Monday, January 14, 2008

Groothuis Reviews Dawkins

Dr. Doug G with a good review of Richard Dawkins', "The God Delusion". In reference to Dawkins' understanding of the Bible, Groothuis writes:

The tone does not change when Dawkins addresses the Bible. On his view, the Bible can be little more than a collec­tion of pious fictions, since its principle character God does not exist. Dawkins's approach is that any biblical text with a historical problem must be a palpable falsehood. Any miracle story, moreover, is false, since there is no God to perform such feats. In other words, the Bible is guilty until proven innocent; but it is never proven innocent, since God does not exist. This is a neat and convenient system of dismissal, but one lacking in academic integrity.

A good study Bible and sources by con­servative biblical scholars can easily answer most of Dawkins's overheated objections." For example, he dismisses the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' early life because they differ in various ways, such as in their genealogies. Rather than realizing that they were written by different authors with different audiences to emphasize different aspects, he infers that they are contradictory and are the result of theological agendas that invented pious fictions. Christian thinkers have noted these kinds of issues for centuries, and the plausible solutions they discovered are readily available, if one is concerned to study the issue carefully."

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