In this last post, I’d like to reflect on how Richard Dawkins unwittingly and certainly unwillingly helps the Christian Church, as well as the other theists he so energetically opposes.
In particular, he helps us by showing us how some of us sound to people such as he, as well as to others who also do not share our premises. I was struck as Dawkins spoke at how similar was his style to that of many Christian apologists and preachers I have encountered/endured through the years.
For instance, he presented major issues in a simplistic fashion only to dispatch them with breathtaking swiftness. Here’s one example.
Dawkins averred that theism is patently contradictory. A God who can see the future with certainty (because of omniscience) thus is powerless to do anything other than what he foresees himself doing, thus compromising his omnipotence. Voilà! Theism is incoherent!
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Richard Dawkins has traveled the world, sowing his particular gospel of atheism, science, rational argument, and the courage to live in the light of The Facts.
He has appeared before countless audiences, participated in dozens of debates, and handled hundreds of questioners. But he seemed surprised, even nonplussed, by the line of questioning he received from several members of the UBC audience who patiently lined up to press him on . . . vegetarianism.
By the time Dawkins encountered the third such questioner, he was moved to wonder aloud whether he was encountering some sort of “lobby.” No, just the West Coast.
Yet this particular issue presented an intriguing window into Dawkins that had not been provided in his presentation. For his presentation was mostly offensive, in the sense of attacking positions he disliked, rather than defensive, in the sense of offering cogent reasons for adopting his own life philosophy. (His presentation was also at times astonishingly offensive in the other sense, but more about that in my third post.)
Being pressed about vegetarianism, then, we got to see Richard Dawkins construct and defend some ethics. And what a ramshackle thing he produced!
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Richard Dawkins at UBC: Part One, Dawkins as Rhetor
April 29, 2008
So someone at the University of British Columbia (UBC) decided it was a good idea to bring Richard Dawkins to campus to give a free public lecture. Fair enough. He’s an academic celebrity and there are precious few of those.
The two (two!) professors who introduced him, however, introduced him as someone who could impressively relate the humanities and the sciences. That claim deserves a little scrutiny.
Lots of people have analyzed and criticized Dawkins’s arguments over the years. Indeed, there are whole forests’ worth of books now in print responding to one or another of his anti-theism volumes. And who can count the number of phosphors employed similarly in the blogosphere?
What I will do over the next three posts is to offer what I hope will be some observations that complement these direct engagements with this ideas, and I will do so indeed from the perspective of the humanities.
Let’s begin with one of the most ancient of the liberal arts and consider Dawkins as Rhetor, as orator, as public speaker.
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We’ve recently taken a 5000-mile road trip, from home in Vancouver, BC, to our middle son’s college in suburban Chicago. Along the way, we stopped for a couple of days to enjoy Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Black Hills in South Dakota. And the two park areas provide rich fodder for theological reflection.
In particular, they raise the question of our calling as human beings toward the rest of the world.
Yellowstone is all about preservation of nature, enjoying as it has from its beginning the blessing of such proponents of wilderness as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. As one drives for hours through this vast park, seeing only the one road ahead and behind with few other signs of human presence, one cannot fail to be impressed by grandeur, vitality, authenticity, and other themes.
Indeed, if one does fail to be so impressed, the visitors’ centre will do all it can to help. And it will do so in the cadences and categories of nature mysticism, a long tradition in America. The film presentation we watched in the centre explicitly invoked Emerson and Thoreau and their successors in this alternative religion.
