The Free Church of Scotland has challenged Richard Dawkins, the world-famous atheist, to a debate on his next visit to the Outer Hebrides.
Professor Dawkins is headlining Faclan, the Hebridean Book Festival, on the Isle of Lewis where he is scheduled to promote his book the God Delusion on Friday 2 November.
Despite calls of a boycott from a member of the Lord’s Day Observance Society, Stornoway Free Church minister Reverend Iver Martin (pictured below), who is minister of one of the biggest congregations on the island, said he welcomed the visit as an opportunity for debate.
[…]“The Free Church of Scotland endorses freedom of discussion and the exchange of argument.
“However, with Richard Dawkins presenting a particularly one-sided narrative, I would hope that there would be opportunity for fair, even handed, reasoned debate at which both sides of the theistic argument can be heard.”
Would Richard Dawkins, champion of militant fundamentalist atheism, rise to the challenge of debating his views in a public forum?
A Scottish Church leader has labeled evolutionary biologist and famed atheist Richard Dawkins a “snob” over his decision to turn down a debate on religion. Dawkins has refused a debate invitation for the faith-themed Faclan Hebridean Book Festival in Scotland in November.
The Rev David Robertson, a Free Church minister in Dundee, responded to Dawkins’ decision to avoid debate by saying that he does not believe the atheist to be a “coward,” but sees him as a “elitist snob, who once told me he would consider debating with me if I was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope or Chief Rabbi.”
Robertson added: “Dawkins considers, like so many of his fellow new atheists, that there is no debate and they, and they alone, have the truth. Ironically, such arrogance and intolerance of others is the very definition of the fundamentalism that Dawkins professes to hate. I suspect that Richard Dawkins’ problem is that he is not a good debater.”
Yes, that’s it exactly. He cannot bear to hear other viewpoints other than his own. He is not intelligent enough to prove what he asserts in private to a skeptical audience in public. That’s why he doesn’t debate in public. He would prefer to preach in private to those who accept his dogma, and to receive their praise and adulation – and their money!
If Dawkins did agree to have his ideas tested in a debate, it would be a good thing if whoever was doing the testing asked him why he affirms the moral goodness of adultery and infanticide, as well as asking him what he means by his desire to “destroy Christianity“, especially given that he refuses to debate with Christians like William Lane Craig. Does he mean something similar to what his fellow atheists like Stalin and Mao meant, i.e. – mass murder? Or does he mean something else? It would be a good question to ask, anyway.
I don’t want anyone to think that atheism is some sort of immature, non-cognitive tantrum that consists largely of insulting Christians and giggling like children who have discovered a new curse word. There are serious atheistic scholars, and they do debate. Richard Dawkins is not a serious scholar, and he does not debate his views. He is therefore very much like those sweating, foam-flecked televangelists you see bloviating on the telly on Sunday mornings. All bluster, no substance.
I want to raise another question that interests me. Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place?
[…]The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?
In one of the most disgusting stories to hit the British newspapers last year, the wife of a well-known television personality, Chris Tarrant, hired a private detective to spy on him. The detective reported evidence of adultery and Tarrant’s wife divorced him, in unusually vicious style. But what shocked me was the way public opinion sided with Tarrant’s horrible wife. Far from despising, as I do, anybody who would stoop so low as to hire a detective for such a purpose, large numbers of people, including even Mr. Tarrant himself, seemed to think she was fully justified. Far from concluding, as I would, that he was well rid of her, he was covered with contrition and his unfortunate mistress was ejected, covered with odium. The explanation of all these anomalous behavior patterns is the ingrained assumption of the deep rightness and appropriateness of sexual jealousy. It is manifest all the way from Othello to the French “crime passionnel” law, down to the “love rat” language of tabloid newspapers.
[…]Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?
I, for one, feel drawn to the idea that there is something noble and virtuous in rising above nature in this way.
[…]And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom,
In 1984, Dawkins divorced his wife of 17 years, Marian Stamp; later that same year, he married Eve Barham. Dawkins also divorced Barham, though the precise circumstances of this divorce are unclear. He married science fiction actress Lalla Ward in 1992; at present, the two are still married.
I have been advised that the full article featuring Dawkins’ views is far, far worse that what was excerpted by UD.
What does atheist morality amount to, in practice? It amounts to the strong acting selfishly and allowing the weak to suffer for it. That’s why atheists are almost entirely for abortion and sexual permissiveness – the children are the first to be screwed by the moral relativism of the adults. That’s where abortion, no-fault divorce, fatherlessness, etc. come from – they are crimes committed by selfish adults against vulnerable children – because they can. It’s the strong abusing the weak, exactly as Darwinism would have them do. There are no human rights on atheism, and there is no reason for self-sacrificial moral behavior, either. Do what you want, and don’t get caught. Get them, before they can get you. Don’t let anyone diminish your happiness with their moral rules. That’s “atheist morality”.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve caught a glimpse of Dawkins’ atheist perspective on morality, either.
But the centrepiece of this Christmas edition is the main coup for the New Statesman – an interview by Prof. Dawkins with Christopher Hitchens, the great polymath who today lost his fight against cancer. It’s a fascinating read over three double-page spreads. Not least because Prof. Dawkins reveals a charming humility, allowing Hitchens to show his intellectual superiority at his own expense. Hitchens is thoughtful about CS Lewis and Christianity and rather leaves Prof. Dawkins floundering in his wake, occasionally interjecting little assents to show that he’s still there, as he struggles to keep up.
But one of these interjections is most revealing. About half-way through, the Prof gets this in edgeways: ‘Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?’
So, ‘if we win…and destroy Christianity’. True, there’s a ‘so to speak’ in there, but it doesn’t do much. Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it? And Prof Dawkins can hardly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context. He was editing the magazine, after all – there’s even a picture of him doing so, pen poised masterfully over page proofs.
Now you might think that Dawkins intends to destroy Christianity in debates, and not in the wars and purges of atheism that occurred last century in North Korea, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, and so on. Those atheist regimes caused the deaths of 100 million people, according to Harvard University Press. But Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig on more than one occasion. So whatever he means by “destroy Christianity”, he doesn’t mean “defeat them in rational debate, using superior arguments and evidence”. He had his chance to do that, and he passed on it. So, he must mean something else by “destroying Christianity” other than persuasion.
Let’s find out what Richard Dawkins thinks about morality. Dawkins has previously written this:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)
Dawkins’ view is that nothing is really good or bad objectively. Cultures just evolve certain conventions, and those conventions vary arbitrarily by time and place. I think we need to interpret his goal of destroying Christianity against the backdrop of his nihilism. 50 million unborn children have been killed in the United States since 1973 alone. That’s 50 million people with distinct genetic codes different from their mothers or their fathers, who will never grow up to achieve their potential.
Dawkins himself is in favor of infanticide:
So what might destroying Christianity look like to an atheist?
A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday.
The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North.
The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri’s government-issued photo ID and said her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.
That’s what Kim Jong Il means by “destroy Christianity”. What does Dawkins mean by it?
From Uncommon Descent, the abstract of a paper by Alex Rosenberg, warning even materialists not to question Darwinism.
Excerpt:
Abstract
There is only one physically possible process that builds and operates purposive systems in nature: natural selection. What it does is build and operate systems that look to us purposive, goal directed, teleological. There really are not any purposes in nature and no purposive processes ether. It is just one vast network of linked causal chains. Darwinian natural selection is the only process that could produce the appearance of purpose. That is why natural selection must have built and must continually shape the intentional causes of purposive behavior. Fodor’s argument against Darwinian theory involves a biologist’s modus tollens which is a cognitive scientist’s modus ponens. Assuming his argument is valid, the right conclusion is not that Darwin’s theory is mistaken but that Fodor’s and any other non-Darwinian approaches to the mind are wrong. It shows how getting things wrong in the philosophy of biology leads to mistaken conclusions with the potential to damage the acceptance of a theory with harmful consequences for human well-being. Fodor has shown that the real consequence of rejecting a Darwinian approach to the mind is to reject a Darwinian theory of phylogenetic evolution. This forces us to take seriously a notion that otherwise would not have much of a chance: that when it comes to the nature of mental states, indeterminacy rules. This is an insight that should have the most beneficial impact on freeing cognitive neuroscience from demands on the adequacy of its theories that it could never meet.
This might have been written by a Catholic Inquisitor at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. “Don’t demand that our theory be empirically adequate, or you’ll be sorry”. We have only to look at the stories documented in the movie “Expelled” to see how sorry. You can watch it on Youtube here, in full.
the true purpose of Rosenberg’s piece is to warn people not to challenge Darwin or they’ll suffer the same castigation as Darwin-critic (and atheist) Jerry Fodor. Rosenberg writes: “When a philosopher advances a purely a priori argument to show that a well-established scientific theory is fatally defective, it is usually safe to assume that the problem is the philosopher’s and not the theory’s.” Translation: If you question Darwin, expect trouble–and the trouble will come from me and other defenders of Darwinism. Given the logic we see being used to defend Darwinian theory, perhaps the philosopher isn’t the problem after all.
And of course, a major part of Rosenberg’s warning is to claim that Fodor’s arguments against Darwinism lead to “damage with harmful consequences for human well being.” And just what is that damage? Well, as Rosenberg puts it, it is lending support for religion (though he can’t bring himself to put it that nicely).
[ … ]In any case, this tarring and feathering of Fodor is just the latest frustrated attempt by hardline Darwinians to discourage people from using design terminology. It’s a hopeless effort, because try as they might to impose speech codes on each another, they can’t change the fact that nature is infused with purpose, which readily lends itself to, as Rosenberg calls it “teleosemantics.”
And finally, a word from the master of Darwinish debate-avoidance, Richard Dawkins:
“My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life. If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of the Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.” — p. 287, Blind Watchmaker” (1986)
Again, these are the words of a fundamentalist. You better agree with his theory, whether the evidence is for it or not.
Here is Richard Dawkins in a video clip explaining that even if life were designed, then he knows without any evidence that aliens who evolved by Darwinian processes are the ones who did the designing:
How does he know that the aliens evolved without being able to see their fossil record and run experiments on their genetic coding? Because when it comes to Darwinism, no evidence is needed. And if you don’t buy into his little religion, then he’ll “destroy” you. And he doesn’t mean destroy you by debating, because we know that the coward refuses to debate his religion in public.
And what about Darwinist Richard Lewontin: (and by “science” he means “naturalistic science”)
“Our willingness to accept [naturalistic] scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our own a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, not matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin in New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28)
This is what Darwinism really amounts to: a faith commitment. A fundamentalist faith commitment, that allows no dissent. It is absolute.
Darwinism beyond the level of simple micro-evolution has never been observed or tested experimentally. And what’s more – the proponents of Darwinism do not want their theory to be subjected to criticism or testing. It fulfills a religious purpose, and therefore they are very concerned that it not be taken away from them. They are fighting against having to care what God thinks, and they will strangle any good experimental science that shows that their religion is wrong. You can see the same fundamentalism at work in the atheistic war against the experimental science that confirms the Big Bang theory, which describes the origin of the universe out of nothing.
WINTERY KNIGHT 