Church Voices

Nothing, apparently.

It’s about time Dawkins had a good exchange with an able defender of Christianity. Claiming a desire “not to further their cause” as his reason for refusing public debate with Christians, Dawkins has remained at a comfortable distance from anyone who could challenge him on equal grounds. He’d much rather verbally harass anyone who doesn’t conform to his own worldview from the podium, a friendly interview, or any other public forum that doesn’t allow attendees to gain any sort of solid ground upon which to make and defend a case. Of course you also have Dawkins being open to the option of confronting Christians who are obviously not prepared to engage him, such as when he randomly showed up at New Life Church and interrogated Ted Haggard.

I am reminded of a video of Dawkins lecturing at RMWC in Lynchburg, VA, during which he was met with several questions from attending theists from Liberty University in the Q&A session. One by one, he made them look like ignorant fools from the stage—not necessarily because their questions weren’t good (some of them weren’t), but because, quite simply, the audience as a whole wasn’t competent enough to identify his shallow responses as such. Rather, they cheered triumphantly during and after each one of his replies. As I watched the video, I was literally convinced that the crowd would have cheered anything Dawkins said, even if it were something like “I’m glad you listeners have no training in formal and informal fallacies.”

It should be no surprise, then, that Dawkins got his foot put in his mouth on Irish radio during his exchange with David Quinn, columnist (and also, as it seems, a fine Christian apologist) at the Irish Independent. The infamous “man of evidence” was reduced to saying “well, I simply deny that” in response to Quinn’s charges. Wow, great response. Without the noise of an audience following his remarks, it’s clear not much noise is coming from Dawkins at all (indeed, the gaps in his arguments are so big that it takes just that to fill them—the mindless ovation of an entire audience). I’m not saying Quinn butchered Dawkins, but had the show lasted any longer than 15 minutes (indeed, it was just getting good) I could very easily see it going that route. You can listen to the recording of the radio talk show featuring Dawkins and Quinn here.

Dawkins is like Britney Spears in the university setting: when you strip him of all the fancy surround sound and digital equipment and backup dancers and voice synthesizers, you have nothing left but a mind-numbing nasal howl. Of course it remains the case that the Dawkins-following atheists play the role of the teeny-bopper drones who actually buy into that studio-produced crap when its Styrofoam infrastructure isn’t exposed, whereas the Christians correctly identified it as crap to begin with.

And before someone tries to charge my thoughts about Dawkins unreasonably biased in lieu of being a Christian theist, consider the testimony of the eminent atheist philosopher Michael Ruse. After reading Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delusion, Ruse comments, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.” The media may be eating Dawkins up right now, but I think they’ll spit him back out soon enough (along with Sam Harris).