Regis Nicoll Christian Blog and Commentary

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The Faith of Richard Dawkins

In last week's debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins, the world's most vocal atheist revealed a belief system based more on faith than on scientific evidence. Consider the following statements of Dawkins from the debate. (Notations are to the audio files B and C and time from their start. (See http://richarddawkins.net/article,1707,n,n)

B (2 min)
Life is explained by Darwin. Cosmology is waiting for its Darwin. (In other words, the discovery of a materialistic origin of the cosmos is not a question of "if" but "when." Such unwavering faith would make a born-again proud.)

B (6 min)
I invoke the Anthropic principle and the multiverse. (The reader will note that the multiverse has neither been observed nor is it theoretically verifiable--a charge, it will be noted, regularly made against faith in the supernatural. See my BP article "Of Blackholes and Multiverses.")

B (28 min)
I cannot conceive of a logical path that says because I am an atheist therefore it is rational for me to kill or murder or be cruel. (Actually, I cannot conceive of any moral restraint for an atheist. If an action--be it even killing or murder-- will give its perpetrator an added edge in his cosmic battle for survival, what should inhibit him?)

B (30 min)
The terrible things that Stalin did did not follow from his atheism. You will not do terrible deeds because you are an atheist--not for rational reasons. (To the contrary, the atrocities of 20th communism and Naxism were committed because of the rational belief of leaders who were convinced that the strong should rule the weak, employing "re-education" or extermination as necessary for social progress and the good of the State.)

B (34 min)
If you base your morals on the Christian Bible, your morals are likely to be hideous. (As hard as I try, I cannot imagine that if someone took the Sermon on the Mount, or even the minimal principles of the Decalogue seriously, his morals "are likely to be hideous.")

B (35 min)
How do I know what is moral? I don't on the whole. (Then how does one conclude that Christian morality is hideous?)

B (36 min)
Everyone knows by common sense that "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is moral. (Did he say "common sense?" While the Golden Rule is certainly moral, it is not common sensical in a world created by matter and motion. Anyway, didn't Dawkins just say that he didn't know what was moral?)

B (37 min)
There is something "in the air" about what it means to be moral and it clearly has nothing to do with religion because it doesn't come from scripture. (And we know that how?)

C (1 min)
We understand that we are here as a result of a truly hideous process. (I repeat: we know that how?)

Natural Selection is an ugly process that has beautiful consequences. (...except for those who were victims of natural rejection in the onward march to progress.)

...What do you think of Dawkins' fatih. Tell us here.