Jews than Jews. Dawkins himself concludes that these children have been indoctrinated into a racist attitude by their religion.

This all sounds very telling, but it does not demonstrate much other than that things were very different at the time of the Old Testament. Whether we like it or not, God chose the Jewish nation to receive the word that he was the one and only God. The events of the Old Testament need to be evaluated in the context of that truth. We cannot draw conclusions based on current day interpretations of events that happened thousands of years ago, particularly when those interpretations are made by children. Furthermore, Dawkins’ point that the opposite results obtained by the control group, (where mention of Judea was replaced with a fictional Chinese kingdom), demonstrated that religion had affected the children’s morality, is exactly as one would expect. The religious perspective is that morality derives from God. Therefore, no doubt the children believed that ‘God had his reasons’. For my part, I too struggle with some of the events of the Old Testament but it doesn’t undermine my faith. I realise that we cannot compare current day attitudes with earlier times, when ideas, canons and creeds were propagated and enforced exclusively by violence. I would be confident that if you took out the historical context out of the Hartnung study, the results would be very different.

As regards the New Testament, Hartnung draws the same conclusions, claiming that Jesus was a devotee of the same in-group mentality and that it was Paul who invented the idea of taking the gospel to the Jews. This seems to me to be little more than wishful thinking on the part of Dawkins, and it is interesting to note that he doesn’t expand on this idea except to make the unsubstantiated quote from Hartnung that ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul was taking his plan to the pigs.’ I won’t comment on this except to say that, in my opinion, the language Hartnung uses tells us more about him than his comment tells us about Jesus.

The issue of to whom Jesus directed his message is directly addressed by Geza Vermes in The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. He considers the question: did Jesus intend to address only Jews or did he expect the gospel to benefit the entire non-Jewish world? (Geza Vermes, by the way, is an ex-Christian and ex-Catholic priest). He concluded that there were clear affirmations that Jesus intended only to address the Jews, but equally clear affirmations that broadcast the opposite view. He, therefore, after “having considered the whole evidence”, identified the following dilemma:

“Either Jesus adopted a strictly pro-Jewish stance and the later introduction into the Gospels of pro-gentiles leanings must reflect the point of view of the early church, which was by then, almost exclusively non-Jewish. Or it was Jesus who adopted the universalist stand and this was replaced at a later stage by Jewish exclusivism.”

So, according to Geza, one way or the other, the gospels have been subject to later revision. Either, the almost exclusively non-Jewish make-up of the early church introduced pro-gentile leanings, or Jesus adopted a universalist stand that was later replaced by Jewish exclusivism. Vermes himself adopts the former view, that the verses that reflect a pro-gentile view were introduced to appeal to the non-Jewish early church. Vermes has no proof, (he himself says that, “having considered the whole evidence”, there is a straight choice), he simply chooses one over the other on the basis of his own personal inclination.

Vermes’ is a scholar well-known for his books on Jesus but this does not mean that his interpretation is not open to dispute. There are two grounds upon which we might find fault. Firstly, if the early church was so totally non-Jewish as he claims, then surely the revisions to the text would have been more significant with many of the references to Jewish exclusivity being expunged altogether. Secondly, he ignores the possibility that the gospels are, in fact, accurate and simply reflect different considerations at different times. Considered in this light we can see that, though most of Jesus’ ministry was undoubtedly directed for the most part at the Jews, this does not necessarily mean that his intention was not to bring salvation to all. Upon setting out on his task, he would have been aware that his message would have had to favour the Jews or they would not have followed him. Once Jesus had achieved a critical mass in his ministry, so the target of his message could begin to broaden. This broadening was then handed over to Paul and the other evangelists who brought it to the rest of the world. This interpretation is the one most consistent with the evidence.

Having dealt with the ‘Jewish’ problem, Dawkins expands his ideas on group enmity. Though Dawkins recognises that violence is perpetrated on the name of countless other ideologies, he argues that religion is particularly pernicious as it is passed down through the generations. Without the labels of in-group/out-group enmity he contends that the divide would not exist, and hence the reason for violence would disappear.

Dawkins has a point when he identifies group loyalty as a powerful force. However, there is nothing to suggest that religious divide is any more or less pernicious than any other divide. Man has what Dawkins himself calls “powerful tendencies towards in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities.” The truth is that it is man’s nature to group together and fight other groups, whatever the labels. Much of the fighting and suffering done in the name of religion has nothing whatsoever to do with God, in the same way that much fighting and suffering done in the name of freedom and equality has nothing to do with this ideals. This is explored in more detail in the section on Hitler and Stalin.

Dawkins concludes the section by saying:

“Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness – its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity’s natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out-groups – would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.”

This point is totally fallacious. It is akin to a child saying, he made me do it, in that it passes responsibility on to someone or something else. Ultimately, man commits evil and is responsible for it. This is nowhere more clear-cut than in Dawkins’ won philosophy. God does not exist, religion is a creation of Man – so where is the culpability? It is simply too convenient to blame ‘labels. Who has created these ‘labels’, ‘forces for evil in the world’, these ‘religions’. Dawkins is hoist by his own petard, because there is only one answer. Man. Therefore, if there is only Man and he has created such forces, if we got rid of religion, you would have to assume that Man would re-invent it all over again, or at least a variety of the same thing (a ‘religion’ believing in no God, perhaps – let’s call it atheism). Unless, of course, you believe in the generally progressive change of the moral zeitgeist, that we have now evolved to a state of superior morality. Even a brief view of twentieth century history debunks any such claim.

Mike King – the God Delusion Revisited
Latest work – Love story of loss and abortion

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_J_King

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

Does Richard Dawkins’ View of The Old Testament Lack Objectivity? By Mike J King

September 9, 2019 – 9:04 pm

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115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

Published on Dec 21, 2012

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Does Richard Dawkins’ View of The Old Testament Lack Objectivity?

By Mike J King

Dawkins devotes a section in The God Delusion to the Old Testament. However, there is little objective analysis and his musings are primarily a journey through a number of violent tales, including:

• The tale of Noah – God drowns the whole of mankind except one family and countless animals.
• The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – Lot offers his two daughters to the mob in Sodom rather than hand over two angels. Lot’s wife subsequently died (killed by God for turning around to watch the destruction of the city) and his two daughters who later slept with their father whilst he was drunk.
• The story of the Levite – a Levite gives over his daughter to a mob to be sexually assaulted.
• Various stories about Abraham – Abraham twice pretends his wife is his sister. Worse, he is prepared to sacrifice his son to God on God’s say-so.
• Jephthah’s daughter – If God will deliver him victory in battle, Jephthah promises to sacrifice the first person who comes out to meet him upon his return home from the battle. This person turns out to be his daughter and, despite his grief, he fulfils his vow.
• The slaughter of the Midianites – God incited Moses to attack and destroy the Midianites.
• The many examples of God’s jealousy – God frequently warns the Israelites against worshipping false gods.
• The book of Joshua – this includes a mass of bloodthirsty violence.
• The story of wood-gatherer – a man is stoned for deliberately breaking the Sabbath.

Interspersed with these examples of brutality, Dawkins makes the following points:

• Theologians argue that much of the Bible is not taken literally any more. This says Dawkins is his point; we pick and choose what we want, therefore this is not an absolute morality.
• Despite this, many people continue to take the Bible literally. Many Asian holy men blamed the 2004 tsunami on human misdemeanours. Further examples of literalism are quoted from America’s fundamentalist right.
• He points out that some of the stories reveal the lack of respect accorded to women in this religious culture.

Before we consider each of Dawkins’ points in turn, let us put the Old Testament in its context. C S Lewis describes the Old Testament as the period in history when God tried to hammer into one particular people (the Jews) the nature of his character, that is, that he was the One and only God and that he cared about Right Behaviour. This is the context in which the Old Testament should be evaluated.

Many people argue that we see a different God in the Old and New Testaments. This is not the case. We may see a different side of God in each case but his nature is entirely consistent across the entire Bible. For example, the loving, compassionate God of the New Testament is equally present in the Old Testament. Let us be clear about this because Dawkins’ pernicious portrayal of Yahweh is contradicted in many places. For example, Exodus 34:

“The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.”

This is an unequivocal description of the God of the Old Testament. There is no doubting his goodness, but perhaps what is most striking is that, exactly like the New Testament, he is a personal God. This unequivocal description of the nature of God and his personal relationship with man contradicts much of what Dawkins says when he relates tales of wickedness and brutality from the Old Testament. Dawkins also (again) confuses God with Man. Many of the stories that he quotes are simply stories of man’s corruption. Look around at the world today and we see exactly the same stories happening every day, Man abusing his privileged position in the universe. It is a gross mistake to ascribe characteristics to God based on these stories.

Another factor we need to bear in mind is one mentioned by Dawkins, that there are passages in the Bible that are figurative in nature and others that are literal. Christians differ in their opinions as to which are which but whatever each of us believes, it does not change the truth of the existence of God. Contrary to Dawkins’ claim, this does not mean that we can pick and choose what we believe in the Bible. Whether something is literal or figurative does not change its underlying truth. The message is the same.

What about the specific stories of violence taken from the Old Testament and quoted by Dawkins? Let us take one take one of them and see if we can make any sense of it; say the case of Jephthah’s daughter. If God will deliver him victory in battle, Jephthah promises to sacrifice the first person who comes out to meet him upon his return home from the battle. This person turns out to be his daughter and, despite his grief, he fulfils his vow. What does this story tell us?

The most striking thing about this passage is that it is about Jephthah, not about God. God is not said to condone the sacrifice. In fact, the opposite is true. The terrible outcome of Jephthah’s oath merely serves to underline the wrongness of his oath. God does not want spiritual deals; he wants obedience. In fact, Jephthahs’ oath reveals a lack of faith because there was no need for him to make it. God would have delivered the enemy in any event. Some may argue that the tale is figurative, others that Jephthah did not ultimately sacrifice his daughter but, for our purposes, the point is irrelevant. These were simply the actions of a man a long time ago and many men have committed similar acts of folly in the interim. Our job is to take a message from the story; perhaps that we should be careful what we promise in the pursuit of our own ends, particularly when these promises are made to God. God does not want promises for the future but obedience for today.

As for the many other stories related by Dawkins, he takes his usual simplistic six-year-old approach to the Old Testament and, taking them out of context, seeks to apply them to the modern world. Clearly, this is grossly inappropriate. Man’s cultural, social, economic and political development in the intervening period means that we cannot judge events in quite the same way. Again, my advice for those interested would be, not to rely on Dawkins, but to do your own research.

Dawkins’ unreliability in matters of religion is underlined by his comment that, if God were all-powerful, he would not be bothered with human misdeeds.

“By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on a scale at which a god might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions?”

Dawkins fails to grasp even the simplest of Christian principles; that God is a personal God and that his purpose is to enjoy a meaningful relationship with Man. In this context, it is inconceivable that God, in his contemplation of the universe, would not always have Man on his mind. He cares about petty human malefactions because he cares for us. As a parent with a child, he knows that all malefactions, no matter how petty, will hurt us, unless checked.

In support of his argument he quotes like-minded people such as American physicist Steven Weinberg, who says:

“religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things it takes religion.”

These are not the words of an impartial observer. Weinberg also said:

“I am all in favour of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue.”

In case there is any doubt to his own personal agenda, consider his partisan interpretation of the anthropic principle:

“Reasoning like this is called ‘anthropic.’ Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in which some constants take different values, then the anthropic explanation of why in our world they take values favourable for life is just common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or Pluto.”

The anthropic principle, rather than a meaningless tautology, is now just common sense. Only someone starting with a preconceived answer would use the anthropic principle to justify any argument. And what of his claim that religion is an “insult to human dignity”? Oh dear, how we elevate ourselves. If there is any “presumptuous egocentricity”, then it is not to be found in religion but in the posturings of such as Weinberg and Dawkins.

Furthermore, I take issue with his statement hat it “takes religion for good people to do evil”. In what name did we fire-bomb the cities of Germany, slaughtering and maiming millions? In what name did we drop the second atomic bomb on Japan, achieving the same? In what name did we napalm the jungles of Vietnam, ditto? The list goes on. For good people to do evil things, it takes religion? Wishful thinking on Weinberg’s part, I am afraid.

Finally, women! Dawkins claims that some of the stories he quotes from the Old Testament reveal the lack of respect accorded to women in this religious culture. This is probably true but it would be more accurate to describe the culture to which this relates as historical rather than religious. I cannot answer for any other religion, but there is no question that Christianity dictates that men and women are born equal and should be treated so.

In conclusion, Dawkins stresses that his main purpose in this section has been to demonstrate not that we shouldn’t get our morals from scripture, but that, in fact, we don’t. To my mind, he has not demonstrated this at all. He shows a lack of basic understanding of the subject he claims to be investigating and has clearly done little genuine research. Furthermore, most of his argument is of the diatribe variety and superficial in nature.

His argument also suffers from the weakness of his own position with regards to the principle of morality. As we have seen before, his view of morality is that it is an evolutionary construct, whether as by-product or otherwise. Therefore, to Dawkins, morality is a word used to describe a behavioural consensus and has no relevance to any standard of goodness; indeed, this standard does not exist. As such, his argument is that morality, as most people understand it, does not exist. We are not good or bad people, we simply act in a particular way consistent with our evolutionary heritage. If circumstances change, and it becomes necessary for us to act in what many would consider an immoral fashion, then so be it. Given this view of morality, how can take his pontifications seriously?

As for relevance to the everyday world, I dare anyone to read Ecclesiastes and not recognise its timeless currency:

“If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things: for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still. The increase in the land is taken by all; the King himself profits from the fields.

Whoever loves money never has money enough;
Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
This too is meaningless.

As goods increase,
so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owner
except to feast his eyes on them?

The sleep of a labourer is sweet,
whether he eats little or much,
but the abundance of a rich man
permits him no sleep.

I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:

Wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner,
or wealth lost through some misfortune
so that when he has a son,
there is nothing left for him.
Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb
And as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labour
that he can carry in his hand.

This too is a grievous evil:

As a man comes, so he departs,
and what does he gain,
since he toils for the wind?
All his days he eats in darkness,
With great frustration, affliction and anger.

Then I realised that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labour under the sun during the few days of life God has given him – for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work – this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.”

(Ecclesiastes 5:8-20)

Dawkins ends the section with the conclusion that the values of the Old Testament are “pretty unpleasant”. This seems to me something of a simplistic conclusion, particularly as Dawkins’ assessment of the text is practically non-existent. He now turns to the New Testament and asks the question; is it any better?

Mike King – the God Delusion Revisited
Latest work – Love story of loss and abortion

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_J_King

_________

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Monthly Archives: September 2019

The closed mind of Richard Dawkins

Did Albert Einstein Believe in a Personal God? by Rich Deem

Introduction

No personal God

Einstein on Jesus

Why no personal God?

Einstein’s error

Conclusion

First Article

” How can you want more than that ?” Richard Dawkins and Bill Moyers

Second Article

Third Article

Fourth Article

Fifth Article

Sixth Article

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder

Prophet of Pointlessness

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

Quote from Bertrand Russell:

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnotes #97 and #98) written by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop

Sir William Mitchell Ramsay,(1851 – 1939)

The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)

115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

United Airlines Flight 93[edit]

115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

115. Filosofia: Richard Dawkins Vs Alister McGrath

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Did Albert Einstein Believe in a Personal God?
by Rich Deem