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Richard Dawkins and agnosticism (view source)
Revision as of 01:33, December 21, 2011
, 01:33, December 21, 2011→Richard Dawkins and deism
...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.<ref>http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2543431/is-richard-dawkins-still-evolving.thtml</ref>}}
...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.<ref>http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2543431/is-richard-dawkins-still-evolving.thtml</ref>}}
== Interview with Alister McGrath ==
[[Creation Ministries International]] reported:
A correspondent kindly let us know of a BBC television interview with Richard Dawkins which was first broadcast in Britain in September 2006, shortly after he’d published his latest book The God Delusion. During that interview, Dawkins let slip a comment which, on the face of it, seems to be an amazing softening in his (formerly?) scoffing disdain for the idea that a ‘Supremely Intelligent Being’ is behind the laws of the universe.
He made the comment while being interviewed with [[Alister McGrath]] on the BBC Heaven and Earth television program, hosted by Gloria Hunniford.1 The interview opened with both men recounting how they’d arrived at their present views—McGrath from atheism to belief in a Creator, specifically the God of the Bible; Dawkins from ‘a Christian upbringing’ to atheism. Note the two ‘events’ that Dawkins cited as being pivotal in his slide into atheism:
He remembers thinking, ‘Since there are so many different religions, they can’t all be right’, so he says he became an agnostic. [Indeed, they can’t all be right, but it is logically fallacious to argue from this to ‘they must all be wrong.’ For a counter to this, see: ‘Holy Books?’]
Dawkins says the key atheism-inducing event was ‘really when I discovered Darwinism’. [And he’s not the only one to have unfortunately (and erroneously) been so influenced—see ‘Playwright just plain wrong’.]
Sitting next to the eloquently-spoken McGrath,2 and under some pressure from interviewer Ms Hunniford’s challenge that Dawkins had ‘no proof’ to justify his ‘there is no God’ stance, in his following comments Dawkins—though still clinging to his belief in a self-creating universe—appears to forget his past outspoken disdain for the concept of an Intelligent Designer:
‘You can’t prove the non-existence of anything, so it’s impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist. … None of us believes in Thor and his hammer, none of us believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. … The best explanation I could just about imagine somebody saying [would be] some sort of immense cosmic intelligence—that I could …—I mean, I don’t believe that but I could just about respect that.’
On the face of it, that’s quite a concession, compared to Dawkins’ previous rants and disparaging railings against any such suggestion of an ‘immense cosmic intelligence’ being behind the laws of the universe.<ref>http://creation.com/is-richard-dawkins-weakening</ref>}}
==References==
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