Yesterday I stumbled upon this interview, which was not included in Richard Dawkins’ “Root of All Evil?” movie. Here Dr. Dawkins interviews Dr. Alister McGrath, who currently teaches at Oxford University, the same school as Dr. Dawkins. Dr. McGrath has earned two PHDs from Oxford, one in molecular biophysics, and the other in theology. Here it the interview (provided by Dr. Dawkins himself) in its entirety:

You can also download the video in .MOV form (88mb)

Dr. Dawkins comes off relatively well in the video. Although he refers to some of his critics as “fleas” on his website, he does seem to have a certain respect for Dr. McGrath. It was refreshing to see an exchange between a prominent atheist and theist done in a respectful manner, but I would have much rather seen a real discussion between the two, instead of Dr. Dawkins posing all the questions (and his own views) with Dr. McGrath continually forced to be on the defensive.

I must comment that, although I thought Dr. McGrath handled the interview quite well, I don’t entirely agree with some of his responses. There were just a couple times where, as I watched and listened, I thought “No, no! I think I have a better reply than that!” While it no doubt seems rather presumptuous of me to disagree with someone like McGrath who holds two PHDs and has published dozens of books and academic articles, nevertheless I’ll try to make a few follow-up posts to this entry where I give my own responses to some of Dr. Dawkins’ questions.

Related Reading:

• The God Solution: A Reply to the God Delusion - One of my professors wrote this upcoming book (release date July 10 2007) that proposes a response to Dr. Dawkins’ popular book The God Delusion.

I forgot to post it before, but Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers alive today, wrote a review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Christianity Today magazine recently. Read it here:

» The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

The title of the article is groan-worthy, but the article itself is not. Plantinga begins his review by making an important note:

[Dawkins] and [Daniel] Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days … Here it’s not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party’s candidate at a Republican rally.

This is one of the initial objections I had to Sam Harris’ book, Letter to a Christian Nation: This is not a “Christian nation”, it’s a secular nation, especially in academia. Dawkins’ dismissal of biochemist Michael Behe’s work out of hand because “Behe believes in God” is an example of the prevailing academic attitude.^* Also, note that in Dawkins’ own nation, One third of all Christians say: We’ve suffered discrimination (Dailymail.co.uk news story).

Also worthy of note, one of my professors at Tyndale University College & Seminary is working on the first North American book in reply to The God Delusion. Alister McGrath’s book is already out in the UK (McGrath also teaches at Oxford University; I wonder Dawkins and McGrath have ever bumped into each other on campus?) but I haven’t read it yet either, so I don’t know how good it is.

For the record, I still haven’t read Dawkins’ book. I should have time to read non-school related books after I finish my degree this summer.

^* This incident is related in more detail, in context, in James W. Sire’s excellent book Why Good Arguments Often Fail, p63-64.

I can see that this ridiculousness is probably going to be fairly big. Already the old Da Vinci Code Blog was spammed by someone advertising the official website. (Posting twice from the same IP within minutes under different names.)

So I made up a page explaining some of the many problems with the James Cameron documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus”, aka “Jesus Family Tomb”. It contains links to several other pertinent resources on this topic. Click below to read it:

Feel free to pass the link around, copy it to your own site, hang it on your fridge, whatever. I’ll work on it some more later when I have more time; this is a “preliminary” version. We already went through this once with the lamentable Da Vinci Code, and now it’s started all over again …

Related reading: In addition to my page linked above, a “Top Ten” list has been posted to Christian Newswire: Ten Reasons Why The Jesus Tomb Claim is Bogus: Leading Scholars Say Discovery Channel ‘Documentary’ Makes for Good TV, Bad History and Bad Science

Lately I’ve been reading Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?: A Professor And a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity, a book that chronicles an email discussion between Dr Preston Jones (Christian, history professor, PhD University of Ottawa) and Dr Greg Graffin (naturalist, singer from the punk band Bad Religion, PhD Cornell University). Overall, it’s an interesting read. I’m glad their discussion never turned into a “debate” because, generally speaking, a debate is about “winning” at all costs, not honest discussion or learning about how others view things.

I’m slightly disappointed so far with some of Dr Jones’ responses, though. One of the main things that annoys me so far is the logic given to assume a naturalistic worldview. [EDIT: As Preston himself (!) points out in the comments, he does not support Gaffin's view, and in fact does support a view similar to the one I expound later on in this post. Probably the format of the dialogue made it difficult to get his view out in the open fully in the book.]

Now, I’m probably oversimplifying this, and Dr Graffin could probably kick my ass (in both the physical and intellectual arenas) but nonetheless here’s how I understand the argument:

1. Empirical observation of the universe is the ’sum of all truth’. (cf p.43 of Jones and Gaffin’s book)
2. Therefore, the only way to know the truth about God is to use the same methods used to study naturalistic phenomena.
3. Since there is no proof of God observable in this way, God does not exist.

Now, while I disagree with point #1 (this seems to be a self-refuting argument; how can you prove this statement is true by empirical observation?) and also with point #3 (see for example What about natural theology? which suggests that we can know some things about God via observation), I’d like to comment briefly on point #2.

The idea that the same methods used to study naturalistic phenomena (that is, the physical things in our own universe) can be used to study God (who is outside of, not limited to, our physical universe) is to me a faulty assumption. I’ll try not to repeat what I’ve already posted on this blog, so see my post Knowing God for a fuller explanation, but the gist of it is this: “I am suggesting that rigidly applying the same methodology used for studying mundane things would be in some sense deficient when considering divine things.” If God is in an entirely different category than physical things, we cannot “study” Him in the same way we study physical things, so therefore concluding that God does not exist because He cannot be empirically studied is a faulty assumption. This doesn’t prove that God exists, it only suggests that the naturalistic reasoning like that given above is not sufficient to conclude that God does not exist.

Further reading:

• Lessons from a Punker Ph.D. - Preston Jones reflects on his conversation with Greg Graffin.
• Finding Faith - Brian McLaren’s book (in particular pages 102-104) were the inspiration for my line of thinking on this subject.
• Is Faith Just a Psychological Crutch? - I hear this all the time: “You may need God, but I don’t.” Implicit in the statement is “You believe in God because you’re weak”. Besides being fallacious reasoning, I don’t think this charge is true.