I'm still slowly working my way through Dawkins' The God Delusion. I'm about halfway done with chapter four, "Why God Almost Certainly Doesn't Exist". Chapter three, in which Dawkins attempts to refute the positive case for God's existence, was unconvincing, for the reasons that have already been noted as well as others. I'm making copious notes as I read so that I'll be able to make a series of posts when I finish reading it, but because of this it's taking a long time to read.
One of the threads on the FORU.MS discussion board was deleted recently, and one of my old posts went along with it. (Not sure why the thread was removed.) A mod was kind enough to forward my post in the thread to me before it was removed, so here's my reply below to someone who posted some comments on science and faith, which I have edited & expanded a bit for this blog: (original poster's comments in italics; assume all spelling errors in his/her writing were in their original post)
Christians don't trust in Science because it clean's their clock. I mean Noah's ark? Camon.
(more…)
Further to my first post about miracles (wow that was almost a year ago) the following thoughts came to mind today as I was reading In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God's Actions in History, which examines the concept of the miraculous in light of Hume's essay "Of Miracles" (and later works which expanded upon that essay).
The idea that science disproves the possibility of miracles is, IMHO, extremely misguided. Science is able to confirm that certain things are testable and repeatable, that is, empirically verifiable in the present. Miracles, by nature, are none of these things. For example, today as I rode home on the bus I glanced out the window as the bus came to a stop. To my surprise I saw a rabbit sitting on the grass beside the road. I had never seen a rabbit here before (a fairly built-up area along a heavily trafficked road). This event is still not testable (you'll have to take my word for it that I observed a rabbit earlier today) and not repeatable (even if we were to get on the same bus, drive along the same road, etc, the circumstances could never be exactly the same) and yet the event really did occur. There is no reason to claim that this was a miraculous event, but even here science cannot test whether this mundane event occurred.
Therefore it's no surprise that science has not (cannot) confirm (or disprove) the miraculous. Richard R. Purtill notes in his essay "Defining Miracles" (also part of the aforementioned book) that scientists "tend to confine their investigations to the ordinary course of nature and to ignore such exceptions as might be made to the course of nature by God, since exceptions brought about by personal agency cannot be predicted from a study of what normally happens".
Trying to test whether a supposed miraculous event occurred in history using the scientific method is sort of like trying to determine whether a banana is tasty by sticking it in your ear and listening to it. It's inappropriate methodology. There's nothing wrong with the scientific method for testing natural phenomenon. However a miracle is not natural, and therefore it is misguided to dismiss, say, the resurrection by appealing to science that shows that people rising from the dead is impossible. Of course we observe that dead people stay dead, and that's entirely the point. This wasn't lost on first century people either: Jesus' resurrection was a big deal because people knew that dead people are supposed to stay dead.
This does not mean that science has no part in examining the truth claims of miracles, but only that as unique events in history, a miracle claim is more properly investigated as history rather than science.
Further reading: The Facts Concerning the Resurrection: Don't believe the New Testament is a reliable historical source? I'd argue that the NT is historically reliable, but try let's throwing out most of what it contains, and only focus on facts agreed upon by the vast majority of scholars, Christian or not. What we find might surprise you!
Apparently Amazon decided to delete my review of the book The Lost Books of the Bible by William Hone (ed). That's unfortunate, because none of the reviews seem to mention the obvious: That having a "lost book of the Bible" is impossible.
Greg Koukl examines the idea of having lost books in his article "No Lost Books of the Bible". In summary:
[T]here are two ways of looking at this: a supernatural or natural perspective. I would contend that there are no other ways of looking at this question; no other options. No matter who you are out there you either think of the Bible as being God's inspired Word … or the Bible is merely the statement of beliefs of the early church, without any supernatural content.
Is it possible that in the first sense of the word Bible that the books could be lost? Wait a minute, if God is supernaturally overseeing it, then God is supernaturally involved in seeing that His book gets written down and preserved. So we have God's supernatural protection if it has a supernatural quality to it. You may say that the supernatural element is bogus, but you can see that from this sense of the definition that it's not really possible to think that God could lose His own book.
Maybe the Bible isn't supernatural, it's a statement of beliefs of the leaders of the church. Okay, if that's the case then who has the final word on which books belong in the Bible? The leaders of the early church. Therefore, by very definition any books that they cast into outer darkness are not part of the Bible. It's their decision to decide which books represent their beliefs.
Related reading:
One raw winter night a farmer heard an irregular thumping sound against his kitchen storm door. He went to a window and watched as tiny, shivering sparrows, attracted to the evident warmth inside, beat in vain against the glass.
Touched, the farmer bundled up and trudged through fresh snow to open the barn door for the struggling birds. He turned on the lights and tossed some hay in the corner. But the sparrows, which had scattered in all directions when he emerged from the house, hid in the darkness, afraid.
The man tried various tactics to get them into the barn. He laid down a trail of Saltine cracker crumbs to direct them. He tried circling behind the birds to drive them to the barn. Nothing worked. He, a huge, alien creature, had terrified them; the birds couldn't comprehend that he actually desired to help. The farmer withdrew to his house and watched the doomed sparrows through a window. As he stared, a thought hit him like lightning from a clear blue sky: If only I could become a bird – one of them – just for a moment. Then I wouldn't frighten them so. I could show them the way to warmth and safety.
At the same moment, another thought dawned on him. He grasped the reason Jesus was born. (As told by Paul Harvey)
As a parable (a simple story told to communicate a larger idea) this story isn't perfect; any parable breaks down if you analyze it to death. But the message behind this parable is very powerful. Could God come near? There's no reason why, if God is love, that He could not. Did He? If the Christmas claims are real, then yes, God did, and there is indeed a reasonable basis to have hope!
Further reading:
Permanent Link to 'Science and faith'