Dawkins and the empty chair

William Lane Craig has two doctoral degrees, has published over 30 books, debated the world’s leading atheists including Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but STILL Richard Dawkins will not debate him!



With thanks to Tony Watkins for this.

The one argument atheists can’t answer

When the apostle Peter wrote a letter to Christians who found themsevles increasingly on the margins of society, mocked and even insulted here was his advice;

Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

In our increasingly secular society how do we respond to the growing numbers of people who are not just sceptical about Christianity but are downright hostile? How do we answer militant atheists who think no good thing comes from believing in God and that the only good religion is a dead one?

Well we should answer their arguments and there are good books worth reading and giving away on why Dawkins and Hitchens et al. are wrong.  But maybe we have one knock-down apologetic argument that atheism cannot answer – the power of a transformed life.

The great defender of the Christian faith, Francis Schaeffer, said ‘the greatest apologetic is love’.

The one thing that atheism cannot explain or understand or rubbish is the extraordinary power of a transformed life.

So when the Guardian this week ran a story on the remarkable work of a church who decided to pour out their lives in sacrificial service of drug-addicts and prostitutes it was a great reminder that maybe Peter was right. When the pastor of a bible-teaching, Jesus-preaching church also says ‘”The real issues are how we should express and find love for the outcasts and the downtrodden” the world even as it accuses Christians of doing wrong still sees our good deeds and acknowledges something remarkable is going on.

John Harris author of the Guardian piece writes;

A question soon pops into my head. How does a militant secularist weigh up the choice between a cleaned-up believer and an ungodly crack addict? Back at my hotel I search the atheistic postings on the original Comment is free thread for even the hint of an answer, but I can’t find one anywhere.

The last Roman Emperor who viciously persecuted the church was Julian. He hated Christians with a vengence but even he conceded;

[Christianity] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.

The New Statesman on why Dawkins disappoints and the man who ‘eats atheists for breakfast’

‘There has never been a really convincing philosophical argument for the non-existence of God’

I don’t agree with all of it’s conclusions but an interesting read not least for recognising the failure of new atheism to defend their cause with any great ability.

Fantastic response to Hawking & heaven by fellow MND sufferer

Hawking says ‘there is no heaven’

In an interview in the Guardian yesterday Stephen Hawking confirmed his belief that ‘There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark‘

Hawking also argues that ‘Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing‘ a claim that is widely disputed within the scientific community.

For a Christian response to the idea of an uncaused universe see William Lane Craig’s Cosmological argument

Why one Oxford Univ. atheist suggests Dawkins is a coward

An Oxford University Philosopher and atheist has written an open letter suggesting that Richard Dawkins might be running scared for refusing to debate Dr. William Lane Craig, arguably the greatest Christian apologist and debater of our time.

Dawkins has consistently refused to debate Craig even though Craig has debated just about every atheist debater out there. Why when Dawkins will debate lesser men without any hesitation does he continue to avoid Craig? It certainly looks as if he is trying to dodge a debate!

In his letter Dr Daniel Came from Worcester College writes,

“The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.

“I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House.”

For the full story see the Telegraph report.

For a great expose on Dawkins His Grace has some very interesting insights.

New Statesman discovers why 30 leading thinkers believe in God

Here’s a great article from the New Statesman that introduces us to 30 leading thinkers including eminent scientists and philosophers and asks for their reasons for faith in God.



In a follow-up article the author Andrew Zak Williams assesses their reasons for belief.

32 top tips for giving better apologetics talks

Preparation

1. Know and interact with the three best arguments against the Christian position

2. Pray hard

Content

1. Refer to the Bible, maybe use a passage from the Bible.  Demonstrate that it is your authority.  Show that you are not speaking on your own behalf but seeking to represent Christ.

2. Take people to the cross

3. Don’t try and say too much and introduce too many ideas.  What you have to leave out have ready to introduce, in condensed form,  in the question-time

4. Work hard on the introduction – engaging and demonstrating an ability to resonate with the ‘problem’ being addressed. Show them that you ‘feel’ the problem.

5. If there is an ‘authority’ on an issue try to cite him (as long as you understand him).  e.g. Dawkins on atheism, Singer on ethics,

6. Don’t cite Christian authorities by name who would be unknown to a non-Christian audience e.g. Stott, Keller, Schaeffer…

7. Don’t be defensive about Biblical truth – our role is not to defend God but rather to show the truthfulness and reasonableness of what God says.

8. Never apologise for what the Bible says but do admit to personal struggle in accepting what the Bible says e.g. gay friends,….

9. Always admit  what we do not know because the Bible does not tell us

10. Always admit what you don’t know because you haven’t thought about it.

11. Trust the Lord by speaking clearly of what we do know even if you think it will push people away from the gospel.

12. Expect to be misunderstood and be patient

13. Have in mind a variety of listener

Communication

1. Show why this is a necessary and important issue for them to resolve for themselves not just an issue to see Christians squirm over.

2. Make clear the limitations a 20-25 minute talk place on addressing the issue at hand. Tell them what you do hope to achieve in a single talk.

3. Watch out for the crunch of gears between ‘prosecution’ and ‘invitation’ – we don’t want an apologetic talk with 2 ways to live bolted on the end

4. Show them that you love them, however you can.

5. Help your hearer to see that they need the gospel to be true if they are to make sense of life. Show them from practical examples why that is so.

6. Don’t be aggressive, antagonistic or hostile to your audience even if they are all of those things to you.

7. Don’t attack the man eg insult Richard Dawkins but do show the folly of his thinking

8. Don’t give them reason to dislike you – only the gospel

9. Invitation needs to be clear – exactly what do you want them to do in response and why.

We must learn the language of our audience. And let me say at the outset that it is no use laying down a priori what the ‘plain man’ does or does not understand. You have to find out by experience…You must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome…but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conclusion that if you cannot translate your own thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts are confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood your own meaning.

C.S. Lewis – God in the Dock

Question time

1. Listen well to the question: thank them for it (no matter how stupid)

2. Take your time in answering a question, if necessary ask for clarification

3. Be prepared to offer a challenge back to the questioner.  E.g. Our answer may leave us with unanswered questions but what alternative explanation are they putting forward

4. Don’t enter into a to-and-fro with a single questioner but invite them to talk with you on your own afterwards.

5. Have a clear finish time and stick to it, but stay around as long as you can afterwards

6. Always have literature available and plenty of it. Explain which would be helpful for who,  Try not to have too many different books that would overwhelm or confuse.

7. Don’t let the questions set an entirely new agenda – try and draw Q&A back to the topic under consideration as set out in the title.

8. Remind people of what you said, briefly, in the talk as you answer questions.

Why Atheists are believers too

In his book A short history of nearly everything Bill Bryson writes ‘It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.’

Bryson, like a lot of atheists I’ve met, accepts that the universe had a beginning but can’t accept that God was the cause.

Yet we must all answer the question first asked by Leibniz ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ or to put it in more scientific language ‘why is the universe here?’. There are only three options open to us;

1) The universe has always existed

2) Someone or something caused the universe – that which some people call ‘god’

3) The universe came to be literally from nothing (without a cause)

Now what I find striking and very revealing is that most atheists opt, like Bryson, for option 3.

It’s striking because in doing so it’s hard not to accuse them of thinking irrationally. After all there is nothing in science and nothing in our known experience to suggest that something comes from nothing. It’s striking because atheists enjoy nothing more than mocking Christians for believing in something without evidence or proof, namely god and yet do exactly the same when it comes to the origins of the universe.

After all what could be more improbable than believing that the universe simply came out of nowhere. Is it not in fact the most counter-intuitive and illogical option of the three available to us. It is to go against everything that we know and everything that science teaches. When something happens we ALWAYS look for a cause. We seek a reasonable explanation. We ask where does it come from. We never shrug our shoulders and say things just happen. If we did we’d give up scientific endeavour.

Atheism’s article of faith

Belief in the god of the Bible is dismissed as being as fanciful as belief in pink unicorns or the flying spaghetti monster. But Atheists don’t enjoy being reminded that their whole worldview rests on believing an extremely unlikely idea – a self-creating universe – and believing it as an article of faith.

It’s why I not only ask atheists ‘why does this universe exist?’ but most importantly ‘what reason do you have for holding the answer that you do?’

So when an atheist such as Quentin Smith concludes ‘the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing’ he is not speaking from reason but against reason for there is no reason at all to believe that things come into being from absolutely nothing. An atheist who believes in an uncaused universe is not being reasonable at all. In reality they are doing what the theist is accused of doing all the time – playing the faith card! They are saying ‘I believe because I believe and I may not have a reason to believe it but it’s what I want to believe and that is enough for me.’  Maybe they think that one day we will find reason to believe it but we all know that at present there is none and by any other name that is religion. Belief not based on what you know to be true but what you want to be true.

What is the conclusion?

Atheists are as much people of faith, belief, maybe even superstition, as the rest of humanity. We believe things because we choose to believe them and we believe things not because they are scientifically based, logical or likely but we believe because the one thing we know is that we don’t want to believe the alternative.

We are all of us believers and believers in something that we cannot prove. Welcome to the club my atheist friend.

I set fire to my Bible

Peter Hitchens is a journalist and author. He is also the brother of new atheist Christopher Hitchens. But whilst Christopher continues to attack God at any and every opportunity, Peter has experienced a remarkable conversion to Christianity.

He describes how atheism led him to faith and to the discovery that what as a boy he had rejected, marked by the burning of his bible, was in fact right all along. He joins a number of prominent atheists who have abandoned their atheism in recent years in favour of belief in God, including AN Wilson, Julie Birchill and Fay Weldon.

What was it about new atheism that particularly grated? Not least, he says, that it is ‘self-satisfied, arrogant, intolerant, completely resistant to any kind of outside argument and contemptuous of it.’

Hitchens has now written on the subject in a book entitled The rage against God.