Richard Dawkins is getting canceled again

_{Denyse O'Leary

September 28, 2020

Academic Freedom, Atheism, Intelligent Design, Religion

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Apparently, when Richard Dawkins said he was an atheist, some people didn’t realize that he rejected Islam along with Christianity:

She had “read his Wikipedia page”, the third paragraph of which begins with the phrase “Dawkins is known as an outspoken atheist.” But she was surprised, apparently, to learn that he’s not a huge fan of Islam, as well as not being a huge fan of Christianity.
Dawkins, is, of course, equally scathing about just about every religion. That’s fine in the case of Christianity, of course, where his views are perfectly aligned with those of the average dunce in Trinity. But criticising Islam is, of course, a big no-no.
And what has he said about sexual assault, you might ask? Well apparently it refers to two tweets he sent in 2014, in which he suggested that being drunk and unable to remember being assaulted might make it more difficult to secure a prosecution.
John McGuirk, “Now Cancelled by Trinity Students: Richard Dawkins” at GRIPT

One commentator chortles:

Richard Dawkins is discovering that the postchristian society he helped bring about isn’t necessarily to his liking…
No Christianity, no inquiry, no science. Dawkins’s central thesis was not only wrong, it was backward. Christianity and science are not only NOT at war, Christianity is a necessary condition for science, logically, historically, and observably.
Vox Popoli, “How’s that postchristianity working out for you?” at Vox

Some would argue that theism rather than Christianity exclusively is necessary for science. But leave that aside for a moment. The stark reality is that the post-Christian student does not want to win a debate but rather to cancel it.

Dawkins probably had no idea what would replace Christianity and, one guesses, he won’t like it.

Ken Francis, who sent the information about Dawkins’s speaker woes, also directs us to this clip, featuring Richard Dawkins hoping that Lawrence Krauss can make sense of a universe coming from nothing with Nobody in charge:

No, really.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

Comments

I would like to point out another, more obvious, reason why Christianity was able to make the critical breakthrough into modern science, while the other monotheistic faiths, Islam and Judaism, were unable to do so. First, in Judaism God is seen as being terrifyingly unapproachable, whereas in Christianity, through Jesus's atonement, God beckons us to approach Him.
On the Mountain: The Terrifying and Beckoning God - Tim Keller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rACtcpKA2vk
It seems clear to me that if you viewed God as being terrifyingly unapproachable, as Judaism does, then that would present a rather formidable roadblock for any culture studying God's handiwork, i.e. nature, and subsequently giving birth to modern science. Whereas in Islam, besides being unapproachable, God is also seen as being capricious, In fact, one of the names of God in Islam is "Capricious"
Allah’s Capricious Nature I was standing in the second biggest mosque in the world in front of the biggest wall of the one hundred names of God under the biggest chandelier of its kind standing on the biggest handwoven carpet (this is all the ways they describe it when you are there). And my friend Mike was there explaining them to me. He was just pointing out name after name written in Arabic. And he said, “That one up there is usually translated capricious, which means God is free; he can do anything he wants.” https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/muslims-vs-christians-on-the-sovereignty-of-god ca·pri·cious given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior.
It seems fairly obvious to me that if one of your main views of God is that he is 'capricious', then that would present an even more formidable barrier for any culture making the critical breakthrough into modern science than presupposing God to 'merely' be terrifyingly unapproachable (as Judaism does). After all, if God truly is capricious, why should we ever trust that God should not, on a whim, change the laws of nature whenever he wanted to? Islam undermines science in the most fundamental way possible in that we have no reason to presuppose that universe should be, or stay, rational for us to comprehend. Only in Christianity is God both approachable, (thus making the study of His handiwork, i.e. nature, far more inviting than it is in Judaism alone), and is God also trustworthy, (in that He is not capricious in his actions as he is in Islam). And therefore, only in Christianity, is a 'friendly' environment for the eventual rise of modern science maintained where we mere humans, being made in the image of God, can dare presuppose that we may be able to approach and comprehend the rational nature in which God has made the universe.
“When with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets, when with excellent microscopes I discern the unimitable subtility of nature’s curious workmanship; and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature, I find myself often times reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, ‘How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all!’ ” — Robert Boyle (1627-1691), largely regarded as the father of modern chemistry, Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
bornagain77_{September 29, 2020
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News states:
Some would argue that theism rather than Christianity exclusively is necessary for science.
Well some could argue that Theism was sufficient within itself to bring about modern science, but they would be faced with the embarrassing fact that there were Theistic cultures other than Christianity, (specifically Judaism and Islam), which never made the critical breakthrough into modern science. Christianity, and Christianity alone, out of all the the world's cultures, including all the other monotheistic cultures of the world, can alone claim credit for the birth of modern science.
No False Gods Before Me: A Review of Rodney Stark’s Work by Terry Scambray (December 2018) Excerpt: Informed by Jewish wisdom and Greek reason, the Christian God was “not only eternal and immutable but also conscious, concerned, and rational.” Jesus Christ is the embodiment of this rational principle as “the Word (logos) made flesh,” reason incarnate.,,, “The early Christians fully accepted this image of God,” Stark writes and then reasonably deduced “the proposition that our knowledge of God and his creation is progressive.” For example, even though the Bible does not condemn astrology, Augustine reasoned that if human destiny was determined by the stars, humans would lack one of Christianity’s indispensable features, free will; therefore, practicing astrology was sinful. So also slavery was normative in all ancient societies and rationalized even by many Christians; yet slavery clearly violated Jesus’ revolutionary concept that individuals are created in God’s image and thereby possess inherent value of immeasurable worth. As Paul wrote, “All are one in Christ Jesus.” From this theocentric faith in reason and progress, Christendom ventured forward to establish freedom and capitalism, organize universities, invent science, abolish slavery while at the same time bestowing virtue on physical labor all of which drove the incomparable advances in Western technology. And finally, Christendom spread these gifts around the world. Stark distances this version of progress from the meme of “Enlightenment progress,” sometimes called “Whig history.” With his usual deftness, he calls this claim, as well as other Enlightenment disinformation, “nonsense.” And that’s because progress was inherent in Jewish and Christian millenarianism, the idea that “history has a goal and humanity a destiny,” Stark, relying on primary source historians like the renowned Marc Bloch, shows, on the contrary, that medieval Catholicism was the breeding ground for modernity. Most, if not all, ancient societies believed in fate. However, Yahweh gave humans the wondrous and terrifying attribute of free will, freedom. Individual freedom in the West then merged with the legacy of Athenian democracy and the Roman republican tradition to form “the new democratic experiments in the medieval Italian city-states,” as Stark reminds us. These rival polities organized the first universities in a unique tradition of institutional learning and discourse which began at Bologna then spread to Oxford, Paris and elsewhere in Europe. From the medieval university science was born. The distinguished philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, astonished a Harvard audience in 1925 when he said that science is a “derivative of medieval theology [since it arose] from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.” Whitehead’s thesis was but another bolt from out of the blue because the notion that medieval philosophy, scholasticism, led to the development of science was astonishing! Though it should not have been, since scholasticism was complex, diverse, penetrating and devoted to reasoning from the two books that undergird Christianity: the book of God, Scripture, and the book of nature, Creation. As Stark writes, “Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable—the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious, Christian scholars.”,,, So Christianity, then and now, never was antithetical to science. And this is because European Christians believed in a rational God whose imprint could be discovered in nature; thus, they confidently looked for and found natural laws. As Johannes Kepler, the venerable 17th century cosmologist, wrote, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world” is to discover this harmony imposed by God in the language of mathematics. Stark concludes, “That the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again. For, as Albert Einstein remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” which Einstein called a “miracle.” And this “miracle” confirms the fact that creation is guided by purpose and reason. https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=189497&sec_id=189497
But what was it about Christianity alone that set it apart from the other monotheistic cultures and enabled it alone to make the critical breakthrough into modern science whereas the other Theistic cultures failed to do make the breakthrough? StanleyJaki states the reason for that distinction like this, "the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes: Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a pa(n)theist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin,,"
The War against the War Between Science and Faith Revisited - July 2010?Excerpt: …as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos),,,?Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes: Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a pa(n)theist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin,, If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation. These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.?http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/08/the-war-against-the-war-between-science-and-faith-revisited/
Robert Sheldon commented on the distinction Stanley Jaki was making for Christianity, fairly clearly, in the following quote:
"The late Stanley Jaki explains this tension that brought about the Enlightenment in his books “The Savior of Science”, “God and the Cosmologists” among others. The point he makes is that if the Designer is purely transcendent, doing as he wills, then the Laws are arbitrary and reflect no underlying unity. On the other hand, if the Design is purely chance, then the Laws are mutable, and reflect no underlying unity. Only the weird situation where the Designer submits to his Design, where the Designer makes rules that he then keeps, where the Transcendent is also Immanent, permits the development of Science." - Robert Sheldon
As you can see, it is a fairly subtle distinction that separates Christianity from the other monotheistic cultures, but it is, and was, a subtle distinction that proved to be critical in the birth of modern science in the medieval Christian cultures of Europe.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 but test everything; hold fast what is good.
bornagain77_{September 29, 2020
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BobRyan and Truthfreedom, There was nothing wrong with what those Cambodian rulers did, at least according to their opinion. The fact that you and I may not like what they did doesn’t mean anything. It’s our opinion against theirs. That’s what Dawkins and his band promoted. No absolute laws, no absolute moral standards, nothing. That’s it. Life goes on. Right?jawa_{September 29, 2020
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Wearing a watch was a death sentence. When a third of the Cambodian people were slaughtered, any reason was justifiable.BobRyan_{September 28, 2020
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2 BobRyan And they killed people for the mortal sign of wearing glasses. Truthfreedom_{September 28, 2020
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The Khmer Rouge took people from the city to work the farms, while the farmers were sent to live in the city. Rather than wonder if there was any skill required to farm, they expected the people from the city to grow the same amount as experienced farmers. Rather than accept the failure when they failed to produce as much food, they murdered them for failure to be farmers.BobRyan_{September 28, 2020
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Theism tends to go along with support for real science, but I think both are products of the same general respect and need for real people with real skills. When a society needs to have productive people making real things, it will favor the kinds of research needed to aid production and everyday life. A productive society also favors religion, because religious people are more 'settled' and ready to work. They aren't constantly anxious and Karening over every little imagined threat or disagreement. Modern western society doesn't need or want people or skills. Share value rises when employees and factories die. So we only favor the kind of research that raises share value: Insane delusional theories, Economics, Innovative Disruption, and Total Genocide.polistra_{September 28, 2020
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