I was privileged to offer a public lecture this past week on the UBC campus on this question. I’ll write more about the topic soon, once I’m done a brief bit of travelling (Banff, Alberta, this weekend; the coastal town of Anacortes, Washington, the next).
But I confess that I had to resist offering the following flippant answers to the question instead of the serious ones I did (again, which I’ll set out for you soon):
“Yes, you do. That’s why I handed back my Ph.D. and professorship last week, and now happily believe unencumbered by intelligence.”
or
“Well, since I have so few of either, it’s no big deal for me…”
or
“Why do we have to keep answering this question? After two thousand years of Christianity, with figures as various and as brilliant as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, J. S. Bach, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and [fill in the names of any number of geniuses here] to point to, why is this still an interesting question?”
or
“This event is sponsored by UBC Christian students, who by definition have good brains (or they couldn’t get into UBC) and serious faith (or they wouldn’t bother sponsoring events such as this). Q.E.D. The End.”
I didn’t say any of that, of course. I said something more sober and sensible.
(But I did think it, I confess, and perhaps when you read this post’s heading, you thought something similar!)
January 17, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I echo the second-to-last impertinent answer, especially because it’s another question.
January 19, 2008 at 11:13 am
I don’t know, though. Perhaps the questioner had been subjected to Christian “thinking” like this. That could cause one to wonder such things
January 19, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Just wondering . . . was this lecture recorded, and if so, will it be available for online download or online purchase of any kind? Thanks!
January 20, 2008 at 8:09 am
Yes, the Regent College Marketplace Institute will put an audio recording on line soon at its site. It already has a recording of a previous lecture I did in this series, one on the problem of evil: http://www2.regent-college.edu/marketplace/
January 29, 2008 at 5:14 am
[...] and Brains: (from 2 weeks ago) John Stackhouse publishes an impatient response to the questions about education and [...]
April 29, 2008 at 8:46 pm
[...] Dawkins likes to say, and did say again, that religion is based on faith, while science is based on evidence. What Dawkins doesn’t say, and didn’t say again, is that faith is also based on evidence. So the parallel is simply false and he (and many others) needs to rethink the relationship of science and faith. (I have written a bit about faith and evidence in a trio of posts, starting here.) [...]