dawkins on god
Richard Dawkins is pretty sure there’s no God. I’d like to spend some time picking through his latest article, but probably won’t get to it until later this week. Until then, I’ll just say that while people like Dawkins still foam rabidly at the mouth, there will always be a place for philosophical apologetics.
“We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness.”
Oh, okay. It’s luck then. Silly me.
Geez…talk about fundamentalist.
Dawkins is pretty well dismantled in “Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life” by Alister McGrath, he of theological fame, who also happens to hold a Ph.D. in biology.
McGrath evaluates Dawkins’ positions from an evolutionist perspective, and finds them wanting.
It’s a short book, and an interesting read.
Mike, I just left a comment… it didn’t appear. Am I getting put in the SPAM again?
[.. sounds of cheering from Cerise...]
No, no, no. Silly man.
Ran across this scathing rebuke of Dawkins in the London Review of Books:
Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
Aly, are you saying that if Jesus’ bones were found and verified to be his, that Christianity would not totter and fall?
Or is the author of the review saying that?
Or am I misreading?
Saying that faith is not reducible to factual knowledge is quite different than saying the facts have no real impact on the faith….
Maybe I’m misunderstanding.