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Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

November 28, 2019

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation,  Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

I have enjoyed reading about a dozen of your books and some of the most intriguing were The God Delusion, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, and Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.
I have posted in the past showing the false claims made in “Outgrowing God,” and you can reference these by googling “Outgrowing God The Daily Hatch.” Some questions raised by you include “Did Jesus even exist?” One of my favorite posts was FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 292 In OUTGROWING GOD Richard Dawkins wrongly notes “Genesis says Abraham owned camels, but archaeological evidence shows that the camel was not domesticated until many centuries after Abraham” Featured Artist is Paul Pfeiffer

I enjoyed your latest book Outgrowing God which is one of my favorite books that you have written. However, there are some some weak parts of the book. For instance, on page 49:

There’s some beautiful English writing in the King James Bible. Ecclesiastes is at least as good as the Song of Songs, although it’s poetry is bleak and world-weary. If you read nothing else in the Bible, I recommend those two books, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

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Richard, I read about your famous cousin John Raymond Smythies who helped administer drugs to Aldous Huxley and his warning to you to stay away from them! Solomon also talked about mind changing substances and the emptiness that follows!

It reminded me of these words of yours that I recently read:

Graham Hancock: Dr Dawkins, many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures believe there are other realities, spirit worlds, and so-on and so-forth, and concrete techniques, such as the use of psychoactive plants, to access them. For example, the visionary brew ayahuasca, used for thousands of years by indigenous culture throughout the Amazon basin. As a scientist, have you ever seriously engaged such techniques to have first-hand experience of what they’re talking about [*audience laughter*], and perhaps even to challenge your own concept of what is real? If not, would you consider doing so, and when would you be ready to begin [*audience laughter*]? If you would not consider doing so, then please explain why not.

Richard Dawkins: I would be curious, I must confess. I mean I’ve read some of the accounts of drug-induced trances and things. There’s a lovely one in Redmond O’Hanlon’s book about going up the Amazon [In Trouble Again], which you may have read…and he visits the Yanomami tribe, who are sometimes described as ‘the fierce people’. They have a drug which they take by shooting it up the nostril with a great long blow-pipe, and I think he tries that. 

I would be very curious, I must say, to take, perhaps not that drug, but something like LSD or mescaline. As Aldous Huxley describes it in The Doors of Perception, he felt when taking mescaline that his eyes were opened, the doors of perception were cleansed, and he saw things that were, in some strange way, beyond reality. I would be prepared to do that under proper medical supervision, if I were absolutely convinced that it would do me no lasting harm. And I would actually like to do it.

I want to talk about a subject that is very sad indeed and it is the attempt by many today to find  their meaning in life through drugs and alcohol. Perhaps they are trying to escape the hard realities of life by taking this path. Like everyone around us, I too have many close friends and relatives who have fallen into this trap. I have a great deal of compassion for these individuals. In fact, several times this month I have taken time to drive individuals from a facility that my church sponsors to AA meetings. We want these individuals to overcome their addictions and live in victory.  I can’t do anything to go back and  save those who have passed on in the past, but I can do something to encourage those who have obstacles to overcome today!!!!

Our church FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH sponsors HIDDEN CREEK REENTRY CENTER,  Assisting incarcerated individuals with a successful transition to their community. I have had the joy of giving some of my time to help these gentlemen. Let me share some posts from their Facebook page:

Hidden Creek Reentry Center January 13 ·

So proud of these guys… They had the honor to go with Mr.Glover yesterday to a school to speak to some children.

August 7, 2016 · Little Rock, AR ·

Well its been a eye jerker today… great tears of joy!! I have watched these guys grow so much… I pray they continue to grow out there… next month they graduate the program!!_______Why do so many individuals today turn to drugs or liquor?  There are various reasons, but let us look at the reason Ernest Hemingway became a drunk.Ernest Hemingway turned to liquor as a device of escapism because he reached the conclusion that life has no lasting meaning.“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.” This quote from Hemingway’s short story A Clean Well Lighted Place shows that Ernest Hemingway embraced nihilism. The Spanish word NADA meaning NOTHING. The old man in the story tried the previous week to commit suicide but was saved by his niece, and he saw it as a temporary saving.Hemingway also wrote in his last book THE GARDEN OF EDEN,“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961.In you go to You Tube and watch the video Woody Allen talks ‘Midnight in Paris’ which was posted on January 27, 2017 and runs 43 minutes and 37 seconds, you will notice at the 27 minute mark that Woody Allen says:

I have never gotten to the point where I can give an optimistic view of anything. I have these ideas for stories that I hope are entertaining and I am always criticized for being pessimistic or nihilistic. To me this is just a realistic appraisal of life. What I have learned over the years is that there is no other solution to it. There is no satisfying answer. There is no optimistic answer I can give anybody.

Ernest Hemingway in one of his stories ( A FAREWELL TO ARMS)is looking at a burning log with ants running on it. This is the kind of thinking that has over powered me over the years and slips into my stories.

Drinking was a large part of Hemingway’s life. Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes also takes a long look at liquor and tries to see if it will bring any satisfaction UNDER THE SUN.

In fact, Solomon  filled his home with the best wine (Eccl 2:3).

Concerning the Book of Ecclesiastes Francis Schaeffer noted:

Solomon was searching for a meaning in the midst of the details of life. His struggle was to find the meaning of life.  Humanism since the Renaissance and onward has never found it. Modern man has not found it and it has always got worse and darker in a very real way.

Ecclesiastes is the only pessimistic book in the Bible and that is because of the place where Solomon limits himself. He limits himself to the question of human life, life UNDER THE SUN between birth and death and the answers this would give.

In Ecclesiastes 1:8 he drives this home when he states, “All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. THE EYE IS NOT SATISFIED WITH SEEING. NOR IS THE EAR FILLED WITH HEARING.”  Solomon is stating here the fact that there is no final satisfaction because you don’t get to the end of the thing.

What do you do and the answer is to get drunk and this was not thought of in the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KAHAYYAM:

Ecclesiastes 2:1-3

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself.” And behold, it too was futility. ² I said of laughter, “It is madness,” and of pleasure, “What does it accomplish?” ³ I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely, and how to take hold of folly, until I could see what good there is for the sons of men to do under heaventhe few years of their lives.

The Daughter of the Vine (from the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KAHAYYAM):

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

A perfectly good philosophy coming out of Islam, but Solomon is not the first man that thought of it nor the last. In light of what has been presented by Solomon is the solution just to get intoxicated and black the think out? So many people have taken to alcohol and the dope which so often follows in our day. This approach is incomplete, temporary and immature. PAPA HEMINGWAY CAN FIND THE CHAMPAGNE OF PARIS SUFFICIENT FOR A TIME, BUT ONCE HE LEFT HIS YOUTH HE NEVER FOUND IT SUFFICIENT AGAIN. HE HAD A LIFETIME SPENT LOOKING BACK TO PARIS AND THAT CHAMPAGNE AND NEVER FINDING IT ENOUGH.  It is no solution and Solomon says so too.

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Both Woody Allen and Ernest Hemingway like Solomon looked for meaning UNDER THE SUN in what I call the 6 big L words in theBook of Ecclesiastes. These areas are  learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies,luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). All three men agree with the conclusion of Ecclesiastes 2:17:

¹⁷So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a striving after the wind

Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”

Why not take a few minutes and just read the short chapter of Psalms 22 that was written hundreds of years before the Romans even invented the practice of Crucifixion. 1000 years BC the Jews had the practice of stoning people but we read in this chapter a graphic description of Christ dying on the cross. How do you explain that without looking ABOVE THE SUN to God. Ecclesiastes was written to those who wanted to examine life UNDER THE SUN without God in the picture and Solomon’s conclusion in the final chapter was found in Ecclesiastes 12 when he looked at life ABOVE THE SUN:

¹³ The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. ¹⁴ For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

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Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais

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Francis Schaeffer below:

Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

Ben Stein vs. Richard Dawkins Interview

XXXX Peter Singer – The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews – Richard Dawkins

XXXXXXX

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Science Confirms the Bible with Ken Ham

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Schaeffer with his wife Edith in Switzerland.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

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Francis and Edith Schaeffer seen below:

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Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris 

Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

The Basis of Human Dignity by Francis Schaeffer

Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Francis Schaeffer in 1984

Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer in 1982

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Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Episode 1

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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Dark History of Evolution-Henry Morris, Ph.D.

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Featured artist Raphael

Raphael

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to searchThis article is about the Italian Renaissance painter and architect. For other uses, see Raphael (disambiguation).

Raphael
Presumed portrait of Raphael[1]
Born	Raffaello Santi (or Sanzio) March 28 or April 6, 1483 Urbino, Duchy of Urbino
Died	April 6, 1520 (aged 37) Rome, Papal States
Resting place	The Pantheon, Rome
Known for	PaintingArchitecture
Notable work	list
Movement	High Renaissance

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino^[2] (Italian: [raffaˈɛllo ˈsantsjo da urˈbiːno]; March 28 or April 6, 1483 – April 6, 1520),^[3][a] known as Raphael (/ˈræfeɪəl/, US: /ˈræfiəl, ˈreɪf-, ˌrɑːfaɪˈɛl, ˌrɑːfiˈɛl/), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.^[5] Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.^[6]

Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his early death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking.

After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael’s more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.^[7]

Contents

• 1Urbino
• 2Early life and work
• 3Influence of Florence
• 4Roman period
  • 4.1Vatican “Stanze”
  • 4.2Architecture
  • 4.3Antiquity
  • 4.4Other painting projects
• 5Painting materials
• 6Workshop
  • 6.1Portraits
• 7Drawings
• 8Printmaking
• 9Private life and death
• 10Critical reception
• 11See also
• 12Notes
• 13References
• 14Further reading
• 15External links

Urbino

Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father; Christ supported by two angels, c.1490

Raphael was born in the small but artistically significant central Italian city of Urbino in the Marche region,^[8] where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the Duke. The reputation of the court had been established by Federico da Montefeltro, a highly successful condottiere who had been created Duke of Urbino by Pope Sixtus IV – Urbino formed part of the Papal States – and who died the year before Raphael was born. The emphasis of Federico’s court was rather more literary than artistic, but Giovanni Santi was a poet of sorts as well as a painter, and had written a rhymed chronicle of the life of Federico, and both wrote the texts and produced the decor for masque-like court entertainments. His poem to Federico shows him as keen to show awareness of the most advanced North Italian painters, and Early Netherlandish artists as well. In the very small court of Urbino he was probably more integrated into the central circle of the ruling family than most court painters.^[9]

Federico was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who married Elisabetta Gonzaga, daughter of the ruler of Mantua, the most brilliant of the smaller Italian courts for both music and the visual arts. Under them, the court continued as a centre for literary culture. Growing up in the circle of this small court gave Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari.^[10] Court life in Urbino at just after this period was to become set as the model of the virtues of the Italian humanist court through Baldassare Castiglione‘s depiction of it in his classic work The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. Castiglione moved to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer based there but frequently visited, and they became good friends. He became close to other regular visitors to the court: Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both later cardinals, were already becoming well known as writers, and would be in Rome during Raphael’s period there. Raphael mixed easily in the highest circles throughout his life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading impression of effortlessness to his career. He did not receive a full humanistic education however; it is unclear how easily he read Latin.^[11]

Early life and work

Portrait of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino from 1482 to 1508, c.1507. (Uffizi Gallery)

His mother Màgia died in 1491 when Raphael was eight, followed on August 1, 1494 by his father, who had already remarried. Raphael was thus orphaned at eleven; his formal guardian became his only paternal uncle Bartolomeo, a priest, who subsequently engaged in litigation with his stepmother. He probably continued to live with his stepmother when not staying as an apprentice with a master. He had already shown talent, according to Vasari, who says that Raphael had been “a great help to his father”.^[12] A self-portrait drawing from his teenage years shows his precocity.^[13] His father’s workshop continued and, probably together with his stepmother, Raphael evidently played a part in managing it from a very early age. In Urbino, he came into contact with the works of Paolo Uccello, previously the court painter (d. 1475), and Luca Signorelli, who until 1498 was based in nearby Città di Castello.^[14]

According to Vasari, his father placed him in the workshop of the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice “despite the tears of his mother”.^[b] The evidence of an apprenticeship comes only from Vasari and another source,^[16] and has been disputed; eight was very early for an apprenticeship to begin. An alternative theory is that he received at least some training from Timoteo Viti, who acted as court painter in Urbino from 1495.^[17] Most modern historians agree that Raphael at least worked as an assistant to Perugino from around 1500; the influence of Perugino on Raphael’s early work is very clear: “probably no other pupil of genius has ever absorbed so much of his master’s teaching as Raphael did”, according to Wölfflin.^[18] Vasari wrote that it was impossible to distinguish between their hands at this period, but many modern art historians claim to do better and detect his hand in specific areas of works by Perugino or his workshop. Apart from stylistic closeness, their techniques are very similar as well, for example having paint applied thickly, using an oil varnish medium, in shadows and darker garments, but very thinly on flesh areas. An excess of resin in the varnish often causes cracking of areas of paint in the works of both masters.^[19] The Perugino workshop was active in both Perugia and Florence, perhaps maintaining two permanent branches.^[20] Raphael is described as a “master”, that is to say fully trained, in December 1500.^[21]

His first documented work was the Baronci altarpiece for the church of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in Città di Castello, a town halfway between Perugia and Urbino.^[22] Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, who had worked for his father, was also named in the commission. It was commissioned in 1500 and finished in 1501; now only some cut sections and a preparatory drawing remain.^[23] In the following years he painted works for other churches there, including the Mond Crucifixion (about 1503) and the Brera Wedding of the Virgin (1504), and for Perugia, such as the Oddi Altarpiece. He very probably also visited Florence in this period. These are large works, some in fresco, where Raphael confidently marshals his compositions in the somewhat static style of Perugino. He also painted many small and exquisite cabinet paintings in these years, probably mostly for the connoisseurs in the Urbino court, like the Three Graces and St. Michael, and he began to paint Madonnas and portraits.^[24] In 1502 he went to Siena at the invitation of another pupil of Perugino, Pinturicchio, “being a friend of Raphael and knowing him to be a draughtsman of the highest quality” to help with the cartoons, and very likely the designs, for a fresco series in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral.^[25] He was evidently already much in demand even at this early stage in his career.^[26]

• The Mond Crucifixion, 1502–3, very much in the style of Perugino (National Gallery)
• The Coronation of the Virgin 1502–3 (Pinacoteca Vaticana)
• The Wedding of the Virgin, Raphael’s most sophisticated altarpiece of this period (Pinacoteca di Brera)
• Saint George and the Dragon, a small work (29 x 21 cm) for the court of Urbino (Louvre)

Influence of Florence

Madonna of the Pinks, c. 1506–7, National Gallery, London

Raphael led a “nomadic” life, working in various centres in Northern Italy, but spent a good deal of time in Florence, perhaps from about 1504. Although there is traditional reference to a “Florentine period” of about 1504–8, he was possibly never a continuous resident there.^[27] He may have needed to visit the city to secure materials in any case. There is a letter of recommendation of Raphael, dated October 1504, from the mother of the next Duke of Urbino to the Gonfaloniere of Florence: “The bearer of this will be found to be Raphael, painter of Urbino, who, being greatly gifted in his profession has determined to spend some time in Florence to study. And because his father was most worthy and I was very attached to him, and the son is a sensible and well-mannered young man, on both accounts, I bear him great love…”^[28]

As earlier with Perugino and others, Raphael was able to assimilate the influence of Florentine art, whilst keeping his own developing style. Frescos in Perugia of about 1505 show a new monumental quality in the figures which may represent the influence of Fra Bartolomeo, who Vasari says was a friend of Raphael. But the most striking influence in the work of these years is Leonardo da Vinci, who returned to the city from 1500 to 1506. Raphael’s figures begin to take more dynamic and complex positions, and though as yet his painted subjects are still mostly tranquil, he made drawn studies of fighting nude men, one of the obsessions of the period in Florence. Another drawing is a portrait of a young woman that uses the three-quarter length pyramidal composition of the just-completed Mona Lisa, but still looks completely Raphaelesque. Another of Leonardo’s compositional inventions, the pyramidal Holy Family, was repeated in a series of works that remain among his most famous easel paintings. There is a drawing by Raphael in the Royal Collection of Leonardo’s lost Leda and the Swan, from which he adapted the contrapposto pose of his own Saint Catherine of Alexandria.^[29] He also perfects his own version of Leonardo’s sfumato modelling, to give subtlety to his painting of flesh, and develops the interplay of glances between his groups, which are much less enigmatic than those of Leonardo. But he keeps the soft clear light of Perugino in his paintings.^[30]

Leonardo was more than thirty years older than Raphael, but Michelangelo, who was in Rome for this period, was just eight years his senior. Michelangelo already disliked Leonardo, and in Rome came to dislike Raphael even more, attributing conspiracies against him to the younger man.^[31] Raphael would have been aware of his works in Florence, but in his most original work of these years, he strikes out in a different direction. His Deposition of Christ draws on classical sarcophagi to spread the figures across the front of the picture space in a complex and not wholly successful arrangement. Wöllflin detects in the kneeling figure on the right the influence of the Madonna in Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, but the rest of the composition is far removed from his style, or that of Leonardo. Though highly regarded at the time, and much later forcibly removed from Perugia by the Borghese, it stands rather alone in Raphael’s work. His classicism would later take a less literal direction.^[32]

• The Ansidei Madonna, c. 1505, beginning to move on from Perugino
• The Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1506, using Leonardo’s pyramidal composition for subjects of the Holy Family.^[33]
• Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1507, possibly echoes the pose of Leonardo’s Leda
• Deposition of Christ, 1507, drawing from Roman sarcophagi

Roman period

Vatican “Stanze”

In 1508, Raphael moved to Rome, where he resided for the rest of his life. He was invited by the new pope, Julius II, perhaps at the suggestion of his architect Donato Bramante, then engaged on St. Peter’s Basilica, who came from just outside Urbino and was distantly related to Raphael.^[34] Unlike Michelangelo, who had been kept lingering in Rome for several months after his first summons,^[35] Raphael was immediately commissioned by Julius to fresco what was intended to become the Pope’s private library at the Vatican Palace.^[36] This was a much larger and more important commission than any he had received before; he had only painted one altarpiece in Florence itself. Several other artists and their teams of assistants were already at work on different rooms, many painting over recently completed paintings commissioned by Julius’s loathed predecessor, Alexander VI, whose contributions, and arms, Julius was determined to efface from the palace.^[37] Michelangelo, meanwhile, had been commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The Parnassus, 1511, Stanza della Segnatura

This first of the famous “Stanze” or “Raphael Rooms” to be painted, now known as the Stanza della Segnatura after its use in Vasari’s time, was to make a stunning impact on Roman art, and remains generally regarded as his greatest masterpiece, containing The School of Athens, The Parnassus and the Disputa. Raphael was then given further rooms to paint, displacing other artists including Perugino and Signorelli. He completed a sequence of three rooms, each with paintings on each wall and often the ceilings too, increasingly leaving the work of painting from his detailed drawings to the large and skilled workshop team he had acquired, who added a fourth room, probably only including some elements designed by Raphael, after his early death in 1520. The death of Julius in 1513 did not interrupt the work at all, as he was succeeded by Raphael’s last Pope, the Medici Pope Leo X, with whom Raphael formed an even closer relationship, and who continued to commission him.^[38] Raphael’s friend Cardinal Bibbiena was also one of Leo’s old tutors, and a close friend and advisor.

Raphael was clearly influenced by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in the course of painting the room. Vasari said Bramante let him in secretly. The first section was completed in 1511 and the reaction of other artists to the daunting force of Michelangelo was the dominating question in Italian art for the following few decades. Raphael, who had already shown his gift for absorbing influences into his own personal style, rose to the challenge perhaps better than any other artist. One of the first and clearest instances was the portrait in The School of Athens of Michelangelo himself, as Heraclitus, which seems to draw clearly from the Sybils and ignudi of the Sistine ceiling. Other figures in that and later paintings in the room show the same influences, but as still cohesive with a development of Raphael’s own style.^[39] Michelangelo accused Raphael of plagiarism and years after Raphael’s death, complained in a letter that “everything he knew about art he got from me”, although other quotations show more generous reactions.^[40]

These very large and complex compositions have been regarded ever since as among the supreme works of the grand manner of the High Renaissance, and the “classic art” of the post-antique West. They give a highly idealised depiction of the forms represented, and the compositions, though very carefully conceived in drawings, achieve “sprezzatura”, a term invented by his friend Castiglione, who defined it as “a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless …”.^[41] According to Michael Levey, “Raphael gives his [figures] a superhuman clarity and grace in a universe of Euclidian certainties”.^[42] The painting is nearly all of the highest quality in the first two rooms, but the later compositions in the Stanze, especially those involving dramatic action, are not entirely as successful either in conception or their execution by the workshop.

• Stanza della Segnatura
• The Mass at Bolsena, 1514, Stanza di Eliodoro
• Deliverance of Saint Peter, 1514, Stanza di Eliodoro
• The Fire in the Borgo, 1514, Stanza dell’incendio del Borgo, painted by the workshop to Raphael’s design

Architecture

Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila, now destroyed

After Bramante’s death in 1514, Raphael was named architect of the new St Peter’s. Most of his work there was altered or demolished after his death and the acceptance of Michelangelo’s design, but a few drawings have survived. It appears his designs would have made the church a good deal gloomier than the final design, with massive piers all the way down the nave, “like an alley” according to a critical posthumous analysis by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. It would perhaps have resembled the temple in the background of The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple.^[43]

He designed several other buildings, and for a short time was the most important architect in Rome, working for a small circle around the Papacy. Julius had made changes to the street plan of Rome, creating several new thoroughfares, and he wanted them filled with splendid palaces.^[44]

An important building, the Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila for Leo’s Papal Chamberlain Giovanni Battista Branconio, was completely destroyed to make way for Bernini‘s piazza for St. Peter’s, but drawings of the façade and courtyard remain. The façade was an unusually richly decorated one for the period, including both painted panels on the top story (of three), and much sculpture on the middle one.^[45]

The main designs for the Villa Farnesina were not by Raphael, but he did design, and decorate with mosaics, the Chigi Chapel for the same patron, Agostino Chigi, the Papal Treasurer. Another building, for Pope Leo’s doctor, the Palazzo di Jacobo da Brescia, was moved in the 1930s but survives; this was designed to complement a palace on the same street by Bramante, where Raphael himself lived for a time.^[46]

View of the Chigi Chapel

The Villa Madama, a lavish hillside retreat for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, later Pope Clement VII, was never finished, and his full plans have to be reconstructed speculatively. He produced a design from which the final construction plans were completed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Even incomplete, it was the most sophisticated villa design yet seen in Italy, and greatly influenced the later development of the genre; it appears to be the only modern building in Rome of which Palladio made a measured drawing.^[47]

Only some floor-plans remain for a large palace planned for himself on the new via Giulia in the rione of Regola, for which he was accumulating the land in his last years. It was on an irregular island block near the river Tiber. It seems all façades were to have a giant order of pilasters rising at least two storeys to the full height of the piano nobile, “a gandiloquent feature unprecedented in private palace design”.^[48]

Raphael asked Marco Fabio Calvo to translate Vitruvius‘s Four Books of Architecture into Italian; this he received around the end of August 1514. It is preserved at the Library in Munich with handwritten margin notes by Raphael.^[49]

Antiquity

In about 1510, Raphael was asked by Bramante to judge contemporary copies of Laocoön and His Sons.^[50] In 1515, he was given powers as Prefect over all antiquities unearthed within, or a mile outside the city.^[51] Anyone excavating antiquities was required to inform Raphael within three days, and stonemasons were not allowed to destroy inscriptions without permission.^[52] Raphael wrote a letter to Pope Leo suggesting ways of halting the destruction of ancient monuments, and proposed a visual survey of the city to record all antiquities in an organised fashion. The pope intended to continue to re-use ancient masonry in the building of St Peter’s, also wanting to ensure that all ancient inscriptions were recorded, and sculpture preserved, before allowing the stones to be reused.^[51]

According to Marino Sanuto the Younger‘s diary, in 1519 Raphael offered to transport an obelisk from the Mausoleum of August to St. Peter’s Square for 90,000 ducats.^[53] According to Marcantonio Michiel, Raphael’s “youthful death saddened men of letters because he was not able to furnish the description and the painting of ancient Rome that he was making, which was very beautiful”.^[54] Raphael intended to make an archaeological map of ancient Rome but this was never executed.^[55] Four archaeological drawings by the artist are preserved.^[56]

Other painting projects

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1515, one of the seven remaining Raphael Cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (Victoria and Albert Museum)

The Vatican projects took most of his time, although he painted several portraits, including those of his two main patrons, the popes Julius II and his successor Leo X, the former considered one of his finest. Other portraits were of his own friends, like Castiglione, or the immediate Papal circle. Other rulers pressed for work, and King Francis I of France was sent two paintings as diplomatic gifts from the Pope.^[57] For Agostino Chigi, the hugely rich banker and papal treasurer, he painted the Triumph of Galatea and designed further decorative frescoes for his Villa Farnesina, a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace and mosaics in the funerary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. He also designed some of the decoration for the Villa Madama, the work in both villas being executed by his workshop.

One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520.^[58] He also designed and painted the Loggie at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche.^[59] He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia and the Sistine Madonna. His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large Transfiguration, which together with Il Spasimo shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.^[60]

• Triumph of Galatea, 1512, his only major mythology, for Chigi’s villa (Villa Farnesina)
• Il Spasimo 1517, brings a new degree of expressiveness to his art. (Museo del Prado))
• Transfiguration, 1520, unfinished at his death. (Pinacoteca Vaticana))
• The Holy Family, 1518 (Louvre)

Painting materials

Raphael painted several of his works on wood support (Madonna of the Pinks) but he also used canvas (Sistine Madonna) and he was known to employ drying oils such as linseed or walnut oils. His palette was rich and he used almost all of the then available pigments such as ultramarine, lead-tin-yellow, carmine, vermilion, madder lake, verdigris and ochres. In several of his paintings (Ansidei Madonna) he even employed the rare brazilwood lake, metallic powdered gold and even less known metallic powdered bismuth.^[61][62]

Workshop

Vasari says that Raphael eventually had a workshop of fifty pupils and assistants, many of whom later became significant artists in their own right. This was arguably the largest workshop team assembled under any single old master painter, and much higher than the norm. They included established masters from other parts of Italy, probably working with their own teams as sub-contractors, as well as pupils and journeymen. We have very little evidence of the internal working arrangements of the workshop, apart from the works of art themselves, which are often very difficult to assign to a particular hand.^[63]

The most important figures were Giulio Romano, a young pupil from Rome (only about twenty-one at Raphael’s death), and Gianfrancesco Penni, already a Florentine master. They were left many of Raphael’s drawings and other possessions, and to some extent continued the workshop after Raphael’s death. Penni did not achieve a personal reputation equal to Giulio’s, as after Raphael’s death he became Giulio’s less-than-equal collaborator in turn for much of his subsequent career. Perino del Vaga, already a master, and Polidoro da Caravaggio, who was supposedly promoted from a labourer carrying building materials on the site, also became notable painters in their own right. Polidoro’s partner, Maturino da Firenze, has, like Penni, been overshadowed in subsequent reputation by his partner. Giovanni da Udine had a more independent status, and was responsible for the decorative stucco work and grotesques surrounding the main frescoes.^[64] Most of the artists were later scattered, and some killed, by the violent Sack of Rome in 1527.^[65] This did however contribute to the diffusion of versions of Raphael’s style around Italy and beyond.

Vasari emphasises that Raphael ran a very harmonious and efficient workshop, and had extraordinary skill in smoothing over troubles and arguments with both patrons and his assistants—a contrast with the stormy pattern of Michelangelo’s relationships with both.^[66] However though both Penni and Giulio were sufficiently skilled that distinguishing between their hands and that of Raphael himself is still sometimes difficult,^[67] there is no doubt that many of Raphael’s later wall-paintings, and probably some of his easel paintings, are more notable for their design than their execution. Many of his portraits, if in good condition, show his brilliance in the detailed handling of paint right up to the end of his life.^[68]

Other pupils or assistants include Raffaellino del Colle, Andrea Sabbatini, Bartolommeo Ramenghi, Pellegrino Aretusi, Vincenzo Tamagni, Battista Dossi, Tommaso Vincidor, Timoteo Viti (the Urbino painter), and the sculptor and architect Lorenzetto (Giulio’s brother-in-law).^[69] The printmakers and architects in Raphael’s circle are discussed below. It has been claimed the Flemish Bernard van Orley worked for Raphael for a time, and Luca Penni, brother of Gianfrancesco and later a member of the First School of Fontainebleau, may have been a member of the team.^[70]

Portraits

• Portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga, c. 1504
• Portrait of Pope Julius II, c. 1512
• Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, c. 1514
• Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1515

Drawings

Lucretia, engraved by Raimondi after a drawing by Raphael.^[71]

Raphael was one of the finest draftsmen in the history of Western art, and used drawings extensively to plan his compositions. According to a near-contemporary, when beginning to plan a composition, he would lay out a large number of stock drawings of his on the floor, and begin to draw “rapidly”, borrowing figures from here and there.^[72] Over forty sketches survive for the Disputa in the Stanze, and there may well have been many more originally; over four hundred sheets survive altogether.^[73] He used different drawings to refine his poses and compositions, apparently to a greater extent than most other painters, to judge by the number of variants that survive: “… This is how Raphael himself, who was so rich in inventiveness, used to work, always coming up with four or six ways to show a narrative, each one different from the rest, and all of them full of grace and well done.” wrote another writer after his death.^[74] For John Shearman, Raphael’s art marks “a shift of resources away from production to research and development”.^[75]

When a final composition was achieved, scaled-up full-size cartoons were often made, which were then pricked with a pin and “pounced” with a bag of soot to leave dotted lines on the surface as a guide. He also made unusually extensive use, on both paper and plaster, of a “blind stylus”, scratching lines which leave only an indentation, but no mark. These can be seen on the wall in The School of Athens, and in the originals of many drawings.^[76] The “Raphael Cartoons”, as tapestry designs, were fully coloured in a glue distemper medium, as they were sent to Brussels to be followed by the weavers.

In later works painted by the workshop, the drawings are often painfully more attractive than the paintings.^[77] Most Raphael drawings are rather precise—even initial sketches with naked outline figures are carefully drawn, and later working drawings often have a high degree of finish, with shading and sometimes highlights in white. They lack the freedom and energy of some of Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s sketches, but are nearly always aesthetically very satisfying. He was one of the last artists to use metalpoint (literally a sharp pointed piece of silver or another metal) extensively, although he also made superb use of the freer medium of red or black chalk.^[78] In his final years he was one of the first artists to use female models for preparatory drawings—male pupils (“garzoni”) were normally used for studies of both sexes.^[79]

• Study for soldiers in this Resurrection of Christ, ca 1500.
• Red chalk study for the Villa Farnesina Three Graces
• Sheet with study for the Alba Madonna and other sketches
• Developing the composition for a Madonna and Child

Printmaking

Raphael made no prints himself, but entered into a collaboration with Marcantonio Raimondi to produce engravings to Raphael’s designs, which created many of the most famous Italian prints of the century, and was important in the rise of the reproductive print. His interest was unusual in such a major artist; from his contemporaries it was only shared by Titian, who had worked much less successfully with Raimondi.^[80] A total of about fifty prints were made; some were copies of Raphael’s paintings, but other designs were apparently created by Raphael purely to be turned into prints. Raphael made preparatory drawings, many of which survive, for Raimondi to translate into engraving.^[81]

The most famous original prints to result from the collaboration were Lucretia, the Judgement of Paris and The Massacre of the Innocents (of which two virtually identical versions were engraved). Among prints of the paintings The Parnassus (with considerable differences)^[82] and Galatea were also especially well known. Outside Italy, reproductive prints by Raimondi and others were the main way that Raphael’s art was experienced until the twentieth century. Baviero Carocci, called “Il Baviera” by Vasari, an assistant who Raphael evidently trusted with his money,^[83] ended up in control of most of the copper plates after Raphael’s death, and had a successful career in the new occupation of a publisher of prints.^[84]

• Drawing for a Sibyl in the Chigi Chapel.
• The Massacre of the Innocents, engraving by ? Marcantonio Raimondi from a design by Raphael.^[c] The version “without fir tree”.
• Judgement of Paris, still influencing Manet, who used the seated group in his most famous work.
• Galatea, engraving after the fresco in the Villa Farnesina

Private life and death

La Fornarina, Raphael’s mistress

From 1517 until his death, Raphael lived in the Palazzo Caprini in the Borgo, in rather grand style in a palace designed by Bramante. He never married, but in 1514 became engaged to Maria Bibbiena, Cardinal Medici Bibbiena’s niece; he seems to have been talked into this by his friend the cardinal, and his lack of enthusiasm seems to be shown by the marriage not having taken place before she died in 1520.^[85] He is said to have had many affairs, but a permanent fixture in his life in Rome was “La Fornarina”, Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker (fornaro) named Francesco Luti from Siena who lived at Via del Governo Vecchio.^[86] He was made a “Groom of the Chamber” of the Pope, which gave him status at court and an additional income, and also a knight of the Papal Order of the Golden Spur. Vasari claims that he had toyed with the ambition of becoming a cardinal, perhaps after some encouragement from Leo, which also may account for his delaying his marriage.^[85]

Raphael died on Good Friday (April 6, 1520), which was possibly his 37th birthday.^[d] Vasari says that Raphael had also been born on a Good Friday, which in 1483 fell on March 28,^[e] and that the artist died from exhuastion brought on by unceasing romantic interests while he was working on the Loggia.^[88] Several other possibilities have been raised by later historians.^[f] In his acute illness, which lasted fifteen days, Raphael was composed enough to confess his sins, receive the last rites, and put his affairs in order. He dictated his will, in which he left sufficient funds for his mistress’s care, entrusted to his loyal servant Baviera, and left most of his studio contents to Giulio Romano and Penni. At his request, Raphael was buried in the Pantheon.^[89]

Raphael’s funeral was extremely grand, attended by large crowds. According to a journal by Paris de Grassis,^[g] four cardinals dressed in purple carried his body, the hand of which was kissed by the Pope.^[90] The inscription in Raphael’s marble sarcophagus, an elegiac distich written by Pietro Bembo, reads: “Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived, and when he was dying, feared herself to die.”^[h]

• Self-portraits
• Probable self-portrait drawing by Raphael in his teens
• Self-portrait, Raphael in the background, from The School of Athens
• Possible Self-portrait with a friend, c. 1518
• Portrait of a Young Man, 1514, Lost during the Second World War. Possible self-portrait by Raphael

Critical reception

Sistine Madonna (1512)

Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries, although his influence on artistic style in his own century was less than that of Michelangelo. Mannerism, beginning at the time of his death, and later the Baroque, took art “in a direction totally opposed” to Raphael’s qualities;^[91] “with Raphael’s death, classic art – the High Renaissance – subsided”, as Walter Friedländer put it.^[92] He was soon seen as the ideal model by those disliking the excesses of Mannerism:

the opinion …was generally held in the middle of the sixteenth century that Raphael was the ideal balanced painter, universal in his talent, satisfying all the absolute standards, and obeying all the rules which were supposed to govern the arts, whereas Michelangelo was the eccentric genius, more brilliant than any other artists in his particular field, the drawing of the male nude, but unbalanced and lacking in certain qualities, such as grace and restraint, essential to the great artist. Those, like Dolce and Aretino, who held this view were usually the survivors of Renaissance Humanism, unable to follow Michelangelo as he moved on into Mannerism.^[93]

Vasari himself, despite his hero remaining Michelangelo, came to see his influence as harmful in some ways, and added passages to the second edition of the Lives expressing similar views.^[94]

Raphael and Maria Bibbiena’s tomb in the Pantheon. The Madonna is by Lorenzetto.

Raphael’s sarcophagus

Raphael’s compositions were always admired and studied, and became the cornerstone of the training of the Academies of art. His period of greatest influence was from the late 17th to late 19th centuries, when his perfect decorum and balance were greatly admired. He was seen as the best model for the history painting, regarded as the highest in the hierarchy of genres. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses praised his “simple, grave, and majestic dignity” and said he “stands in general foremost of the first [i.e., best] painters”, especially for his frescoes (in which he included the “Raphael Cartoons”), whereas “Michael Angelo claims the next attention. He did not possess so many excellences as Raffaelle, but those he had were of the highest kind…” Echoing the sixteenth-century views above, Reynolds goes on to say of Raphael:

The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters, his judicious contrivance of his composition, correctness of drawing, purity of taste, and the skilful accommodation of other men’s conceptions to his own purpose. Nobody excelled him in that judgment, with which he united to his own observations on nature the energy of Michael Angelo, and the beauty and simplicity of the antique. To the question, therefore, which ought to hold the first rank, Raffaelle or Michael Angelo, it must be answered, that if it is to be given to him who possessed a greater combination of the higher qualities of the art than any other man, there is no doubt but Raffaelle is the first. But if, according to Longinus, the sublime, being the highest excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.^[95]

Reynolds was less enthusiastic about Raphael’s panel paintings, but the slight sentimentality of these made them enormously popular in the 19th century: “We have been familiar with them from childhood onwards, through a far greater mass of reproductions than any other artist in the world has ever had…” wrote Wölfflin, who was born in 1862, of Raphael’s Madonnas.^[96]

In Germany, Raphael had an immense influence on religious art of the Nazarene movement and Düsseldorf school of painting in the 19th century. In contrast, in England the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood explicitly reacted against his influence (and that of his admirers such as Joshua Reynolds), seeking to return to styles that pre-dated what they saw as his baneful influence. According to a critic whose ideas greatly influenced them, John Ruskin:

The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber [the Stanza della Segnatura], and it was brought about in great part by the very excellencies of the man who had thus marked the commencement of decline. The perfection of execution and the beauty of feature which were attained in his works, and in those of his great contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of form the chief objects of all artists; and thenceforward execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.

And as I told you, these are the two secondary causes of the decline of art; the first being the loss of moral purpose. Pray note them clearly. In mediæval art, thought is the first thing, execution the second; in modern art execution is the first thing, and thought the second. And again, in mediæval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second. The mediæval principles led up to Raphael, and the modern principles lead down from him.^[97]

By 1900, Raphael’s popularity was surpassed by Michelangelo and Leonardo, perhaps as a reaction against the etiolated Raphaelism of 19th-century academic artists such as Bouguereau.^[98] Although art historian Bernard Berenson in 1952 termed Raphael the “most famous and most loved” master of the High Renaissance,^[99] art historians Leopold and Helen Ettlinger say that the Raphael’s lesser popularity in the 20th century is made obvious by “the contents of art library shelves … In contrast to volume upon volume that reproduce yet again detailed photographs of the Sistine Ceiling or Leonardo’s drawings, the literature on Raphael, particularly in English, is limited to only a few books”.^[100] They conclude, nonetheless, that “of all the great Renaissance masters, Raphael’s influence is the most continuous.”^[101]

See also

• List of paintings by Raphael

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms.

Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

Kentridge has had major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (2007); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2004); among others. He has also participated in Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); the Sydney Biennale (1996, 2008); and Documenta (1997, 2002). His opera and theater works, often produced in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, have appeared at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2007); Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa (1992, 1996, 1998); and Festival d’Avignon, France (1995, 1996).

His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in conjunction with a retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais

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Francis Schaeffer below:

Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

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Schaeffer with his wife Edith in Switzerland.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

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August 29, 2019

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation, 
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

i have enjoyed reading about a dozen of your books and some of the most intriguing were The God Delusion, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, and Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.

On August 28, 2019 you tweeted:

Beethoven’s heiliger Dankgesang: lunchtime listening inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Spandrell who tries to persuade Rampion (the DH Lawrence character) that the music proves God. Rampion demurs, but on spurious aesthetic grounds rather than because art can’t deliver such a proof

I tweeted in response:

Charles Darwin noted before he died that nature and music no longer testified of God “now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions  and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.”

—

 YOU MAY FIND IT INTERESTING THAT CHARLES DARWIN WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF THE BIBLE. When I read the book  Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters, I also read  a commentary on it by Francis Schaeffer and I wanted to both  quote some of Charles Darwin’s own words to you and then include the comments of Francis Schaeffer on those words. 

Darwin, C. R. to Doedes, N. D., 2 Apr 1873

“It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide…Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose.”

Francis Schaeffer noted:

What he is saying is if you say there is a first cause, then the mind says, “Where did this come from?” I think this is a bit old fashioned, with some of the modern thinkers, this would not have carry as much weight today as it did when Darwin expressed it. Jean Paul Sartre said it as well as anyone could possibly say it. The philosophic problem is that something is there and not nothing being there. No one has the luxury of beginning with nothing. Nobody I have ever read has put forth that everything came from nothing. I have never met such a person in all my reading,or all my discussion. If you are going to begin with nothing being there, it has to be nothing nothing, and it can’t be something nothing. When someone says they believe nothing is there, in reality they have already built in something there. The only question is do you begin with an impersonal something or a personal something. All human thought is shut up to these two possibilities. Either you begin with an impersonal and then have Darwin’s own dilemma which impersonal plus chance, now he didn’t bring in the amount of time that modern man would though. Modern man has brought in huge amounts of time into the equation as though that would make a difference because I have said many times that time can’t make a qualitative difference but only a quantitative difference. The dilemma is it is either God or chance. Now you find this intriguing thing in Darwin’s own situation, he can’t understand how chance could have produced these two great factors of the universe and its form and the mannishness of man.

From Charles Darwin, Autobiography (1876), in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1888), pp. 307 to 313.

“Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt…”

Francis Schaeffer commented:

On the basis of his reason he has to say there must be an intelligent mind, someone analogous to man. You couldn’t describe the God of the Bible better. That is man is made in God’s image  and therefore, you know a great deal about God when you know something about man. What he is really saying here is that everything in my experience tells me it must be so, and my mind demands it is so. Not just these feelings he talked about earlier but his MIND demands it is so, but now how does he counter this? How does he escape this? Here is how he does it!!!

Charles Darwin went on to observe:  “—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”

Francis Schaeffer asserted:

So he says my mind can only come to one conclusion, and that is there is a mind behind it all. However, the doubt comes because his mind has come from the lowest form of earthworm, so how can I trust my mind. But this is a joker isn’t it?  Then how can you trust his mind to support such a theory as this? He proved too much. The fact that Darwin found it necessary to take such an escape shows the tremendous weight of Romans 1, that the only escape he can make is to say how can I trust my mind when I come from the lowest animal the earthworm? Obviously think of the grandeur of his concept, I don’t think it is true, but the grandeur of his concept, so what you find is that Darwin is presenting something here that is wrong I feel, but it is not nothing. It is a tremendously grand concept that he has put forward. So he is accepting the dictates of his mind to put forth a grand concept which he later can’t accept in this basic area with his reason, but he rejects what he could accept with his reason on this escape. It really doesn’t make sense. This is a tremendous demonstration of the weakness of his own position.

Darwin also noted, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”

Francis Schaeffer remarked:

What a stupid reply and I didn’t say wicked. It just seems to me that here is 2 plus 2 equals 36 at this particular place.

Darwin, C. R. to Graham, William 3 July 1881

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Francis Schaeffer observed:

Can you feel this man? He is in real agony. You can feel the whole of modern man in this tension with Darwin. My mind can’t accept that ultimate of chance, that the universe is a result of chance. He has said 3 or 4 times now that he can’t accept that it all happened by chance and then he will write someone else and say something different. How does he say this (about the mind of a monkey) and then put forth this grand theory? Wrong theory I feel but great just the same. Grand in the same way as when I look at many of the paintings today and I differ with their message but you must say the mark of the mannishness of man are one those paintings titanic-ally even though the message is wrong and this is the same with Darwin.  But how can he say you can’t think, you come from a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s conviction, so how can you trust me? Trust me here, but not there is what Darwin is saying. In other words it is very selective. 

Now we are down to the last year of Darwin’s life.

* The Duke of Argyll (Good Words, April 1885, p. 244) has recorded a few words on this subject, spoken by my father in the last year of his life. “. . . in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms,and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.’”

Francis Schaeffer summarized :

And this is the great Darwin, and it makes you cry inside. This is the great Darwin and he ends as a man in total tension.

Francis Schaeffer noted that in Darwin’s 1876 Autobiography that Darwin he is going to set forth two arguments for God in this and again you will find when he comes to the end of this that he is in tremendous tension. Darwin wrote, 

At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons.Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.

Francis Schaeffer remarked:

Now Darwin says when I look back and when I look at nature I came to the conclusion that man can not be just a fly! But now Darwin has moved from being a younger man to an older man and he has allowed his presuppositions to enter in to block his logic. These things at the end of his life he had no intellectual answer for. To block them out in favor of his theory. Remember the letter of his that said he had lost all aesthetic senses when he had got older and he had become a clod himself. Now interesting he says just the same thing, but not in relation to the arts, namely music, pictures, etc, but to nature itself. Darwin said, “But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions  and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…” So now you see that Darwin’s presuppositions have not only robbed him of the beauty of man’s creation in art, but now the universe. He can’t look at it now and see the beauty. The reason he can’t see the beauty is for a very, very , very simple reason: THE BEAUTY DRIVES HIM TO DISTRACTION. THIS IS WHERE MODERN MAN IS AND IT IS HELL. The art is hell because it reminds him of man and how great man is, and where does it fit in his system? It doesn’t. When he looks at nature and it’s beauty he is driven to the same distraction and so consequently you find what has built up inside him is a real death, not  only the beauty of the artistic but the beauty of nature. He has no answer in his logic and he is left in tension.  He dies and has become less than human because these two great things (such as any kind of art and the beauty of  nature) that would make him human  stand against his theory.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

Francis and Edith Schaeffer seen below:

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_

Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris 

Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

The Basis of Human Dignity by Francis Schaeffer

Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Francis Schaeffer in 1984

Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer in 1982

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Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Episode 1

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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Dark History of Evolution-Henry Morris, Ph.D.

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Featured artist is Ray Holt 

Roy Holt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia    

Roy Holt (1942–2007) was a British contemporary artistspecialising in painting.

Born in Surrey and studied at the Royal Academy Schools and later at Goldsmiths College. His work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries in the UK, Europe, the US and China; has been shown twice at the John Moores^{[disambiguation needed][1]}and three times at the Young Contemporaries^[2] (now called New Contemporaries).

As well as working in his London Studio he was also a Principal Lecturer and Reader in Contemporary Fine Art Practice at Liverpool College of Art^[3] where he taught for four decades. He was a visiting lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools, the Royal College and on the Fine Art MA at Goldsmiths School of Art.

Holt’s formal specialism was colour and he was a passionate disciple of Josef Albers. His broader interest which informed his artwork and teaching, was based on the notion of ‘Art as Folly’.^[4]His art works are mainly wall–based installations often reflecting DIY culture which he saw as a rich source reflecting some of the latent desires and hopes in society.

He considered art objects as ‘Objects of Speculation’ in which he saw the role of the viewer as pivotal, challenging our rationalism (and insecurities) thus allowing us to speculate on a more wonderful universe.

In addition to his art practice he also wrote many critical texts, including ‘Verbs Posing as Nouns’ in ‘Sigmar Polke: Back to Postmodernity’^[5] published by Tate Liverpool and Liverpool University Press.^[6]

He was also an original member of the Liverpool Art School band, Deaf School^[7] in the mid 1970s, playing his much loved instrument the banjo.

See also[edit]

• British art

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ John Moores Biennial
2. Jump up^ New Contemporaries
3. Jump up^ John Moores Fine Art Degree show review
4. Jump up^ Drive book
5. Jump up^ Sigmar Polke: Back to Modernity ISBN 978-0-85323-911-6
6. Jump up^ Liverpool University Press
7. Jump up^ official Deaf School site

External links[edit]

• Artist’s official website: www.royholt.co.uk
• exhibition at the Liver Buildings

Categories:

• 20th-century English painters
• 21st-century English painters
• 1942 births
• 2007 deaths
• Academics of Liverpool College of Art

		Roy Holt was a British contemporary artist specialising in painting. He worked from his London based studio and was a principal Lecturer in Fine Art and Reader in Contemporary Fine Art Practice at Liverpool School of Art, John Moores University. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and later at Goldsmiths College. His work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries in the UK and internationally. Holt’s formal specialism was colour (he was a passionate disciple of Josef Albers) his broader interest which informed his own artwork and teaching, was based on the notion of ‘Art as Folly’. His art works are mainly wall–based installations often reflecting DIY culture which he saw as a rich source reflecting some of the latent desires and hopes in society. He considered art objects as ‘Objects of Speculation’ in which he saw the role of the viewer as pivotal, challenging our rationalism (and insecurities) allowing us to speculate on a more wonderful universe.
	The majority of the work seen on this website is held together as a collection in Liverpool and can be viewed by appointment.

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The Beatles are featured in this episode below and Schaeffer noted,  ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world.”

How Should We then Live Episode 7 

John Lennon- On Revolution & Native Americans

The Beatles:

 

Schaeffer talked about the young people of the 1960’s and their dissatisfaction with their parents values and he talked about also the proper reasons to confront the government. Unfortunately, John Lennon wrote some words in the song REVOLUTION that indicated that a revolution involving violence was a possible remedy.

The website Genius gives us some good insights into the song:

 

[Verse 1]
You say you want a revolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know you can count me out

The version of this song that appears on The Beatles (The White Album) has a variant lyric indicating Lennon’s uncertainty about destructive change, with the phrase “count me out” recorded as “count me out, in”. “Revolution I” was recorded first, but released second. giving the false impression that he was becoming less sure of his pacifist views, when in it was in fact the opposite.

“Count me out if it’s for violence. Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers”
—John Lennon in 1980 about how “Revolution” still stood as an expression of his politics.

[Chorus]
Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright
Alright, alright

[Verse 2]
You say you got a real solution
Well you know
We’d all love to see the plan

According to wikipedia, John said he wrote this song around the time they had been advised to stop answering questions about the Vietnamese war. This was such a fraught period in American political life that he could have been referring to any number of issues here, but what is most clear is that the Beatles were unafraid to call on and question politics and government even as they were the biggest band in the world.
You ask me for a contribution
Well you know
We’re doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]
You say you’ll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

[Chorus]

[Outro]
Alright, alright
Alright, alright
Alright, alright
Alright, alright

“YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?” – THE BEATLES

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

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Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais

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Francis Schaeffer below:

Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

Ben Stein vs. Richard Dawkins Interview

XXXX Peter Singer – The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews – Richard Dawkins

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XXX November 21, 2019

November 21 2019

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation,  Washington, DC 20005

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation,  Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

I have enjoyed reading about a dozen of your books and some of the most intriguing were The God Delusion, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, and Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.
I have posted in the past showing the false claims made in “Outgrowing God,” and you can reference these by googling “Outgrowing God The Daily Hatch.” Some questions raised by you include “Did Jesus even exist?” One of my favorite posts was FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 292 In OUTGROWING GOD Richard Dawkins wrongly notes “Genesis says Abraham owned camels, but archaeological evidence shows that the camel was not domesticated until many centuries after Abraham” Featured Artist is Paul Pfeiffer

I enjoyed your latest book Outgrowing God which is one of my favorite books that you have written. However, there are some some weak parts of the book. For instance, on page 49:

There’s some beautiful English writing in the King James Bible. Ecclesiastes is at least as good as the Song of Songs, although it’s poetry is bleak and world-weary. If you read nothing else in the Bible, I recommend those two books, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

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Here is the universal man and his genius. Solomon is the universal man with a empire at his disposal. Solomon had it all.

Ecclesiastes 1:3

English Standard Version (ESV)

³ What does man gain by all the toil
    at which he toils under the sun?

Francis Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes. The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.” 

Below are the words of Francis Schaeffer on Ecclesiastes:

XXXX Works

After wisdom Solomon comes to the great WORKS of men. Ecclesiastes 1:14,  ^“I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is ^[p]vanity and striving after wind.” Solomon is the man with an empire at this disposal that speaks. This is the man who has the copper refineries in Ezion-geber. This is the man who made the stables across his empire. This is the man who built the temple in Jerusalem. This is the man who stands on the world trade routes. He is not a provincial. He knew what was happening on the Phonetician coast and he knew what was happening in Egypt. There is no doubt he already knew something of building. This is Solomon and he pursues the greatness of his own construction and his conclusion is VANITY AND VEXATION OF SPIRIT.

Ecclesiastes 2:18-20

¹⁸ Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me. ¹⁹ And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun. This too is vanity. ²⁰ Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun.

He looked at the works of his hands, great and multiplied by his wealth and his position and he shrugged his shoulders.

Ecclesiastes 2:22-23

²² For what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labors under the sun? ²³ Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.

Man can not rest and yet he is never done and yet the things which he builds will out live him. If one wants an ironical three phrases these are they. There is a Dutch saying, “The tailor makes many suits but one day he will make a suit that will outlast the tailor.”

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Why not take a few minutes and just read the short chapter of Psalms 22 that was written hundreds of years before the Romans even invented the practice of Crucifixion. 1000 years BC the Jews had the practice of stoning people but we read in this chapter a graphic description of Christ dying on the cross. How do you explain that without looking ABOVE THE SUN to God. Ecclesiastes was written to those who wanted to examine life UNDER THE SUN without God in the picture and Solomon’s conclusion in the final chapter was found in Ecclesiastes 12 when he looked at life ABOVE THE SUN:

¹³ The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. ¹⁴ For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

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Science Confirms the Bible with Ken Ham

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Schaeffer with his wife Edith in Switzerland.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

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Francis and Edith Schaeffer seen below:

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Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris 

Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

The Basis of Human Dignity by Francis Schaeffer

Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Francis Schaeffer in 1984

Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer in 1982

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Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Episode 1

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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Dark History of Evolution-Henry Morris, Ph.D.

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Featured artist is Michael c McMillen

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Michael C. McMillen: Every Dream Is New

Michael C. McMillen: Photo by Ari Young

Michael McMillen is a visual artist in the very broadest sense, careful to avoid narrowly defining just what it is he does. “The medium has to be in service of the idea,” he told an audience of students at Art Center College of Design in 2005.

McMillen’s shifting and overlapping job descriptions — sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, cultural anthropologist — reflect the fact that he is a searcher, never quite sure what he is looking for, always hoping to be amazed by what he comes across. An leading edge baby boomer — he was born in 1946 — his childhood was marked by a curiosity about the artifacts of postwar California.

Raised mainly by his grandparents, McMillen was surrounded from an early age by things older than he was: elderly people, antique furnishings, objects that had seen better days. Being older, his grandparents also tended to let him roam. Some of McMillen’s childhood memories involve pulling a wagon down the alleyway near his their house, collecting junk that he would later organize and create stories about. Since many of neighbors were veterans of WWII, or had worked for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, McMillen often found items that conveyed the faded poetry of war and industry.

His imaginative drive also reflects the influence of his father, an actor who also worked as a scenic artist. Eventually McMillen Sr. worked for Channel 11, and Michael would visit him there. Walking among the sets, which he realized looked very different on television, got him thinking about the artifice and “duality” of media images. While attending Santa Monica City College he decided to become an artist: an epiphany that he says came to him like a “snap of a finger.”

After earning his MFA at UCLA McMillen promptly gained attention for his mixed-media sculptures and constructed environments. “Like films,” wrote one commentator, “McMillen’s fastidiously constructed works function as portals into other worlds…” While building his reputation as an artist McMillen also did odd jobs in the film industry, creating props and special effects for “Blade Runner” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Since winning the LA County Museum’s “New Talent Award” and landing NEA Artist’s Fellowship, both in 1978, McMillen’s career has never faltered. His groundbreaking 1981 installation “Central Meridian (The Garage)” featured the cluttered interior of a 60’s garage/workshop/catacomb, complete with the rusting bones of a Dodge Dart. Doug Harvey, writing for the LA Weekly, says that the piece “…remains one of the most subtle, poetic and experiential critiques of the institutional art environment ever devised.”

Over the years, McMillen’s interests as an artist have remained remarkably consistent. Deeply aware of the evocative power of things, he has been accumulating and re-assembling “objects of interest” — some would call them detritus — all his life. While building his stellar reputation as an artist, an inevitable by product has been a growing storage problem.

“I have an exotic collection of materials, artifacts, gee-gaws and what-nots” says McMillen. “To avoid unnecessary clutter, I have a simple rule: If I haven’t used it in 30 years, I discard it.”

One of the results of being “awash with stuff” has been a deepening exploration with film. This new direction has allowed McMillen to both literally recycle some of the physical raw material he has accumulated and also to recycle some of the overarching ideas of his career. He has been tinkering with film since 2003, and his 2007 installation/exhibition “Speed’s Place” at the UnMuseum of the Contemporary Arts Museum of Cincinnati, included projections of his digital films.

His current exhibition “Lighthouse” at LA Louver Gallery doesn’t literally include a lighthouse. The title, McMillen explains, “… is both metaphoric and a bit literal,” as the installation includes a looped screening of his new short film “Quotidian Man” which projected onto the billboard of the “Hotel New Empire,” a kind of tilting film set raised on a catafalque of stilts over a tray of water.

A precarious flophouse with a questionable past it is both a sculpture and a metaphor. Adding the element of the billboard/movie screen is McMillen’s way of priming the image to receive an even richer set of suggestions. The billboard may also be a nod to the late painter James Doolin’s “Psychic,” a 1998 oil of a blank signboard hovering above a row of LA stores.

McMillen’s films are reminiscent of old films, and nostalgia — he has great affection for the days when movie magic wasn’t so seamless — is one of their key ingredients. Paradoxically, the poetry of nostalgia recycled creates something fresh and dreamlike. “Every dream is new: we don’t know where they are going,” McMillen points out. Spooky mirages, grainy and full of surprises, McMillen’s films somehow feel inevitable, as if he has been making them all his life.

In a sense, he has. Working with history makes him feel fresh, like a child again.

Michael C. McMillen is a man who is fascinated by the past, but who isn’t the least bit jaded. His imagination flickers brightly, like a Tesla coil in a monster movie.

Michael Mc Millen Artist’s Statement for “Lighthouse.”

The illusions of permanence and perfection are recurring themes in my work.

I use architectural references as a metaphoric language to express and reveal this
continuous state of flux and entropy.

The viewer’s memory and sense of reality are subtly subverted by the use of altered scale and the fabrication of elements that are both familiar and strangely dystopian.

With the advances in digital motion picture technology, I have been able to integrate time based images into my installations. The movies blend and combine a multitude of varied images from our popular culture into personal dream-like narratives that animate and transport the viewer into unexpected realms.

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Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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The first portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Richard Dawkins and next week I will have the second part.

On May 15, 1994 on the 10th anniversary of the passing of Francis Schaeffer I mailed the following letter to Richard Dawkins.

Could you take 3 minutes and attempt to refute the nihilistic message of the song (DUST IN THE WIND) which appears at the beginning of the enclosed tape? Back in 1980 I watched the series COSMOS and on May 5, 1994 I again sat down to watch it again. In this letter today I will tell you of 3 GENTLEMEN who contemplated the world around them. The first one is an evolutionist by the name of Carl Sagan. Mr. Sagan is what I would call a humanist full of optimism.

The second man also sought to contemplate the world around him and this man was King Solomon of Israel. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon limits himself to the question of human life lived “under the sun” between birth and death and what answers this would give (that is exactly what Mr. Sagan has done in COSMOS).It is this belief that life is only between birth and death that eventually causes Solomon to embrace nihilism. In the first few words of Ecclesiastes he observes the continual cycles of the earth and makes some very interesting conclusions”…to search for understanding about everything in the universe.”

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The third man I want to mention is Francis Schaeffer who I believe was the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century. However, when he was a young agnostic many years ago he also had an experience similar to King Solomon’s when he contemplated the world and universe around him.contemplated the world and the universe around him.CARLSAGAN:”Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”KING SOLOMON: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11;3:18-19 (Living Bible): 2 In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile. 3-7 For what does a man get for all his hard work?Generations come and go, but it makes no difference.[b] The sun rises and sets and hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south and north, here and there, twisting back and forth, getting nowhere.* The rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full, and the water returns again to the rivers and flows again to the sea . .everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied; no matter how much we hear, we are not content. History merely repeats itself…For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!—-What Solomon said ties into this following statement by evolutionist Douglas Futuyma – “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”

———-FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man (at the age of 18 in 1930). I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.

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Solomon died 3000 years ago and Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984  exactly 10 years ago.I firmly believe Solomon was correct when he said in Ecclesiastes 7:2 “It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For you are going to die, and it is a good thing to think about it while there is time.”Suppose that you to learn that you only had just one year to live—the number of your days would be 365. What would you do with the precious few days that remained to you? With death stalking you, you would have little interest in trivial subjects and would instead be concerned with essentials. I know that is what I did when I was bed ridden in a hospital in Memphis at age 15. I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Thank you for your time.Sincerely,Everette Hatcher III, P.O. Box 23426, Little Rock, AR 72221TIME MAGAZINE May 28, 1984:DIED, Francis Schaeffer, 72. Christian theologian and a leading scholar of evangelical Protestantism; of cancer; in Rochester, Minn. Schaeffer, a Philadelphia-born Presbyterian, and his wife in 1955 founded L’Abri (French for ‘the shelter’), a chalet in the Swiss Alps known among students and intellectuals for a reasoned rather than emotional approach to religious counseling. His 23 philosophical books include the bestseller How Should We Then Live? (1976).” (January 30, 1912-May 15, 1985)

Adrian Rogers is pictured below and Francis Schaeffer above.

Watching the film HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? in 1979 impacted my life greatly

Francis Schaeffer in the film WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

Francis and Edith Schaeffer

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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

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

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 second video below in the 67th clip in this series are Richard Dawkins’ words that Harry Kroto wanted me to see. Since then I have read several of Richard Dawkins books and have attempted to respond to the contents of these books directly to Richard Dawkins by mail. In fact, I have been writing Richard Dawkins letters since May 15, 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of the passing of one of my heroes, Francis Schaeffer. Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time responding to many of Richard Dawkins’ heroes such as Carl Sagan, Jacques Monod, H.J. Blackham, Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Planck, Johann Sebastian Bach, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, Gerald Horton, Edmund Leach, Louis Pasteur, George Wald, Jacob Bronowski, Steven Weinberg, Charles Darwin, Paul Kurtz, Peter Singer, Jonathan Miller, William B. Provine, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, James D. Watson, Francis Crick, Michael Polanyi, The Huxley family, Antony Flew, and Edward O. Wilson (Dawkins has since revised his opinion of Flew and Wilson, but he earlier regarded them very highly). 

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Both Francis Schaeffer and Richard Dawkins have talked extensively about the life of Charles Darwin.

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Sir Harry Kroto with his high school friend Sir Ian McKellan at the FSU National High Field Magnetic Lab on Tuesday, October 27, 2009.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

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Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

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

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Richard Dawkins Photos Photos – Professor Stephen Hawking Unveils Medal For Science Communication – Zimbio

Professor Stephen Hawking Unveils Medal For Science Communication In This Photo: Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian May, Harold Kroto, Alexi Leonov, Garik Israelian

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Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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