Thursday, October 30, 2008

Debatable Dawkins

Melanie Phillips, journalist for the U.K.'s "The Spectator", attended the second debate held this week at Oxford's Natural History Museum, between Richard Dawkins and Oxford Math Professor John Lennox. Lennox is the author of "God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?", which disputes Dawkins' book, "The God Delusion".

According to Phillips, the first debate between the two caught Dawkins off guard because Lennox used science to combat Dawkins' use of biology in the debate, a tack Dawkins appeared not to have expected, one on his own ground.

Apparently the second debate took a different tack, with Dawkins early on making the following statement:

"A serious case could be made for a deistic God."
This blockbuster statement is now being hotly debated - and any significance denied - on Atheist websites.

Another amazing revelation in the interview:

"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."
Dawkins is admitting that rational thought leads away from abiogenesis. And he concludes that pre-existing life from outer space is more probable than an intelligent first cause of the universe. The panspermia/alien theory is a fable, of course, created to draw attention away from the absurdity of abiogenesis. It not only cannot be proved, if it were true it would not solve the Atheists' problem: where did THAT life come from? An infinite regress solves nothing, especially within a finite timeframe.

It is common for those encumbered of an agenda to rationalize, rather than succumb to rationality. Dawkins is a past master at this art of self-deception. But maybe he is now forced to acknowledge a rational crack in the limits of his reality. Or maybe he just messed up.

The first debate is on video here; presumably the second debate will also be released on-line. I'm hoping for a transcript of both since my dial-up won't download that much video in this lifetime.

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