Responding to Dawkins

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MarcellusW

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Hello all,

I would like to know if any of you have a good resource to recommend for debating people who use Richard Dawkin’s philosophies to try to make discussing God irrelevant, i.e. the flying sphagetti monster.

I have some ideas but I admit I am no philosopher. I would really like some hardcore arguments, mostly diffusing dawkins logic without having to prove my own belief.

Thanks for your replies 🙂
 
Glad to see someone else read Vox Day’s work. As far as a comprehensive response to the arguments actually broached by those three (Plus some extra data), it’s a downright ferocious book.
 
MarcellusW said:
Hello all,

I would like to know if any of you have a good resource to recommend for debating people who use Richard Dawkin’s philosophies to try to make discussing God irrelevant, i.e. the flying sphagetti monster.

I have some ideas but I admit I am no philosopher. I would really like some hardcore arguments, mostly diffusing dawkins logic without having to prove my own belief.

Thanks for your replies 🙂
Click to expand...
Answering the New Atheism is really good. They discuss the flying spaghetti monster, the microscopic orbiting teapot, etc. It focuses on Dawkins worship of chance and how it would be mathematically impossible for random chance to lead to the creation of the universe, planets, suns, life, humans. He doesn’t use religious arguments, but logical and scientific ones. He shows that Dawkins worships a god called Chance, and that his worship has no logical basis.

He also shows that, if Random Chance is the creative force in the universe, there is no morality possible. For true atheists, there is no basis upon which to construct a morality other than what is beneficial to you at the moment, or maybe what is beneficial to your tribe or species at the moment.
 
Hi Marcellus,

There have been many responses from leading Christian philosophers on the New Atheism movement. The wonderful thing about it is that there are so many different methodologies at work. You can never go wrong with William Lane Craig or Gary Habermas. If you’re into Thomism, you might want to check out Norman Geisler’s Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal. One of my personal favorites of the so-called ‘Reformed Epistemology’ method is Alvin Plantinga’s The Analytic Theist. Plantinga has written a direct response to Dawkins here.

One notable Catholic philosopher is Peter Kreeft. His website has various articles and audio lectures on philosophical theology.

Blessings
 
The Hahn/Wiker book is too rambling in my opinion, not focused enough, and the Vox Day book is too rhetorical and not serious enough from what I see of the reviews, although I don’t have the Vox book yet. The books I do have:

The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths by David Robertson (Christian Focus, 2007)
The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists by Ravi Zacharias (Zondervan, 2008)
God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens by John Haught (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008)
God is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins by Thomas Crean, O.P. (Ignatius Press, 2007)
The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by McGrath and McGrath (IVP Books, 2007)
Dawkin’s God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life by Alister McGrath (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)
The Truth Behind the New Atheism by David Marshall (Harvest House Publishers, 2007)
Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker (Emmaus Road, 2008)

bringyou.to/apologetics/GodIsNoDelusion.jpg

I need to go through these more thoroughly since I just got them, but the best ones appear to Fr. Crean’s God is No Delusion and Haught’s God and the New Atheism mainly because these guys are trained philosophers and really attack Dawkins (and the rest) at their weakest points. Haught is more an “overview” response to the “new atheism”, while Crean answers Dawkins in detail, chapter by chapter. McGrath’s earlier 2004 book Dawkin’s God is probably the better (more detailed) of his two books.

I am doing my own evaluation/response page to these “new atheists” here. I refuse to buy Hitchens’ book in hardback so I will wait for the paperback, or maybe speed read his book in the store. His book is more rhetorical as well, a lot of assertions without real arguments. :rolleyes: Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation does have a lot of objections that need good answers, and it looks like Zacharias’ The End of Reason tries to respond. Atheists do want the “end of faith” but Christians should not want the “end of reason” so I don’t really get the title there. :confused: I’ll summarize the best arguments/responses from all these books if I can. Maybe another unfinished project, I got a lot of those…

Phil P
 
A book I can recommend is “A Catholic Replies to Professor Dawkins” by Thomas Crean O.P. It is an excellent resource and probably requires several reads to fully appreciate all the arguments.
I should imagine though I haven’t checked that Amazon would stock it.
Gerry
 
MarcellusW said:
I have some ideas but I admit I am no philosopher.
Click to expand...
That’s okay. Neither is Dawkins. Like all atheists, Dawkins rests his case against God on one fallacy after another. His work is self-refuting.

– Mark L. Chance.
 
I first discovered Dinesh D’Souza by accident when I saw a video of his debate with Richard Dawkins. So I bought his book What’s So Great About Christianity?

He tackles a wide variety of subjects, but does it in a completely understandable way. His book has turned me on to Catholic Apologetics (he defends The Church’s actions in the Crusades as well as the Inquisition) and I recommend it for any average Christian looking for ways to answer common atheist viewpoints.

Best wishes!
Krista
 
I think for the most part, Dawkins is a smart man. Not in the philosophical sense, but I mean in the business sense. He, or someone else who suggested this to him, ideally knew how to appeal to today’s youth. A brief look at the ‘ardent’ supporters on facebook for his book will send many a philosopher crying.

This is no joke friends, his book ‘seems’ to be intimidating because of the popularity of it, it has infact been a while, since a book with such rhetoric and sneer came out, discussing theism. I was wandering around on the dawkins site yesterday when I decided I had to stop by to point out logical fallacies in their arguments (the fans). One guy concluded, Hahn couldn’t possibly be right because his book is only 152 pages. :rolleyes:

I think for the most part, dismissing Hawkins and his supporters can be done with the use of the wikipedia article on logical fallacies. Infact on Hawkins’ wikipedia article, there is a logical fallacy in one his quotes, he said that extremist atheistic viewpoints on t.v is ‘balanced’ out by the fundamentalist christians, and thus ok. He is essentially doing what here? Two wrongs make a right anybody? Ah yes, we are once again walking into a logical fallacy. The supporters however didn’t take to it kindly (me editing it saying - “this however is a logical fallacy (with citation)” 😉

For the most part, this will die down sooner or later, every era has a class clown. I think of Dawkins largely as that high school sneer who wins the ‘cool people’s’ respect, then 20 years down the line, you hear no more from them.

Oh well.
 
mlchance said:
That’s okay. Neither is Dawkins. Like all atheists, Dawkins rests his case against God on one fallacy after another. His work is self-refuting.

– Mark L. Chance.
Click to expand...

Dawkins is basically a Fundamentalist Evangelical - except his Good News is that God is a fantasy 😃​

Fundamentalists are not much good at philosophy - no wonder he can’t understand that evolution & Christian theism are not contradictory.
 
Mea_Culpa said:
Answering the New Atheism is really good. They discuss the flying spaghetti monster, the microscopic orbiting teapot, etc. It focuses on Dawkins worship of chance and how it would be mathematically impossible for random chance to lead to the creation of the universe, planets, suns, life, humans. He doesn’t use religious arguments, but logical and scientific ones. He shows that Dawkins worships a god called Chance, and that his worship has no logical basis.

He also shows that, if Random Chance is the creative force in the universe, there is no morality possible. For true atheists, there is no basis upon which to construct a morality other than what is beneficial to you at the moment, or maybe what is beneficial to your tribe or species at the moment.
Click to expand...
Dawkins concurs:
Let’s stop beating Basil’s car: Richard Dawkins on moral responsibility
:whacky:
 
kmleo said:
I first discovered Dinesh D’Souza by accident when I saw a video of his debate with Richard Dawkins. So I bought his book What’s So Great About Christianity?

He tackles a wide variety of subjects, but does it in a completely understandable way. His book has turned me on to Catholic Apologetics (he defends The Church’s actions in the Crusades as well as the Inquisition) and I recommend it for any average Christian looking for ways to answer common atheist viewpoints.

Best wishes!
Krista
Click to expand...
I would second this suggestion, too. It’s a great book.
 
mlchance said:
That’s okay. Neither is Dawkins. Like all atheists, Dawkins rests his case against God on one fallacy after another. His work is self-refuting.

– Mark L. Chance.
Click to expand...
No kidding.
The first and most gaping flaw in atheists’ arguments tends to be the foregone conclusion/circular reasoning. The foregone conclusion with which they operate is that the supernatural doesn’t exist. They prefer to believe that millions of people in hundreds of countries for millennia have worked without pay, died brutal deaths, and somehow sneaked out of prisons and dungeons to perpetrate magic tricks that depend on supplies they could not have had access to, all to fool the rest of us with no possible motive except perhaps attention, which can be had much more easily and safely. Yet people do things only with means, motive and opportunity. When these are not in place, the odds that a person would perform a trick dwindle away. Yet the new atheists become irate when anyone suggests that they reexamine their foregone conclusion. But they will never admit that they are the ones arguing from emotion.
 
mlchance said:
That’s okay. Neither is Dawkins. Like all atheists, Dawkins rests his case against God on one fallacy after another. His work is self-refuting.

– Mark L. Chance.
Click to expand...
Care to list these alleged fallacies?
 
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