Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving?
this was originally posted on Thursday, 23rd October 2008
On
Tuesday evening
I attended the
debate between
Richard Dawkins
and John Lennox
at Oxford’s
Natural History
Museum. This was
the second
public encounter
between the two
men, but it
turned out to be
very different
from the first.
Lennox is the
Oxford
mathematics
professor whose
book, God’s
Undertaker: Has
Science Buried
God? is to
my mind an
excoriating
demolition of
Dawkins’s
overreach from
biology into
religion as
expressed in his
book The God
Delusion --
all the more
devastating
because Lennox
attacks him on
the basis of
science itself.
In the first
debate, which
can be seen on
video on this website,
Dawkins was
badly caught
off-balance by
Lennox’s
argument
precisely
because,
possibly for the
first time, he
was being
challenged on
his own chosen
scientific
ground.
This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning 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.
Anthony
Flew, the
celebrated
philosopher and
former high
priest of
atheism,
spectacularly
changed his mind
and concluded --
as set out in
his book There
Is A God -- that
life had indeed
been created by
a governing and
purposeful
intelligence, a
change of mind
that occurred because
he followed
where the
scientific
evidence led
him. The
conversion of
Flew, whose book
contains a
cutting critique
of Dawkins’s
thinking, has
been dismissed
with unbridled
scorn by Dawkins
– who now says
there is a
serious case for
the position
that Flew now
adopts!
Unfortunately,
so stunning was
this declaration
it was not
pursued on
Tuesday evening.
Instead, Dawkins
was able to move
the debate onto
a specific
attack on
Christian belief
in the divinity
of Jesus, which
is a very
different
argument and
obscured the
central point of
contention –
the claim that
science had
buried God. The
fact that
Dawkins now
appears to be so
reluctant
publicly to
defend his own
position on his
own territory of
scientific
rationalism –
and indeed, even
to have shifted
his ground –
is a tribute
above all to the
man he was
debating once
again on Tuesday
evening.
Afterwards, I asked Dawkins whether he had indeed changed his position and become more open to ideas which lay outside the scientific paradigm. He vehemently denied this and expressed horror that he might have given this impression. But he also said other things which suggested to me that some of his own views simply don't meet the criteria of empirical evidence that he insists must govern all our thinking.
For
example, I put
to him that,
since he is
prepared to
believe that the
origin of all
matter was an
entirely
spontaneous
event, he
therefore
believes that
something can be
created out of
nothing -- and
that since such
a belief runs
counter to the
very scientific
principles of
verifiable
evidence which
he tells us
should govern
all our
thinking, this
is itself
precisely the
kind of
irrationality,
or ‘magic’,
which he scorns.
In reply he said
that, although
he agreed this
was a
problematic
position, he did
indeed believe
that the first
particle arose
spontaneously
from nothing,
because the
alternative
explanation –
God -- was more
incredible.
Later, he
amplified this
by saying that
physics was
coming up with
theories to show
how matter could
spontaneously be
created from
nothing. But as
far as I can see
– and as
Anthony Flew
elaborates –
these theories
cannot answer
the crucial
question of how
the
purpose-carrying
codes which gave
rise to
self–reproduction
in life-forms
arose out of
matter from
which any sense
of purpose was
totally absent.
So such a
belief, whether
adduced by
physicists or
anyone else,
does not rest
upon rational
foundations.
Even more jaw-droppingly, Dawkins told me that, rather than believing in God, he was more receptive to the theory that life on earth had indeed been created by a governing intelligence – but one which had resided on another planet. Leave aside the question of where that extra-terrestrial intelligence had itself come from, is it not remarkable that the arch-apostle of reason finds the concept of God more unlikely as an explanation of the universe than the existence and plenipotentiary power of extra-terrestrial little green men?
The
other thing that
jumped out at me
from this debate
was that,
although Dawkins
insisted over
and over again
that all he was
concerned with
was whether or
not something
was true, he
himself seems to
be pretty
careless with
historical
evidence.
Anthony Flew,
for example,
points out in
his own book
that Dawkins’s
claim in The
God Delusion that
Einstein was an
atheist is
manifestly
false, since
Einstein had
specifically
denied that he
was either a
pantheist or an
atheist. In the
debate, under
pressure from
Lennox Dawkins
was actually
forced to
retract his
previous claim
that Jesus had
probably
‘never
existed’. And
in a revealing
aside, when
Lennox remarked
that the Natural
History Museum
in which they
were debating
– in front of
dinosaur
skeletons -- had
been founded for
the glory of
God, Dawkins
scoffed that of
course this was
absolutely
untrue.
But it was true. Construction of the museum was instigated between 1855 and 1860 by the Regius Professor of Medicine, Sir Henry Acland. According to Keith Thomson of the Sigma XI Scientific Research Society, the funds for the project came from the surplus in the University Press’s Bible account as this was deemed only appropriate for a building dedicated to science as a glorification of God’s works. Giving his reasons for building the museum, Acland himself said that it would provide the opportunity to obtain the knowledge of the great material design of which the Supreme Master-Worker has made us a constituent part...The student of life, bearing in mind the more general laws which in the several departments above named he will have sought to appreciate, will find in the collections of Zoology, combined with the Geological specimens and the dissections of the Anatomist, a boundless field of interest and of inquiry, to which almost every other science lends its aid : from each Science he borrows a special light to guide him through the ranges of extinct and existing animal forms, from the lowest up to the highest type, which; last and most perfect, but pre-shadowed in previous ages, is seen in Man. By the aid of physiological illustrations he begins to understand how hard to unravel are the complex mechanisms and prescient intentions of the Maker of all; and he slowly learns to appreciate what exquisite care is needed for discovering the real action of even an apparently comprehended machine.
posted
by Brian
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