The dishonesty of atheism
September 26th, 2007 ~ Culture gone madGreg shared a YouTube video with me last week, and I think he did it on purpose knowing that it would bug me a lot. He was right. On the video you have Richard Dawkins, a well-known atheist, apparently (though not well-known to me. I don’t hang out with lightning rods.). He wrote a book called “The God Delusion” (something to add to my Amazon wishlist. Sometimes it’s hard to get a fire started in my drafty old fireplace.), and went out on college campuses to pollute students’ already-muddled minds give valuable lectures on the wonders of atheism. At one university, a woman asked him a simple question: What if you’re wrong?
He gives the weakest excuse for an answer imaginable, but the audience just seems to think he’s a genius. Here’s the link, but if this kind of thing makes your blood boil, just skip it because I can paraphrase the key points like this:
- “What if I’m wrong? What if any of us are wrong?” — evasion
- “You’ve been brought up, I assume, in the Christian faith” — assumption (obviously), and an unfounded attack on her right to ask the question
- “You’re only a Christian because you happen to be an American” — a rather lame assumption based on his last assumption, and a bizarre one considering that the audience was full of non-Christian Americans
- “What if I’m wrong? What if you’re wrong?” — completely childish non-answer
… and the audience broke into mad applause as if he had really said something. Which is too bad. An embarrassed silence might have done better under the circumstances.
If someone had asked him what he thought of global warming and he had said, “Well, what do any of us really think about global warming? You’re a capitalist, I assume, and so because you’re a capitalist you’re asking me this question. What about global warming, you say? And I say, ‘Yes. What about global warming.’ Ha! In your ear with a tractor gear!”, everyone would have known that he didn’t have anything to say about global warming and was kind of hoping no one would ask. But because he’s espousing atheism, he gets to invoke science when it suits him and then do away with it when it suits him. It’s really both unscientific and disingenuous.
By turning combative when asked a simple question, he only shows that atheism is, in his case at least, a point of view that that can’t stand up to honest scrutiny.
Similarly, the commenters of this video on Digg (which skews heavily toward the faith-impaired) tried to help him out by guessing that the correct answer would’ve been “Well, if I’m wrong I go to hell,” which allows them to merrily deride all theists as people who merely play god in order to damn others. But that answer similarly shows a willful disregard of all but a fraction of Christian teaching, eschewing all consideration of reasoned faith, salvation, love and truth.
The honest answer to the question is: If I’m wrong, it changes everything.
That is to say, [lip-synchhing for Mr. Dawkins here]: “If there is a god, then I have perpetrated a terrible wrong on both that god and my fellow man. I will have to examine what else I may have gotten wrong. I will have spent many years preaching a lie to others and missing out on the truth. I will have to consider that I’m not the clear-minded, stout-hearted fellow I thought I was. If that god is the Christian God, then I’m going to have a lot of other things to think about as well, and a good number of them won’t be pleasant to contemplate. I will have a very, very hard time of it if I’m wrong.”
That would actually be the honest answer. But we won’t hold our breath.
As a follow-up bit of fun, though, here’s Dawkins again having a very bad time of it with a question that argues against evolution (link HERE). After a LOT of blinking and even a time-out to pull his thoughts together, he launches into something that isn’t what he was asked at all. Yep, looks like a genius all right. We poor Christians are sunk.
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September 27th, 2007 at 5:27 am
I am familiar with Dawkins and from what I understand some of the atheists are embarrassed by him. He tends to be a shrill rather than a debater (at least this is what I hear - I’ve never watched him myself).
September 27th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
There’s a debate within the atheist community between those who have a live-and-let-live attitude (which is to say, they think we’re wrong but they’re not up in our face about it) and radical atheists who feel the need to go on the attack. The latter group has been on the rise for several years and Dawkins is a bit of a poster child for them.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Something I would love to see: An Orthodox author take on Dawkins and his fellow traveller Christopher Hitchens, point by point. Someone who would come at the debate from a completely different perspective than say, the SBC’s Rick Land. Bishop +Kallistos (Ware), as an ex-Oxford don, would provide a wonderful counterpoint to the oh-so-clever Brit Hitchens.
October 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Now there’s something I would pay to see. I think some time back Hugh Hewitt — who has a very widely read conservative blog that touches on Christian points as well — organized a series of dialogues between Hitchens and Christian apologists. As I recall, Hugh was trying to see if he could line up something between Hitchens and John Mark Reynolds, who is Orthodox and has a PhD in philosophy. I thought that would’ve been pretty darn good, but I don’t know if they ever arranged it.
As Greg notes above, not all atheists think they have to go into commando mode, which is probably just as well. Sooner or later, they’re going to have their arguments handed back to them in flinders if they do.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:09 am
A debate would be good, a bestselling book, better!
My memory (based on what I’ve read; I don’t listen to him) is that Hewitt had a Presbyterian theologian up against Hitchens, and that Hitchens put him on the defensive rather easily.
The Washington Post’s website has a section called “On Faith,” which has lately become a big soapbox for folks like Dawkins and Susan Jacoby. Recently, Dawkins had a piece on the site that began something like, all you have to do is look at Osama Bin Laden to see that religion breeds evil (or is evil itself, I can’t remember now which tack he took). I only read the teaser, but I certainly hope someone commented back with three words: Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Ooo, good point. You remind me of something I meant to write up along those lines. May have to do a new blog entry. Heck, may have to have a new category — “What to tell the atheist when he knocks at your door.” Naah, too long.
As for the debate with Hitchens — bummer. That’s the reason that I shy away from these things. It’s so distressing when the guys end up spending a half hour defending details of Biblical stories and never getting around to the whole narrative. This kind of apologetics is something that I think Protestants spend more time on than we do, but I also think they let themselves get led into dead-ends and stuck there.