I was bored tonight, so I made a new logo for the blog. I think it looks rather sharp. Kudos to stock.xchng and all those who contribute to it … it is an extremely valuable free resource for royalty-free photos.
(Note: You may have to hold Shift and press the Reload button in your browser to make it show up if you've been to the site before; your browser may have the image cached, and since the name of the file didn't change it may not load the new image.)
Photo credits:
Book: Book with white pages (brokenarts)
Background: Is it a bird…is it a plane…? (a_kartha)
In November of 2005, British magazine Prospect, which is according to their website "the most intelligent magazine of current affairs and cultural debate in Britain" (link) posted their selections for The world's top intellectuals as selected by their readers; Richard Dawkins made the list. He is called "a formidable critic of organised religion" and "perhaps the world’s most vocal atheist", and the article says that he "makes the case for science to the general public in a way few can match". Clearly, this magazine is not biased against Dr. Dawkins.
Nor could any bias be claimed against the author (Andrew Brown) of Prospect magazine's recent review of The God Delusion, who begins his review (titled "Dawkins the dogmatist") by strongly affirming that he too believes that "In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous". (Of course, all/most religious people would agree that all religions are potentially dangerous, but it seems as though Dawkins' theory goes a little further than that!)
However, this reviewer was not impressed with Dawkins' latest book, calling it "Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory", and concluding that it represents "one long argument from professorial incredulity"; sounds a lot like argument from outrage (aka "argumentum ad cerebrosus") to me. Now, when a Christian claims that Dawkins often resorts to argument from outrage, we may initially suspect their complaint is due to bias. But I can find no reason to suspect bias in Brown's assessment. (That's Andrew Brown's, not Dan Brown's! Yeesh, every time I think I'm done with The Da Vinci Code …)
To be clear, I have not yet read Dawkins' book, though I plan to this summer. Unlike certain other recent writers I do have a certain amount of respect for Dawkins as a historical scholar, even if my understanding of certain topics is profoundly different from his own. However, the above review seems to confirm my initial impressions of the book: that it wouldn't present much new information that I haven't already considered.
Further reading on The God Delusion:
I was going to write up a commentary on Pat Robertson's most recent vague, eyeroll-worthy 'prediction', but fortunately Stand to Reason's Melinda Penner has already written up a brief commentary that expresses my own concerns about Mr. Robinson quite succinctly:
Robertson has given us no reason to believe that he is [a prophet] – especially given the poor track record of his past prophetic utterances. … When we use God's name, we should evaluate whether it will bring God honor or ridicule, whether we have the proper authority to use it.
http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2007/01/speaking_for_go.html
This is really, IMHO, an example of using God's name in vain (Exodus 20:7), as Melinda also notes in her article. I don't doubt that prophecy is still possible, but that doesn't mean it is in any way frequent. Sometimes when we read the Bible (which by nature records uncommon, atypical events) we get the impression that miracles were, and should still be, happening on a continuous, almost daily basis. But that is not the case; the incidents of prophecy and miracles were recorded precisely because they were the exception to the norm.
(BTW, yeah that's me in the pic above; edited from an old picture taken about 3 years ago.)
Related reading:
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