Some Transparent Honesty from Richard Dawkins!

STR.org:

A reaction of “Tell us what you really think, Dr. Dawkins” in response to his famous quote about the character of God (see below) turns out to not be as rhetorical as one might think. Dawkins clarified his position a bit on a recent episode of the Unbelievable? podcast in the midst of his conversation with a rabbi and a Christian:

JUSTIN BRIERLEY (host): “The God of the Old Testament,” you said, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”…. Do you still stand by that description of the God of the Old Testament? 

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes, I do…. 

RABBI JOSH LEVY: There is also a deeply, deeply ethical God, who 3,000 years ago is saying to the Israelites, “You have to care about the vulnerable in your society. You have to do your business honestly. You have to look after your workers. You have to care about the immigrant who comes into your society.” So to only describe the God of the Old Testament in that way, I think, is actually just simplistic and doesn’t help us to really engage with the Old Testament as a whole. 

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yeah, I accept that, of course. It was a passage that was semi-tongue-in-cheek actually, because, well, when I do public readings of my books, I do it with my wife, and we usually try to get a laugh from the audience early on in our performance because it sort of lightens up the atmosphere. And that passage, we always used when doing The God Delusion readings right at the beginning, because it does get the audience roaring with laughter…. So it was a sort of humorous passage, and I do accept that if you look through either the Old Testament or the New Testament, you can certainly find passages of wisdom, passages that one would ethically approve of tucked in amongst the others that one wouldn’t ethically approve of…. 

CHRIS SINKINSON: The problem, though, I think…is that, Richard, you are very good with rhetoric. You have a very powerful mastery of the English language, and that rhetoric can be very bullying sometimes. And…in terms of the passage, it’s clearly a very slanted view of how to read the text of the Old Testament. Most of us would take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages. We would be talking about Leviticus 19—“love your neighbor as yourself”—before we’re looking at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So, we would have an approach to Scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the God who I believe in, or the God who I worship. So the rhetoric, I think, can generate a lot more heat than it does light. 

RICHARD DAWKINS: That’s probably fair, yes.

Deconstructing Dawkins

Francis Beckwith:

Soon after Benedict announced his abdication, the eminent science writer and Oxford professor, Richard Dawkins, sent out this tweet: “I feel sorry for the Pope and all old Catholic priests. Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.”

If you know anything about Dawkins, you know that he is the quintessential scientific rationalist, denying that anything that cannot be captured and quantified under the categories of the hard sciences, or traceable to them, is outside the purview of reason – and that anything outside that purview is de facto irrational. For this reason, Dawkins, as the pope would put it, has an aversion to asking questions that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationalism.

So let us explore the reason that dare not speak its name. Dawkins, as is well known, maintains that reason – understood as equivalent to scientific rationalism, which has established the truth of evolutionary theory – requires that we deny that nature is designed, and thus is not infused with intrinsic purposes or proper ends by which we can issue moral judgments.

Setting aside his ungrounded belief that evolution per se is inconsistent with intrinsic purposes and proper ends in nature, it should be clear that Dawkins’ scientific rationalism means that his anti-papal tweet cannot be a deliverance of reason.

After all, for one to claim that a life of priestly celibacy devoted to Christ and his Church is a wasted life requires that one know what a fulfilled life would look like. But such a life is an ideal, and thus is not like an empirical claim about the natural world. It is not an object of scientific inquiry. One cannot point to it, as one would point toward Pope Benedict or Richard Dawkins, though the intellect can be aware of this abstract truth when assessing Benedict and Dawkins by it.

Just as we know that a blind person ought to have sight because we know what a human being is by nature and how his parts and properties are ordered toward certain ends that work in concert for the good of the whole, we also know what excellence and virtue are before and after we see them actualized in our fellows.

But given his diminished understanding of reason, Dawkins must deny that even he can issue such judgments by means of his rational powers. Consequently, on Dawkins’ own account of reason, his verdict on the pope’s life is the cerebral equivalent of covert flatulence gone terribly wrong: not silent and not deadly.

Is This Really a Debate About Bible vs. Science?

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Alan Schlemon interacts with this graphic above in a helpful way.  

Leithart on the enduring bedrock of Plantinga

No new news here, but a great short piece on the work completed (and under construction) by theistic philosophers in secular halls. There is much to thank God for in these men and women, willing to risk reputation for Kingdom opportunities among the areopagites:

http://www.leithart.com/2010/05/28/what-hath-plantinga-wrought/