Dawkin's God

I usually manage to find something interesting to read while waiting in doctor's offices, even if I have to resort to something I put into my briefcase that day. This morning, I found something on the doctor's "coffee table" (of course, no coffee in sight). It was the recent issue of Time Magazine about God versus Science (He's against science?), and it featured a debate, of sorts, between Francis Collins, a Christian, and Richard Dawkins, an atheist evangelist.

I took notes (no laptop on hand):

Time: Could the answer [to what's behind the Universe] be God?

Dawkins: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

Collins: That's God.

Dawkins: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Maritans or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishing small--at the least the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

If anyone has read Dawkins' latest best-selling evangelical tract for atheism, The God Delusion, perhaps you could tell me if Dawkins demonstrates why Jesus's claim to be God Incarnate should be rejected as resting on a vanishing small chance of being true.

Dawkins: [later] I don't see the Olympian Gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there's a God, it's going to be a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Dawkins, here, I submit, is really making a theological argument, though I doubt he would admit it. What's worthy of grandeur? Is there something he knows about "godness" that tells him a God would never die on a Cross? Well, actually that idea strikes many people as unreasonable.  Except that: 1) We know something is terribly wrong with us, a tilt toward evil, outbursts of cruelty 2) We know that death seems outrageous. If a god wished to deal with sin and death in the world, Dawkins may be asked, how would he deal with it? Apparently Dawkins knows, or just doesn't like the offer Jesus makes to him. Jesus said that the greatest love is shown by one laying down his life for another. Might not the most grand thing in the universe be a love that gives up its own prerogatives, its life for the other?

The God who is revealed in Christ "dwells in unapproachable light," whom no man can see or ever see. Classical Christian theology agrees that the One who made heaven and earth is beyond our comprehension, his name is ineffable. Dawkins has a problem with Jesus, an old problem, one he shares with the world as a whole.

Comments

[Bobby Winters]

I wonder if Dawkin's uses that sort of reasoning while trying to cross the street. "That truck could be thousands of other places so the probability that it is coming down the street at this point in time is vanishingly small. Therefore there is no truck."

[GL]

Just what does Dawkins believe would be "more incomprehensible" than that God would "com[e] down and d[ie] on the Cross? What gesture toward His creation could be more grand? What is parochial about giving up the glories of heaven to take on flesh, suffer, die and rise again as the first fruits of an entirely resurrected universe, a new heaven and a new earth?

Dawkins obviously does not understand what Christians believe.

[Bill R]

"Dawkins obviously does not understand what Christians believe."

From what I've read of Dawkins, he doesn't even try to understand.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>From what I've read of Dawkins, he doesn't even try to understand.<<<

Actually, I've heard better philosophy in late-night, beer-fueled dormitory bull sessions. Dawkins makes the classic intellectual error of believing that his expertise in one narrow, technical area qualifies him to speak magisterially in areas outside of his competency.

[Nick]

Worse, Dawkin's claims implicitly to know the mind of God. He claims this by being able to recognize what God wouldn't do, which allows him to know exactly what he would do. He bases this on no authority other than himself. Since he knows the mind of God outside of any revelation he is therefore God.

[GL]

I guess we can update the joke I posted on Montgomery:

Richard Dawkins was speaking to a group of sceintist about the silly things people of faith believe. In reading from the myth-filled book upon which they base their silly ideas, he begins, "And the Lord said to Moses . . . ."

He pauses and then notes, "Of course if he really were the Lord, what he would have said to Moses is

Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. [I am] a delusion; and, as later chapters show, a pernicious delusion.

Not nearly as humorous, but perhaps even Monty's ego pales in comparison to Dawkins'.

[Ethan Cordray]

>>If there's a God, it's going to be a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.<<

Sounds like Azathoth, the idiot god who twiches endlessly to the piping of blind servants in the utter pits of chaos at the center of the universe (to paraphrase H.P. Lovecraft). If you refuse to see a moral order in the cosmos, you'll fail to find a moral order in its ruler, though you may be unable to escape belief in some ultimate being. But don't talk of something "incredibly grand and incomprehensible" unless you are prepared to confront its utter indifference and hostility to to our pathetic little race.

Unless, of course, it turns out to be the sort of being that deliberately reveals itself to us, who against all odds asserts that it cares about us, and who goes so far as to become one of us to relieve our most desparate need.

[Brian John Schuettler]

It is as if Richard Dawkins dropped out of the air and landed on Earth. This isn't just a monumental ego, this is someone who doesn't seem to realize that these questions concerning the nature of God have been pondered and written about by the finest minds who came before him. Dawkins doesn't seem to know that they existed!
Beginner's reading list for Mr. Dawkins:
Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Balthazar for starters. He might be startled to discover that minds greater than his disagree with him about the nature and the existence of God. Dawkins might be especially amazed to discover that Hegel considered the idea of God as Trinity and a "God Person", Jesus Christ, breaking into time and space as being the most convincing way to understand his nihilistic presentation of reality.

[Bobby Winters]

Billy Connolly has more of a clue than Dawkins. (Warning, offensive language).

[Fr. Robert Hart]

Dawkins:"Dawkins: [later] I don't see the Olympian Gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there's a God, it's going to be a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

In an inverted way, Dawkins the atheist, has made a very good argument in favor of our central doctrine, the Incarnation. If Jesus, visible like some Olympian god, had merely "come down" it would mean nothing. Rather, the "incomprehensible" God, especially appreciated as "incomprehensible" due to Christian theology, is known by assuming our nature into the uncreated person of the Logos.

[Judy Warner]

C.S. Lewis made a similar point, didn't he? That the Christian story is so unlikely as a founding story that it must be true. None of the grandeur of the pagan religions, just a Man sent to us to die.

[Francesca Matthews]

While I certainly understand that Dawkins, as an evolutionary biologist of some note, would take issue with claims that the earth is only 6,000 years old or that we are not descended from more primitive organisms, I wonder how he feels about the evolutionary value of institutionalized religion? People who attend religious services regularly on average live longer than those who don't and the difference is too great to be explained away by "cleaner living" or a sense of community. They also tend to suffer less from depression and are less likely to commit suicide.