Look, it was okay when the guy just wrote an essay about what it is like to be a bat, refuting materialist nonsense harmlessly. But he went too far, as a piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education details. Here are some of the guy’s crimes:
Joan Roughgarden, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the -Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, agrees that evolutionary biologists can be nasty when crossed. “I mean, these guys are impervious to contrary evidence and alternative formulations,” she says. “What we see in evolution is stasis-conceptual stasis, in my view-where people are ardently defending their formulations from the early 70s.”
Nagel really got their noses out of joint by sympathizing with theorists of intelligent design. “They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met,” he wrote. “It is manifestly unfair.” To be sure, he was not agreeing with them. He notes several times that he is an atheist and has no truck with supernatural gods. He views the ID crowd the way a broad-minded capitalist would sum up Marx: right in his critique, wrong in his solutions. But ID, he says, does contain criticisms of evolutionary theory that should be taken seriously.
Whatever the validity of this stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad. …” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.
So what you think? Hanging? Hanging, drawing, and quartering?
Could be gruesome. Darwinists’ unearned incomes are at stake.
“Vicous, sadomasochistic, and repellent”? Tell us how you really feel, Richard. Talk about being clueless.
Instead of seeing the atonement for the loving sacrifice it is, Richard Dawkins sees only madness. Is it common for atheists to be so pessimistic, so cynical, that they cannot or will not show appreciation for anything?
Now, in God’s love for humankind, could he condone the wickedness that Satan, along with Adam, had brought into the universe? Could God say to any sinning individual, ‘Well, I like you and want to show you mercy, so I’ll just overlook your sin’? In harmony with his justice and righteousness he could not ignore sin and let it go unaccounted for. If he should do this, he would be undermining the foundation of his government.—Psalm 89:14.
In providing the atonement sacrifice of his Son, God did not weaken and compromise his sense of justice and his own laws, nor did he leave mankind without hope. Truly, Dawkins and other atheists are blind if they cannot (or will not) see this simple fact.
The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.