Richard Dawkins is Moving Towards Sanity
Richard Dawkins, blowhard stalwart of the New Atheist movement, has made a rather stunning and significant admission in a recent debate. According to Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? by Melanie Phillips in the Spectator:
Personally, I think that is a move towards reality and away from his fantasyland that he has been advocating recently. He is moving in the direction of Antony Flew, and I encourage him to explore this admission more carefully.
HT: Apologetics 315
This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:A serious case could be made for a deistic God.
This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.
Personally, I think that is a move towards reality and away from his fantasyland that he has been advocating recently. He is moving in the direction of Antony Flew, and I encourage him to explore this admission more carefully.
HT: Apologetics 315
Comments
Keep him in prayer (just don't let him know it yet.)
Christians too happy, Atheists too mad.
Saying that a "SERIOUS case COULD be made for a deistic god," while no doubt a stunning admission from Dawkins, is hardly an admission of belief in such a god, and, if read closely, doesn't even state that he thinks such a case HAS been made, only that one "could" make such a case. And again, we're talking about a much different god than Yahweh.
While, I'm sure many "fanboys" will freak out over this comment, I think a lot of otherwise rational, independent minded atheists who don't take marching orders from whatever loud mouth atheist they happen to be reading, would never have had a problem making that concession in the first place.
Btw, when I say fanboys, I mean particularly the internet fanboys who are generally irrational and simply regurgitate his words.
Anyway, I agree you can make too much of it. Still surprising to me, though.
Note that the article says:
I asked Dawkins whether he had indeed changed his position and become more open to ideas which lay outside the scientific paradigm. He vehemently denied this and expressed horror that he might have given this impression.
It looks like he has not moved anywhere and this blog post takes a sentence out of context.
I have never personally seen him give even that much room for theism before....I think... is a major movement by Dawkins.
This is an argument of ignorance. Just because you personally have not seen him "give room" it does not mean there is a movement. Please read my previous comment again.
Enough for now. Anyway I'm glad to hear Dawkins say this. It's a much more reasonable position to leave his previously held belief that "God almost certainly doesn't exist."
Thanks for this.