Musicians, poets, scientists and atheists

I wrote about Evernote in my last post.  And I'm going to mention it here again: it's a great place to go looking for something to connect up with an idea or phrase that you're using in a post, a phrase such as the following: affordable Behringer mixers at Musician's Friend.

To many readers that will read a bit like a statement in a foreign language, or a dense poem. By the way, talking of poems, I'm reading an anthology called Poems of Devotion at the moment.  It's edited by the poet, Luke Hankins, who's served as Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review since 2006.  It's a collection of wonderful poems by modern poets, some more accessible than others, but all worth reading.  The focus in the book is on devotion to God, but there are some poems that have snuck under the radar a little too. 

But that's a side path. Back to the original phrase.  I did a search on a couple of the words in it: Behringer produced no results, mixers only a couple of not very interesting ones. Musicians - without the apostrophe - produced plenty, and the first was one from a book I read recently called God's Undertaker, by the scientist, John Lennox.  It's a book in which he tries to bring some sanity to the science/atheist vs Christian/creationist debate.  The following quote has only a small amount to do with musicians, but it's worth reading all the same.

"...the fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same thing as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. For example, the assertions by [Peter] Atkins and Dawkins, with which we began, fall into that category. They are not statements of science but rather expressions of personal belief, indeed, of faith – fundamentally no different from (though noticeably less tolerant than) much expression of the kind of faith Dawkins expressly wishes to eradicate. Of course, the fact that Dawkins’ and Atkins’ cited pronouncements are statements of faith does not of itself mean that those statements are false; but it does mean that they must not be treated as if they were authoritative science. What needs to be investigated is the category into which they fit, and, most important of all, whether or not they are true."

This kind of straightforward thinking does wonder for the brain, especially if it's been assailed by Dawkins-type thinking. 

William James on sciences

The following is a quote I recorded some years ago, from Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals- chapter one, by William James.

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made such mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently, yet neither will transgress the lines.

Pity some of the supposed scientists, like our old friend, Richard Dawkins, didn't pay attention to what James has to say here.

Ditchkins

In his brilliantly argued critique of the new atheism, Terry Eagleton ridicules those who treat religion as a purely explanatory entity. 'Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks of the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.' Believing that religion is a 'botched attempt to explain the world' [quoting either Dawkins or Hitchens - or, Ditchkins, as he melds them] is on the same intellectual level as 'seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.'

Quoted in the introduction to Mere Theology, by Alister McGrath, pg ix - original source is Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution: reflections on the God Debate, published 2009.

Speaking of Science

Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett is a collection of 13 interviews with distinguished scientists and writers on science, each with a thoughtful introduction from Tippett. Here, again, her interviewees are people with deep knowledge and unique perspectives on science and religion; among them are distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, Darwin biographer James Moore, and psychologist Michael McCullough, who studies revenge and forgiveness. The premise behind each conversation is that science and religion are not in conflict, and that believing they are has led us all astray. As Hindu scholar and physicist V. V. Raman tells Tippett, though we talk about a “cognitive dissonance” between religion and science, many of us live with an “experiential consonance.” It almost goes without saying, as Tippett puts it in one podcast, “we are not going to talk about Richard Dawkins.”

The paragraph above comes from an essay on the Killing the Buddha site and was written by Brook Wilensky-Lanford. It's an interesting piece, though she does seem to have a bit of a fixation on the political aspect of religion/science, and in particular is concerned to push the Intelligent Design movement into a thoroughly political position.

Well meaning, but....

I don't know what Richard Dawkins will make of this, but one of the leading scientists and atheists in the UK has come out saying that perhaps religion - God, even - will save us from ourselves in the coming catastrophe of Global Warming, or Climate Change, or whatever we should increase our home insurance on this week.

Lord May, who was brought up a Scottish Presbyterian but went through an "inverse epiphany" at the age of 11, (which strikes me as fairly mature for an eleven-year-old) says, “A supernatural punisher maybe part of the solution.”

Plainly Lord May hasn't discovered that God is Love, rather than being some nasty big daddy in the sky who beats people up when they don't behave. (Yes, he does have a bit of that too, but it isn't his major characteristic.)

A typical evolutionist, he adds that in the past a belief in a god, or gods, that punish the unrighteous may have been part of the mechanism of evolution that maintains co-operation in a dog-eat-dog world. Evolutionists can't ever say anything without bringing evolution in as some kind of pseudo-explanation, however absurd and unfounded the argument might be. (When you think about it, isn't the usual idea that evolution is survival of the fittest? Where would co-operation come into that?)

He goes on, "Given that punishment is a useful mechanism, how much more effective it would be if you invested that power not in an individual you don't like, but an all-seeing, all powerful deity that controls the world." Okay, now let's try and connect this to something ordinary: Does that means that when I put my grandchild to bed I should threaten him with a nasty deity who will thump him if he doesn't go straight to sleep? (In the light of the anti-smacking law we could then say to the judge, when we've been arrested for smacking our children, that God did it. Okay, I'm just joking....)

To listen to the esteemed Lord May a little more: while religion maybe one possible answer, it remained, at the moment, very much part of the problem as it had teetered ever more towards fundamentalism.

So religion is both the solution and the not-solution. Hmmm.

In less troubled times religions had become softer and less dogmatic, and embraced a more humane set of values, he said.

Um, Lord May doesn't seem to sure about his religious history. In the early days of the church, for instance, at times of often intense persecution, and when Rome had a plague (both fairly troublesome times, one would think) Christians were known for being softer than the normal Roman, and far more humane. It was the Romans, after all, who committed infanticide with great frequency, and the Christians who stayed with those who were dying and suffering when the Romans fled the cities.

But that pattern was now reversing with the rise of fundamental Islamic and Christian beliefs.

The rise of fundamental Christian beliefs? Umm, Lord May, fundamental Christian beliefs have never gone away, so they've no need to 'rise.' The basic Christian beliefs are the same today as they were in the beginning.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: do atheists actually listen to what they're saying?

Susan Blackmore

The application of natural selection to culture has been called 'memetics'. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas - or 'memes' - naturally vary and that (generally) the 'fittest' ideas survive and are replicated across generations.

Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

But like a good deal of Dawkins' thinking, 'memes' is not actually science, but philosophy. Dawkins likes to promote evolution as the total answer to everything, and in the process has come up with this piece of philosophical nonsense that, while it might explain something we already know (ideas catch on), isn't actually science in any sense.

Regrettably, he has a number of disciples who plainly believe that 'memes' actually mean something. Susan Blackmore appears to be a prime example.

In the 31st July edition of New Scientist, (that most evolutionary-minded of all magazines) she has written an extraordinary piece in which she proclaims the following 'scientific' thinking:

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

Along with Dawkins, she thinks that genes have a mind of their own, and that memes (which didn't exist until Dawkins dreamt them up) have a similar ability to hop from human to human and do their own thing.

What does the following actually mean? This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

She then goes waffling on about humans being 'lumbering robots' (Dawkins said so, so it must be right) that genes have built to carry them around, propagate them and protect them. Her article is a fanciful piece of stuff that is basically being made up as it goes along. It's pure speculation given some respectability by being published in a well-known magazine, one that often does have some real science in it.

The third replicator, of course, is technology, specifically the Internet, where apparently, according to Bradshaw, "We should also expect design to appear spontaneously, and it does. Much of the content on the web is now designed automatically by machines rather than people."

Oh, dear.

Richard Dawkins is dead

If ever a headline was going to catch my attention - particularly in view of my past posts about Richard Dawkins - it was one that proclaimed: Richard Dawkins is Dead.
For a moment, until I began to read the post, I thought the grand old man of insane thinking had actually shuffled off this mortal coil. For better or worse, this is a joke, and, as far as we know, he still exists in a state which may be equated with a normal human life-form.
The post begins thus: After years of research by people who call themselves science lovers it was finally discovered that Richard Dawkins is dead. Richard (Latin for Dick) Dawkins (Latin for Dork King ie: king of the dorks) was found to have died at his irony board having exploded his mind trying to convince the himself that his genes still fit. Actually they stopped fitting long ago and ran off with some floozy because they were so selfish.
It probably has to be regarded as fairly low-level satire, (the sub-heading is: Dawkings Butt Kissers unite in prayer) but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Heresy, Jim, but not as we know it

A couple of posts back I noted that the cover of the latest New Scientist magazine states: Darwin was wrong.
Basically what the article in question was saying is that Darwin was wrong about a particular facet of his evolutionary theory. What I didn’t notice until today was that in the editorial the magazine basically ‘covers its back’ regarding the provocative cover headline (excuse the pun). They say:
We await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. [The first was Darwin’s original theory, the second the introduction of Mendelian genetics.]
The editorial goes on: None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that ‘New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong.’ Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not. Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.
As my wife always says, the best method of defence is attack,. Seems to me that the person who wrote the editorial is getting in first, before those he/she regards as naysayers come out of the woodwork. But the interesting thing is that it’s the magazine that’s being provocative by putting such a statement on its cover. It knows it will get anti-Darwinists to read the mag to see what’s going on.
Seems to me there's an element of dishonesty here: one hand waving the marketing gimmick while the other tries to show the integrity card. Scientists like to proclaim that they're above all sorts of human foibles in their thinking; regrettably they're just as prone to them as the rest of us.

Incidentally, quite by chance I came across a book hilariously titled: Darwin's Winky. The blurb reads:
Author Joseph Druski leaves no stone unturned in his bid to overturn Evolution. From Darwin's "Finches" to Richard Dawkins' underwear, Druski leaves a trail of devastated icons of evolution in his wake in this 402 page exposé on the dirty underbelly of the Theory of Evolution.
I doubt if it's truly the scientific masterpiece the site proclaims, but it would be fun to read all the same!
The site in question, craptaculus.com, is fairly oddball: it proclaims intelligent design, but doesn't particularly seem to defend it. And very strangely, it looks as if someone has substituted a photo of Richard Dawkins for that of someone called Sam McCain. Perhaps the whole site is a joke!

So much for 'Bright'

In the March 2008 Investigate magazine, Ian Wishart reviews a book called, The Irrational Atheist, by Vox Day, a Mensa member and columnist for WorldNetDaily (not a site I'm familiar with, and one that seems to have its fair share of ranters).

Anyway, Vox Day (a bloke, for those who didn't guess) has written a searing indictment of the New Atheists, particularly Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris. Perhaps the most interesting comment quoted in the review is this:

There is even evidence to suggest that in some cases...atheism may be little more than a mental disorder taking the form of a literal autism. On one of the more popular atheist internet sites, the average self-reported result on an Asperger Quotient test was 27.9. The threshold for this syndrome, described as 'autistic psychopathy' by its discoverer, Dr Hans Asperger, is 32, whereas the average normal individual scores 16.5.

Wishart comments that: Sam Harris doesn't make it out of the book alive, Dawkins is touch and go and Hitchens is left reeling by the end.

And in case you think Wishart is a bit of a ranter himself (as he can be), check out the New Oxford Review on the book: ...columnist Vox Day uses logic and facts (not theology) to refute the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
and
Perhaps the most engaging chapters in this book are those about war. The high-church atheists assert that religion causes war, but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars, of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to the deaths of 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Day examines 1,763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can reasonably be attributed to religion -- 6.92 percent of those recorded. Since half of these religious wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world's religions are responsible for only 3.35 percent of all wars. "The historical evidence is conclusive," Day concludes. "Religion is not a primary cause of war."

There's a good deal more, but it's better to read the lengthy review for yourself. It's by
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

Is Dawkins sliding down the pit to self-destruction?

Some quotes from an article by Melanie Phillips, in The Spectator, 23rd Oct, 2008. The article concerns a second debate between Dawkins and John Lennox, author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

At the very beginning [of the debate, Dawkins] made a most startling admission. He said: A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.

Read the rest of the article, in which Dawkins digs himself deeper and deeper into a confused mire, and seems more inclined to believe in some alien force creating life than God. As the King of Siam says, 'Tis a puzzlement.

Godless Shakespeare?

If Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens set out to write a book on Shakespeare, it would be [Eric] Mallin's Godless Shakespeare. Mallin isn't just an atheist. He is an aggressive, militant atheist. He's an angry atheist. Mallin offers readings of selected plays, organized, clumsily, by the tripartite structure of Dante's Comedy, and occasionally intersperses his interpretations with cynical reflections on contemporary Christianity. Everywhere, Shakespeare gives us godlessness—a godless hell of religious hypocrites (strange, that: doesn't Jesus consign hypocrites to hell?), a godless purgatory of failed Messiahs, a godless heaven promising pleasure and sex. But who needs evidence from the plays? Mallin knows before he begins that believers are animated by "aggressive certainty," that orthodoxy is small and mean and religion an inflexible system posing senseless riddles as if they were divine profundities. Religion is rigid; Shakespeare is flexible. Religion is certain; Shakespeare richly doubts. Religion justifies immorality by invoking God; Shakespeare is rigorously moral in a Kantian sort of way. Religion gives answers; Shakespeare poses questions. Religion is small; Shakespeare expansive. We know before we crack the First Folio that he was at best a religious skeptic. QED—that is, "Quite Easily Done."

Mallin accomplishes less than his title promises. Godless Shakespeare reveals not Godless Shakespeare but Godless Mallin. The back cover copy has it right: The book doesn't prove Shakespeare an atheist, though Mallin's may be the "first book to discuss Shakespeare's plays from an atheist perspective." That Augustine's mood is as interrogative as Shakespeare, that Christianity has impressive resources for self-criticism, that his own atheism is as stiff a collar as any orthodoxy—all this is lost on Mallin.

from Bardus Absconditus
Shakespeare is the Rorschach test of English literature.
by Peter J. Leithart

God and the New Atheism

After reading Antony Flew’s There is a God, a few weeks ago, I found John Haught’s book, God and the New Atheism, a bit of a fizzer. He has some good things to say in his arguments against Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but he’s repetitious in his writing, and the book looks as though it’s been produced in rather a hurry, in order to cash in on the current interest in the Christian/Atheist debates. Maybe I just don’t like Haught’s style, and that’s put me off. However, I finished reading it this morning, so whatever he has to say, I’ve now read (!)
Flew’s book was inspiring, by contrast. Here’s a man who has the integrity to say he was wrong about the way he thought previously. This seems to me to be the mark of a true philosopher: as Flew says, he follows arguments to their logical conclusion, even if it means given up long-held beliefs.
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris remind me more of fundamentalists in various religions: people who are so set on a few basic points that they can’t see any other arguments. (The original Christian fundamentalists had far more breadth to their beliefs; unfortunately their name has been adopted for a group who are narrow and backed into corners.) Philosophically they're much more like teenagers in need of acne treatment than people who've grown up and really argued through all the issues. You find plenty of their adherents on the Net: people who have no willingness to listen to anything beyond their own narrow views.

Heresies?

I wrote about the philosopher John Gray a while back without knowing much of him or his work at that point. I’d been reading an article in the NZ Listener in which he was quoted at length relating to his most recent book.
Since Gray keeps turning up on my HitTail search results I thought I’d follow one of them through, and in doing so came across a review on an earlier book by Grey called Heresies: against progress and other illusions. The review is by John Banville and appeared in The Guardian back in Sept, 2004.
Banville quotes Gray several times as well. Here are some examples:
"The danger of American foreign policy is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished."
He says that the direct heirs of the Enlightenment are "missionaries of a new gospel more fantastical than anything in the creed they imagined they had abandoned." (Banville comments: One of the heresies promulgated by Gray is that many of those who today continue to hold to religious faith are far more profound in their thinking, and certainly better educated, than most of their liberal-humanist opponents. )
And something that would no doubt irk dear old Richard Dawkins: "in intellectual terms atheism is a Victorian fossil."

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Professor Antony Flew, who became a believer in a Creator last year, presented his forthright views on Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, in a recent article. His article, (click here), shows his key reasons for his belief in a Divine Intelligence.
He also makes it clear in his book, There is a God (page 213), that it's possible for an omnipotent being to choose to reveal himself to human beings, or to act in the world in other ways.
Professor Flew’s article is testimony to the developing thinking of someone who is prepared to consider the evidence and follow its implications wherever it leads.

Meanwhile, Dawkins continues to act like a teenager with acne who can't think beyond his new-found discovery that he's growing hair in funny places.

Footnote: There's a wide-ranging discussion relating to the argument between atheists and believers here; Flew's gradual changes of view are laid out clearly in the middle of the article.

Richard Dawkins in a swimsuit

I've been coming across a bunch of references to Richard Dawkins on the Net lately, including several videos on You Tube. In some of them he makes an ass of himself; in others he certainly shows his intelligence, but still seems to miss the point of much of what other people are trying to say. In one he makes a surprisingly crude joke, which has some bloke standing off to the side of the conference table rocking with laughter. This bloke seems to be wandering around in a rather ad hoc manner, so don't ask me what he's actually doing there.
In another video he's apparently stumped by a question asked by a girl off-screen. Seems that it may be a hoax, but it certainly makes Dawkins behave really oddly!
In fact, there are so many Dawkins videos around just now, that you rather wonder if he isn't the man of the hour; some are from tv interviews, some from discussion panels, one from a documentary in which he interviews a very aggressive white Muslim and is then puzzled by the bloke's reaction (!), one is a very odd thing that ends up with Dawkins blowing himself and the lecture room up after 'proving' that he won't. I don't quite get the point of this, as it seems to shoot itself in the foot somehow!
All we need now is Dawkins in a swimsuit, I guess, and we'll just about have run the gamut.

He's such a nice man; yes, he really is - he really, really is! Just look at that smile....

John Gray - philosopher

I’ve just been reading an article in the NZ Listener from a couple of weeks ago about the philosopher, John Gray. I’m going to quote a few paragraphs and comment on them.

[John] Gray thinks we’re doomed. His latest book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, argues that creeds that presume humankind can remake society are holdovers of Christian apocalyptic thinking – the illusion that a harmonious world will follow from an event of mass destruction that eliminates conflict. With the Enlightenment, the yearning to see human history as progressing towards a goal became secular rather than religious.

Gray isn’t anti-religion as a later quote will show. However, I think he’s mistaken in believing that Christians ever thought the world as it is would become harmonious. It will take God himself to recreate the world to bring about harmony.

Gray professes that secular ideologies – from Marxism and Nazism to extreme forms of liberalism and conservatism – contain this repressed religious inheritance. By believing that paradise on Earth can be created by force, the utopian mind justifies mass bloodshed.

Christian religion never believed that the a paradise on Earth could be created by force.

History doesn’t necessarily bear out Gray’s belief that utopianism is inevitably destructive. He argues that campaigns are not utopian if they potentially can be realised. But many historical strides, like abolishing slavery, would at one time have seemed as implausible as democratising Iraq.

Was the abolishing of slavery a Utopian idea? I think the writer of the article - Ben Naparstek - is mistaken in saying this.

The idea of using mass terror to refashion the world was absent in the medieval period, Gray says, and emerged only with the French Revolution. He sees al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, nazism and neoconservatism.
It’s interesting to see someone actually putting the blame for some of the worst atrocities of the last few centuries where it belongs; on the so-called Enlightenment.

He conjectures that the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular utopianism. “Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along those lines.

And one final (long) quote:

Gray says his harshest detractors are “evangelical humanists”, hostile to his beliefs that secular movements renew Christian patterns of thought and that 20th-century tyrannies were by-products of Enlightenment ideology. “They’ve said things like, ‘Well, the Enlightenment can’t have any role in these episodes because the Enlightenment is pluralistic and tolerant’, which reminds me of those gormless Christians who say, ‘Christianity couldn’t have any role in the Inquisition because it’s a religion of love.’”

The role of atheism in Maoist and Stalinist totalitarianism is rarely acknowledged, says Gray. “Mao launched his attack on Tibet with the slogan ‘religion is poison’.”

Though not a believer, Gray excoriates the recent fad for books attacking religion by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michel Onfray. “The difference between religious believers and secular rationalists is that religious believers are used to questioning their myths, whereas secular rationalists think their myths are literally true. I advocate an attitude of scepticism and critical distance from all these powerful belief systems.”

This seems to me to be the wisest thing said about Hitchens, Dawkins and the like in quite some time.

Simon Barnes....again

For the past six weeks or so I've been reading Simon Barnes' book, How to be Wild. The following quote comes from section 63.

Science cannot replace religion, still less. God. That is not the job of science, despite all the fuss made by Dawkins, the proselytising atheist. But science can at least address the God Questions; and give us a deeper and more vivid understanding of life. And as I read about life, and as I walk along my own entagnled bank, I can feel very deeply that there is grandeur in the deep, puzzling, buzzling, complex nature of life that these great books have shown me.

The reason I'm taking so long to read the book is that it's very much one that you pick up in an odd moment and put down again after a couple of its short chapters, unlike The Prestige, which I devoured in a few days. (More on that book in a later post.) So I've just got Barnes' book out of the library for the third time, and hopefully will finish it on this round.

And speaking of Dawkins, I came across this quote about him and other atheistic popularizers in a blog I read most days, The Website of Unknowing. Carl McColman's referring to a book by Becky Garrison, called: The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith.

He writes:
Basically mimicking the fetish for intolerance that has come to characterize religious conservatives in our day, the new atheists have made it fashionable to dismiss religion as not only “untrue,” but unworthy of even the right to exist.

Dealing with Dawkins

Logan Paul Gage, policy analyst, Discovery Institute writes in Books and Culture, in an article entitled Deconstructing Dawkins (relating to Alister McGrath's book, The Dawkins' Delusion, which in turn challenges Dawkin's The God Delusion.)

To see why Darwinism and theism are incompatible, consider random mutations and natural selection—the two elements of modern Darwinian theory. Random mutations are, well, random. By definition, random mutations are unguided. "Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication," according to University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. "The chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful." If a mutation is harmful, the organism with the mutation will leave fewer offspring; but if the mutation is beneficial for reproduction, the mutated gene will be passed to many offspring. This is the "natural" selection part. Theistic Darwinists claim that this process creates life's diversity and is also "used" by God.

While theists can have a variety of legitimate views on life's evolution, surely they must maintain that the process involves intelligence. So the question is: Can an intelligent being use random mutations and natural selection to create? No. This is not a theological problem; it is a logical one. The words random and natural are meant to exclude intelligence. If God guides which mutations happen, the mutations are not random; if God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life's evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural.

Theistic Darwinists maintain that God was "intimately involved" in creation, to use Francis Collins's words. But they also think life developed via genuinely random mutations and genuinely natural selection. Yet they never explain what God is doing in this process. Perhaps there is still room for him to start the whole thing off, but this abandons theism for deism.

Platinga on Dawkins

The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown twins of current academic atheism.
Dawkins has written his book, he says, partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith—at any rate its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.
The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a "delusion." The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.

This comes from an article by Alvin Plantinga, published in Books and Culture, March/April 2007. You can find Plantinga's homepage here.

Musicians, singers, athlete's fingers, et al

The Hittails reports continue to intrigue me, and are actually interesting in terms of what they dredge up. Here’s the most recent list.
How to find trade me members
Boat for workers
Anna Leese Maggie Teyte
Sings Harry Douglas Lilburn
Giles Hatterley Dawkins
Athletes hand athletes foot
Gareth Farr blog
The finding of Trade Me members is an interesting one. Certainly not a ‘key word’ phrase I’d have thought of. Euqally, the mysterious ‘boat for workers’ while it follows on my portmanteau comments, is odd. I’m not sure of the intentions of a person looking for a boat for workers. Some suspect character wanting to find a cheap boat to ship some refugees?
Anna Leese and the Maggie Teyte prize were only written about in the last few days, so I caught that one pretty quick!
My not-so-favourite composer Douglas Lilburn gets a look in, this time via Sings Harry, a song cycle I played with a friend of mine, Brent Read, a few years back. It has a rather skimpy accompaniment, I feel, perhaps because it was written for the guitar originally (if I have my facts right), but it is actually a piece of Lilburn’s I could be said to ‘enjoy’ – just. Brent is the tenor I wrote four songs for which he performed last year at a concert I put on. One of the world’s as yet undiscovered great voices!
I’d forgotten about the Hattersley/Dawkins connection – Mr Dawkins is another one of those people whose contribution to the humanities I don’t have a lot of time for, but here is, turning up on my doorstep again.
I’m not sure why someone would go looking for ‘athletes hand athletes foot’, but they did, and apparently this blog turned up in the results, in my athlete’s fingers post.
I’ve written about Gareth Farr more than on this blog, and will probably write about him again. There you go, Hittail!