The God Delusion: David Quinn & Richard Dawkins debate (Transcript Here)

Catholic Education Resource Center ^

[Seruzawa]

We'll see what Dawkins thinks when he's on his death bed.

[theFIRMbss]

>"it’s as though almost all of the population or a substantial proportion of the population believed that they had been abducted by aliens in flying saucers. You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion"
>Richard Dawkins was educated at Oxford University and has taught zoology at the universities of California and Oxford. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University

[theFIRMbss]

The Crusade Against Religion -- By Gary Wolf 02:00 AM Oct, 23, 2006, WIRED.COM

[bcsco]

We'll see what Dawkins thinks when he's on his death bed.

Actually, it'll be right after that. Things will be sorted out in the end. Much to his displeasure, I'm afraid.

[tdewey10]

Memo to Dawkins:

1. The Universe is a Box. Science can tell us a lot about what's in the box, and even what the box is made of. Science can not look outside the Universe to see where the box came from.

2. Re-read Arthur Allen Leff. You can attemp to dervie a morality not based on God, but such attempts will fail.

[Wings-n-Wind]

Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God in many parables....
Some people "got it"...
Some didn't "get it" until later...

Some WOULDN'T believe even though someone was raised from the dead! (Lazarus! -- Jairus' daughter -- son of the widow of Nain)

Every word is established in themouth of two or three witnesses!

[vimto]

Thanks for that post - a good read.

[kindred]

Romans1:
18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21. Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

[D-fendr]

thanks for posting this...

[Boiler Plate]

C.S. Lewis used to believe the same nonsense as Dawkins.

[ikka]

Charles Simonyi

Was one of the early, big programmers at Microsoft, probably worth close to a billion or more at this point. He is the inventor of "Hungarian notation" in programming.

[theFIRMbss]

>Charles Simonyi ... Was one of the early, big programmers at Microsoft, probably worth close to a billion or more at this point

Yep. And now he is
giving big bucks to Russia
to fly into space . . .

[RoadTest]

To think that God must have some origin is the thought of a small mind from inside a small box.

[Question_Assumptions]

Re-read Arthur Allen Leff. You can attemp to dervie a morality not based on God, but such attempts will fail.

It actually might be worse than that. See this essay. And while this article credits evolution for human moral hardcoding, it points out that there is more to morality than cold rational logic.

[SirLinksalot]

Here is a review of Dawkin's latest book by Dinesh D' Souza

SEE HERE: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/22/INGA9LRRPN1.DTL

---

God knows why faith is thriving
- Dinesh D'Souza
Sunday, October 22, 2006

A group of leading atheists is puzzled by the continued existence and vitality of religion.

As biologist Richard Dawkins puts it in his new book "The God Delusion," faith is a form of irrationality, what he terms a "virus of the mind." Philosopher Daniel Dennett compares belief in God to belief in the Easter Bunny. Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" and now "Letter to a Christian Nation," professes amazement that hundreds of millions of people worldwide profess religious beliefs when there is no rational evidence for any of those beliefs. Biologist E.O. Wilson says there must be some evolutionary explanation for the universality and pervasiveness of religious belief.

Actually, there is. The Rev. Ron Carlson, a popular author and lecturer, sometimes presents his audience with two stories and asks them whether it matters which one is true.

In the secular account, "You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach 3 1/2 billion years ago. You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You came from nothing and are going nowhere."

In the Christian view, by contrast, "You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with him."

Now imagine two groups of people -- let's call them the Secular Tribe and the Religious Tribe -- who subscribe to one of these two views. Which of the two is more likely to survive, prosper and multiply? The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.

Should evolutionists like Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Wilson be surprised, then, to see that religious tribes are flourishing around the world? Across the globe, religious faith is thriving and religious people are having more children. By contrast, atheist conventions only draw a handful of embittered souls, and the atheist lifestyle seems to produce listless tribes that cannot even reproduce themselves.

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and there abortions outnumber live births 2 to 1. Russia's birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. And then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Lacking the strong Christian identity that produced its greatness, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. We have met Nietzsche's "last man" and his name is Sven.

Traditionally, scholars have tried to give an economic explanation for these trends. The general idea is that population was a function of affluence. Sociologists noted that as people and countries became richer, they had fewer children. Presumably, primitive societies needed children to help in the fields, and more-prosperous societies no longer did. From this perspective, religion was explained as a phenomenon of poverty, insecurity and fear, and many pundits predicted that with the spread of modernity and prosperity, religion would fade away.

The economic explanation is now being questioned. It was never all that plausible anyway. Undoubtedly, poor people are more economically dependent on their children, but on the other hand, rich people can afford more children. Wealthy people in America today tend to have one child or none, but wealthy families in the past tended to have three or more children. The real difference is not merely in the level of income. The real difference is that in the past, children were valued as gifts from God, and now they are viewed by many people as instruments of self-gratification. The old principle was, "Be fruitful and multiply." The new one is, "Have as many children as enhance your lifestyle."

The prophets of the disappearance of religion seem to have proven themselves to be false prophets. Even though the world is becoming richer, religion seems to be getting stronger. The United States is the richest and most technologically advanced society in the world, and religion shows no signs of disappearing on these shores. China and India are growing in affluence, and the Chinese government is not exactly hospitable to religion, yet religious belief and practice continue to be strong in both countries. Europe's best chance to grow in the future seems to be to import more religious Muslims. While Islam spreads in Europe and elsewhere, Christianity is spreading even faster in Africa, Asia and South America. Remarkably, Christianity will soon become a non-Western religion with a minority presence among Europeans.

My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

Dinesh D'Souza's new book "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11" will be published in January by Doubleday. He is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution

[SirLinksalot]

See Richard Dawkin's explanation of HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY in light of Darwinian Evolution here :

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1723345/posts

[SirLinksalot]

Yep. And now he is giving big bucks to Russia

Speaking of Russia, read this :

A Sterile Worldview

Vanishing Russia

By Chuck Colson

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, Russia “has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.” We’re talking about the population of San Francisco or Baltimore—a grim reminder of how fruitless some worldviews can be.

If demographic trends hold steady, Russia’s population, which stands at 142 million today, will drop to 52 million by 2080. At that point, according to Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the upper house of the Dumas, the Russian parliament, “there will no longer be a great Russia . . . it will be torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist.”

Mironov isn’t alone in his fears. Russia’s demographic crisis raises “serious questions about whether Russia will be able to hold on to its lands along the border with China or field an army, let alone a workforce to support the ill and the elderly.”

Even more disturbing than the numbers are the reasons behind them: that is, “one of the world’s fastest-growing AIDS epidemics . . . alcohol and drug abuse . . . [and] suicide” are among the leading causes of Russia’s shrinking population.

What’s more, last year there were 100,000 more abortions than births in Russia. And many women who want children can’t have them: “[A]n estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health.”

As Scripps-Howard columnist Terry Mattingly puts it, “we have suicide, AIDS, substance abuse, rampant abortion, and a loss of hope in the future . . . in a nation that, in the past century, saw the rise of an atheistic regime that tried to stamp out the practice of faith . . . Do you think there might be a religion element in here somewhere?”

Well, not according to the Los Angeles Times or the Russian government. The Times’s story did not mention the role of religion—or, in this case, its absence—in its analysis of Russia’s plight. And the Russian government is trying to avert catastrophe by using the same techniques that have failed in the rest of the world: that is, bribing people to have children.

They will fail in Russia, as well, because they don’t address the real problem: The real problem is a loss of faith. Life has always been tough in Russia, and Russians are famously fatalistic. But, as writers such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn told us, Christianity helped Russians to see their suffering as redemptive and not to lose hope.

Seventy-four years of official atheism robbed the Russian people of this source of hope. This, more than a ruined economy and environmental degradation, is what has put Russia on the road to extinction. It’s a tragic reminder that ideas, and the worldviews and attitudes they engender, have very real consequences.

It’s also a cautionary tale, for what happened to Russia is, in many ways, just an exaggerated and accelerated version of the secularism and materialism overtaking much of Europe. There, as in Russia, secularism is proving to be literally sterile. And maybe it is a lesson we had better learn here as courts and cultural elite continue to marginalize the Christian faith in America.

Chuck Colson is the Chairman and Founder of BreakPoint and of Prison Fellowship Ministries

[kindred]

[Dawkins: You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion.

Romans 1:
22. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23. And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
24. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25. Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
26. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
28. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;




Romans1:
29. Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
30. Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
31. Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
32. Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Dawkins faces difficult questions by creating straw men and then destroying them.

This exchange was enlightening.

A true debate would be Dawkins and Norm Geisler.