http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ ... l#commentsThis is a light-hearted diversion for the God-hating adherents to this site (to whom I occasionally fling hunks of bleeding flesh, so that I can watch them come flapping from afar to feast on it).
Maybe it will also be a rest from the tedium of responding (yet again) to the various lame and exploded ‘arguments’ of the drug lobby, for making their selfish habit even more legal than it already is. If just one of them ever paid any attention, or engaged seriously, it would make it seem worthwhile. But they never do. It’s all mechanical, destructive rhetoric they’ve got off the telly, or learned in PSHE classes.
Now, serious engagement was exactly what we got in the uplifting surroundings of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (named after Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, since you ask, and one of the great buildings of Europe, superb inside and outside but perhaps most astonishing of all up in the mighty roof-beams that make it possible) in Oxford on Tuesday night. The Sheldonian is one of a group of buildings which in largely embody English history, as well as expressing the Royal grandeur of the restored Stuarts. They look pretty startling now, but set amid the small and muddy town that was Oxford at the end of the 17th century, they must have seemed almost impossibly majestic.
Next to it is Bodley’s Great Library, and beyond that Radcliffe Square dominated by The College of All Souls, a monument to the dead of the Hundred Years’ War, and the soaring church of St Mary the Virgin, scene of Thomas Cranmer’s great trial and renunciation of the Pope. Next to the Sheldonian is the Clarendon Building, once the headquarters of the University Press, and built thanks to the profits of the ‘History of the Great Rebellion’, the first great account of the English Civil War, written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sheldon, a courageous Anglican who had to be ejected bodily from All Souls, by the Cromwellians, was a close ally of Clarendon, so it is fitting that buildings named after both of them stand next to each other. Three hundred yards away is the spot where Cranmer, (and before him Latimer and Ridley) were burned to death for their Protestant beliefs.
But I digress.
The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins’s book ‘The God Delusion’ with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.
I have to confess here that I don’t find Craig’s debating style or manner very attractive. It is too smooth and American for me – and his best moment (again, for me) came when he dropped his salesman’s manner and said, in effect, that he was sorry if he seemed too certain, and that his fundamental claims were modest ones – that the Theist position was scientifically tenable.
The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.
Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.
The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.
For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.
He doesn’t (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : ‘In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either, it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe’. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.
The trouble is that so many ‘official’ Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig’s training in logic and science.
He is the antidote to the lazy belief that in some way ‘science’ is incompatible with ‘religion’, and to the idea that all believers are unlettered morons who think the earth is 5,000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
This is, I’m afraid, all too often the tone of the anti-God people who come here to post. It’s settled, you’re stupid, why not give up?
It’s not settled. We’re not stupid. We won’t give up.
(NB: A note to Mr ‘Crosland’. I won’t respond to any queries he posts here - and I have a small bet with myself as to what form they will take this time - until he replies to my ‘childishly simple’ private letter to him, which he has had since August).
An erudite article by Christopher's retarded brother
Thank you both.
