Monday, November 20, 2006

Dawkins again

From James M. Kushiner at Mere Comments:
I usually manage to find something interesting to read while waiting in doctor's offices, even if I have to resort to something I put into my briefcase that day. This morning, I found something on the doctor's "coffee table" (of course, no coffee in sight). It was the recent issue of Time Magazine about "God versus Science" (He's against science?), and it featured a debate, of sorts, between Francis Collins, a Christian, and Richard Dawkins, an atheist evangelist.

I took notes (no laptop on hand):
Time: Could the answer [to what's behind the Universe] be God?

Dawkins: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

Collins: That's God.

Dawkins: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishing small - at the least the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.
If anyone has read Dawkins' latest best-selling evangelical tract for atheism, The God Delusion, perhaps you could tell me if Dawkins demonstrates why Jesus's claim to be God Incarnate should be rejected as resting on a vanishing small chance of being true.
Dawkins: [later] I don't see the Olympian Gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there's a God, it's going to be a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Dawkins, here, I submit, is really making a theological argument, though I doubt he would admit it. What's worthy of grandeur? [The rest]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. I will gladly approve any comment that responds directly and politely to what has been posted.