The "New Atheism"

Transcript The "New Atheism"

Kevin Harris: We are talking about the so-called New Atheism with Dr. William Lane Craig. This has recently been branded so by the media due to some best selling books by atheist authors talking about atheism. More and more people are starting to write on this topic. What should be our attitude as believers in Christ, Bill?

Dr. Craig: I think we need to be culturally alert to what is going on in our society and try to speak out boldly and intelligently in defense of the Christian faith in the face of these attacks. But I think we must not become defensive. We don’t want to look like we are the persecuted minority or worried by these. I don’t think, in fact, these do represent a major cultural movement. I think this is the defensive backlash of a wounded animal, frankly. Atheism is on the retreat today and it is fighting back now. It is lashing out. I think we need to remain confident and calm and communicate the love of Christ but at the same time be very firm and intelligent as we handle the arguments and rebut them.

Kevin Harris: Richard Dawkins has said that Darwinian evolution has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. So he really does think that Darwinian evolution is the answer to theism.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, he does seem to think that although he himself admits that Darwinian evolution doesn’t do anything to explain away the fine-tuning. He thinks that that has yet to be explained; that there really is no good explanation for that. When I looked at his chapter in The God Delusion on the arguments for the existence of God, I was rather surprised by, frankly, how superficial his handling of the arguments are. For example, I think that he says nothing in response to the Leibnizian argument from contingency – the argument that there needs to be an explanation for why something exists rather than nothing. He has nothing about the kalam cosmological argument – the argument that there was a beginning of the universe and therefore the universe needs to have a transcendent cause. He talks about the design argument but he doesn’t deal with the fine-tuning. He only deals with the biological aspects of it but has nothing to offer in terms of how you can explain the fine-tuning of the universe – of the Big Bang for intelligent life. The moral argument – here he is just completely inconsistent. On the one hand he grants the premise that if God does not exist, there are no objective moral values and duties. He is very clear that he thinks that morality is just basically a human illusion. But on the other hand, over and over again in the book he makes moral judgments and affirms moral truths and therefore affirms the second premise of the moral argument that objective moral values exist. So he doesn’t refute that argument. Finally, the ontological argument – oddly enough he spends the most time on that one. He spends several pages on the ontological argument but if you look at it all it is is ridicule. He doesn’t know anything about Alvin Plantinga’s defense of the ontological argument. He just mocks it and makes fun of it. It is very clear he doesn’t know the literature and that he is not familiar with the argument. So I was very unimpressed, quite honestly, looking at his handling of the arguments for God’s existence.

Kevin Harris: I am curious about a quote attributed to him and that is the study of biology – the challenge there – is that you are examining systems that look as if they are designed . . .

Dr. Craig: Right, and he says you need to constantly remind yourself that they are not.

Kevin Harris: Why not just say, well, maybe because they are! Your naturalism isn’t going to let you say that, I guess. Dr. Craig, you’ve debated the top atheist thinkers in the world on university campuses and at other events. What about a debate with Dawkins?

Dr. Craig: I would welcome it. I would like to have a debate with Dawkins. In fact, I recently had a UK debating and speaking tour that took me to quite a number of British universities. It was set up by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in the UK. The board of directors chairman Peter May of InterVarsity wrote a very nice letter to Richard Dawkins at Oxford in which he explained that William Lane Craig was coming to Great Britain on a university speaking tour and that I was a philosopher interested in philosophy of science and wanted to know if he would be interested in participating in a debate with me on the existence of God. [1] So it wasn’t about creation-evolution. I wasn’t presented as a religious person or theologian, but as a philosopher of science. The letter that Dawkins sent back to Peter May said “I don’t know who William Lane Craig is and if I were to debate a religious person he would have to be at least a bishop. While a debate with Craig might look good on Craig’s resume, it wouldn’t look good on mine.” Therefore, he declined to engage. So I didn’t have the chance to debate with Dawkins.

Kevin Harris: What are some of the values in doing these debates on campuses.

Dr. Craig: I think there are a couple of values. One is that for many students this is the first time that they have ever encountered a Christian intellectual. They have never met a Christian who has substantive reasons for believing what he does. I think it helps to destroy that pernicious caricature of Christians that televangelists have put out in our culture of emotional, Bible pounding fanatics, frankly. So I love to shatter that stereotype by participating in these debates and in a gracious way just hanging the other fellow out to dry by showing that his arguments don’t hold water.

I think it also has a tremendously encouraging effect upon the Christians who come to these events. Christians go away from these events with their heads held high, proud to be Christians, and anxious to share their faith on their campus. I remember after one debate on a Canadian campus, a student came up to me and said, “I can’t wait to go out and share my faith in Christ.” He was so excited. It is just a shot in the arm for these students who often feel beaten down and beleaguered to go to one of these debates and see the Christian faith come out head and shoulders above the atheistic or agnostic or other non-Christian worldview. So it is a real encouragement to Christians.

Finally, thirdly, I think what these debates do is they help to make Christianity an issue in the public square. They make Christianity a credible alternative for thinking men and women today. It is seen as something that is worthy of debate and worthy of discussion and exploration. That itself, I think, is a victory, Kevin. So long as Christianity can be viewed as an intellectually credible alternative for people today, it gives people the freedom to respond to Christ without thinking that they have to blow their brains out first. It gives them the permission to believe. So even if they don’t come to Christ through the arguments or on the basis of the arguments, these sort of arguments give a person the permission to believe if he feels his heart is drawn to Christ.

Kevin Harris: Let me just show my hand and just say that debates teach me so much. I learn so much from debates. After I hear a debate or I attend a debate – and debates go back traditionally hundreds of years; it is a fine tradition that I hope never, ever goes away. After I hear a debate, see a debate, attend a debate, I usually go on a marathon reading spree. It sends me to my mind. It sends me to further study. So, I think it is just awesome. I am just so glad that you are out there doing it. It has to be kind of unnerving some times. You got some guy throwing everything he’s got at you.

Dr. Craig: Oh, I’ll tell you. Before some of these debates, the atmosphere is like a heavyweight prizefight. The atmosphere in the room is so electric. And the tension, you can just cut it with a knife. It really is remarkable. In the debate I had in England – the first debate I had – it was the second day we were in England and trying to get over jet lag. It was with Lewis Wolpert who is kind of a Dawkins clone and it was in Central Hall, Westminster, right across the street from Westminster Abbey – it faces Westminster Abby in central London. This is a huge hall which holds some 2,000 people. They had no idea how many would come to this debate. They thought maybe a couple hundred or so because people in Britain are very secularized and don’t attend church. As the time of the debate would draw closer, I would go out from behind the stage and kind of filter among the crowd, walk in the halls, look into the room, and the auditorium kept filling up and filling up and soon the whole ground floor was filled. Then people began to fill the galleries and soon the galleries began to be filled. When we walked out onto the stage finally for the debate the whole place was packed. [2] The moderator, John Humphrys, who is a BBC and newspaper commentator in England, he just couldn’t believe it. He said I’ve never seen anything like this before. Obviously, something is going on here that there is this kind of interest in these religious topics. So the atmosphere is just really, really exciting in these debates. I do love to participate in them.

Kevin Harris: By the way, I want to send people to the website, reasonablefaith.org, and they can read the newsletter chronicling your trip to the UK. It reads like a novel. It really does. As the events unfolded, your adventures there, I am expecting a movie of the week at some point.

Dr. Craig: Jan, my wife, and I do think of these as adventures. They are just marvelous adventurers to be on. Also on the website, Kevin, don’t forget there are quite a number of transcripts of debates there that can be read. [3] Some of the debates were recorded but the quality wasn’t very good. So what we did was we had those transcribed and those can be read right there at the website. Then of course we have DVDs and CDs of some of the debates where there are quality recordings.

Kevin Harris: ReasonableFaith.org. As we are talking about the New Atheism, Daniel Dennett is another author, he has a best selling book called Breaking the Spell. The implications there are of religion. What is his take?

Dr. Craig: Again, Dennett is an interesting character. I was just at a conference with him in New Orleans a couple of months ago on atheism and theism. He was debating Alister McGrath on this topic. Then several of us were invited to give comments on the whole debate. I was one of them; Keith Parsons was another. I decided I would look at Dennett’s response to the typical arguments for the existence of God, since he doesn’t think there are any good reasons. Again, Kevin, I was shocked. This man is an eminent philosopher at Tufts University. This is not some popularizer. Yet, if you looked at his responses to the typical arguments for the existence of God, George Smith does a better job – a popularizer – than what Dennett did. For example, his response to the kalam cosmological argument – which says that whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause – he agrees with the first premise that anything that begins to exist must have a cause that brings it into being. He agrees with the second premise. He thinks the universe began to exist and that the Big Bang gives good evidence of that. So, he agrees with the conclusion – the universe has a cause. But, here’s his answer to the argument. Yeah, the universe has a cause. The universe caused itself. The universe brought itself into being. He says it is the ultimate bootstrapping trick. The universe pulled itself up by its own bootstraps, it brought itself into existence. [4] And I pointed out to him, “You know, in order for the universe to bring itself into existence, it would have to exist before it existed.” Otherwise, it is not self-caused, it would be uncaused – it would come out of nothing. So his view would be that the universe had to exist before it existed, which is a self-contradiction. It is logically incoherent. And yet this was his response to the cosmological argument.

Kevin Harris: I imagine he’ll find another one after that conference.

Dr. Craig: I think so. It was funny because after I presented my response, there was applause from the audience and then he was invited to give an impromptu reaction. He walked up to the podium and he just stood there looking out at the audience for a moment in silence and then he said, “That was a virtuoso performance.” Basically, he had nothing more to say. What his answer was, “Well, I guess what this shows is that when you have plausible premises leading to an implausible conclusion then I guess you’ve got to go back and deny one of those plausible premises after all.” That was his response.

Kevin Harris: He seems to kind of lean on psychology a little bit and Darwinian evolution as an explanation for how religion evolved. I am not totally familiar with the argument there. You may be, Bill.

Dr. Craig: He is a Richard Dawkins fan in that he thinks there are these things called memes which are kind of like cultural . . . not institutions . . . they are cultural factors or features that get spread by reproducing themselves.

Kevin Harris: They are like genes. [5]

Dr. Craig: They are like genes, biologically, except they are cultural. They are called memes – they are like cultural genes. And religion would be one of these. In the Q&A, what I pointed out to him, I said, if that is true . . . and he thinks that everything we think is like that; all of our ideas are like that . . . I said you know if that is true that would apply to your own ideas as well. Really, what you have been sharing with us here, this idea, these memes, this is just sort of like a contagion that you have caught from Richard Dawkins and you are just sharing with us this intellectual disease that you have contracted.

Kevin Harris: My view on memes is caused by memes.

Dr. Craig: Right. So it was really a self-defeating position if taken seriously. Again, he really didn’t have any good answer to this self-refuting position he was in. It is like the man who saws off the branch that he is seated on.

Kevin Harris: I am sure there are psychological factors that can explain various expressions of religion and rituals of religion and things like that, but the origin of religion (or especially when it comes to the existence of God) doesn’t seem to me to be a psychological issue.

Dr. Craig: Well, you know, it seems to me that one is committing what’s called the genetic fallacy here. This is a very famous and well known fallacy among philosophers which is the attempt to invalidate a position by showing how it originated. You try to invalidate a position by showing how a person came to believe that. So an example of the genetic fallacy would say you believe in democracy just because you were raised in America. That is the only reason why you think democracy is the best. So you try to invalidate the person’s point of view by showing how he came to believe that. Even if it were true that I came to believe in God because of the influence of my parents or my culture or society, that is completely irrelevant to the truth or the falsity of that belief. You can’t invalidate a belief by showing how it came to be held. That is the genetic fallacy. Even if my belief is the product of psychological and social factors, it could still be true.

Kevin Harris: If Hitler said rain is wet, rain is still wet. You can’t discount the wetness of rain just because Hitler said it.

Dr. Craig: Suppose I came to believe that the earth is round because I read it in a fortune cookie. Well, that is a totally unreliable source of information but the belief is still true. So, it is just a very common fallacy called the genetic fallacy. Folks should watch out for this because you hear it in different contexts all the time where folks will try to say that what you think or believe is false because they can explain how you came to hold that belief.

Kevin Harris: As we end our time together, Bill, it seems that the bottom line is worldview. If you are committed to a particular worldview – how you view the world, the glasses through which you view everything, your assumptions that you hold – if you are committed to a specific worldview then you will make the evidence fit that view sometimes. You will force fit it. The commitment of Dawkins and Dennett and others is naturalism. There’s nothing beyond nature. That really seems to come out in their books.

Dr. Craig: I think that is right. If a person has a strong enough commitment to naturalism, say, for example, or any worldview, then one will do what Dennett did in the face of my arguments. He’ll say, well, I guess that one of those very plausible premises has to be false after all. If you believe strong enough in a presupposition then anything contrary to that you are just going to have to deny. Fortunately, Kevin, for some people who aren’t so deeply committed and who are more open-minded, a good argument can lead them to change their worldview or their assumptions. So it is those open-minded people that represent what Jesus called the good soil that is open to the reception of the message and to good reasons for it. So when we talk to folks, I typically am not interested in talking or debating with a person who is totally closed-minded, frankly. I don’t see much good in it. But if I sense there is an honest seeker who has got real questions and really is looking for answers, that is the kind of person I want to talk to.

Kevin Harris: Our question of the day, Dr. Craig: what is the Christian’s relationship to politics?

Dr. Craig: Well, I firmly support the notion that Christians ought to be deeply involved in politics on a personal level. [6] I don’t think that the church needs to be taking stands on political issues that are not moral issues. But certainly individuals ought to be involved as good citizens of the state to be sure that we are directing the government and our political process in the right way. I, myself, have political views on various issues but I try to keep those separate from ministry. When I am preaching the Gospel or sharing about Christian faith, I try to keep my political views as separate from this as possible because I don’t want people to think that in order to be a Christian you have to be aligned with a certain political party or agenda. So I try to isolate my political views from the Gospel when I present it. But certainly on a personal level, I vote for those candidates that I think are ones that will be supportive of Christian points of view. When it does come to moral issues like abortion and homosexual behavior and so forth then I see no reason that the church cannot speak out with moral authority on these concerns. [7]