Dr Paul Allen

Richard Dawkins, one-time leader of the now-fracturing New Atheist movement, has just released another anti-God book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. It’s a sad display of what can happen when an influential scientist thinks the whole intellectual world exists inside his own head. It’s not just that I disagree with Dawkins’ conclusions. I certainly do, but there’s another problem he ought to care about himself. He makes faith look ridiculous by misrepresenting it, yet without even seemingly knowing that’s what he’s doing. He’s oblivious. Not a good sign for a man of his influence. He should know it. For years now, Christian thinkers have been answering him, correcting him, explaining what it is we really believe. Judging from this book, though, none of that has pierced the shell surrounding his private idea of “religion.” He has sealed himself off from information and arguments. That’s not just my impression. He approves of fellow atheist P. Z. Myers’ “Courtier’s Reply,”

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only ‘take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief’.  Human logic may be rationally adequate but it’s also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there’s more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent but does not compel it. Sadly some of those who boast of being freethinkers are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, unaware of the radical changes in our understanding of rationality that have emerged in the last 50 years. Many New Atheists will quite reasonably want to protest at this point. From a New Atheist perspective, it’s not that human reason discovers God by reaching beyond reason, but that naive human beings invent God. More than that: they invent a nasty God.

English: Alvin Plantinga after telling a joke at the beginning of a lecture on science and religion delivered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The twentieth century has seen philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne , reaffirm the rationality of faith and reinvigorate traditional debates about reasons for belief in God—catalysed in part by new scientific understandings of the origins of the universe. There’s a growing consensus that belief in God is perfectly rational—unless, of course, you define rationality in terms that deliberately exclude such a belief.5 Rationality is less concerned with adopting a particular starting point or conclusion than with the rules that regulate reflective discussion leading to a conclusion. New Atheist writers often define the term beyond its fundamental sense, holding that it demands we interpret the world in a specific way that excludes belief in God. Yet this interpretation c

English: Signature of Stephen Jay Gould (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) From what’s been said it seems that God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) rightly remarked,  ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.’ In fact Dawkins and other New Atheists comment rather a lot on this matter, but perhaps that’s because they speak here primarily as militant atheists rather than scientists. While scholarship has shown that the origins of ‘scientific atheism’ as a faith tradition can be traced back to the eighteenth century, the New Atheism has given it a new importance and profile through its appeal to the natural sciences in defence of its atheist outlook. In the New Atheist world-view, scie

Peter Medawar (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The natural sciences are empirical in their approach—in other words they rely on the application of observation and experiment in investigating the world. Yet empiricism refuses, as a matter of principle, to speculate about any realities beyond the observable world. Bas van Fraassen , a leading philosopher of science , makes this point clearly. To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena, and to recognize no objective modality in nature. To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable … it must invoke throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable. This emphasis on what’s ‘actual and observable’ gives the sciences their d

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) New Atheist websites tend to give the impression that scientific theories are based only on evidence. Religion on the other hand, they posit, runs away from evidence. Richard Dawkins’ argument that atheism is rational and scientific, while religion is irrational and superstitious, is clearly being picked up here. But just how reliable is it? Dawkins often argues that there’s no need for faith in science , in that the evidence for a correct conviction compels us to accept its truth. He first set out his views on this matter in The Selfish Gene in 1976 and has not changed his mind since. [Faith] is a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. Though this seems clear and persuasive, it’s actually an unsustainable vie

The 2001 Census for England and Wales revealed that 72 percent of the population identified themselves as Christian, but ten years later, this figure had dropped to 59 percent, while during the same time the proportion of those claiming no religion jumped from 15 percent to 25 percent. We can assume that “Christian” can be interpreted very loosely, but so can “no religion.” Both hide the fact that we live in an age permeated by religious pluralism. Even if we set atheists aside, huge swaths of people reject “God talk” as prejudiced radicalism and reduce quotations from the Bible as carrying no more authority than those from other religious books. Religious pluralism has inevitably spawned rampant relativism, which even claims that truth itself has been ripped from its roots. Yet archatheist Richard Dawkins’ statement that “all truth is relative” is a claim to absolute truth, so on its own terms it is false. This points to the question of ultimate authority as the most significan

“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” Richard Dawkins   recently tweeted  the above in response to a woman who wondered what she should do about her unborn child with Down syndrome . Of course that is an obscene statement and people all over the world responded. Here is how he summarized those arguments : I am being bombarded with pictures of Down’s children, with descriptions of how adorable and affectionate they are, and how rewarding to look after in spite of the difficulties. This seems to be our primary means of arguing with those who would kill our children with Down syndrome and other disabilities: point out how valuable they are  because of  the rewards we receive and how happy they are. We even have studies that demonstrate people with Down syndrome are happy with their lives. But Dawkins, and most others who support the destruction of unborn people, are more than willing to grant what we feel: I