Storm: I like this

Hadn't come across Tim Minchin before but glad I have now. This is great. Includes a few rude words.

The Moral Argument on Premier Christian Radio

The podcast archive on Premier Christian Radio is a well organised, rich source of interesting discussions between theists and others. Today I downloaded and listened to Paul Orton and David Robertson discussing the moral argument. That is, the argument that there are immutable, universal moral absolutes, and therefore God exists.

The discussion opens with an assertion by the presenter, Justin Brierley, that we all accept moral ‘facts’ (scare quotes based on his intonation) about the world: certain things are right and certain things are wrong. He then states that that can only be the case if there is something on which to ground the facts, and that has to be God. A few minutes later he softens this to

“Most people appear to believe in moral absolutes, i.e. some things are definitely right and other things are definitely wrong, and that [moral absolute truth] would hold whether we happened to believe it or not. Can those kinds of beliefs exist without God in the equation? Or do we live in a world where there are no moral absolutes, and our morality is purely a product of purposeless evolution? That is certainly the view that someone like Richard Dawkins would be compelled to hold, as what we might call a materialistic atheist. He doesn’t believe in anything beyond the material, physical world. However complex it may be, that is all we ultimately reduce to.”

Brierley has presented a false dichotomy, laced with loaded terms like ‘reduce’ and ‘purposeless’. His first mistake was to predicate the existence of God upon his baseless assertion that there are moral absolutes. In effect he is trying simply to assert God into existence. Even if moral absolutes were proven to exist, that in itself would not necessitate any connection with the God in whom Brierley professes belief. Besides, Brierley has not demonstrated the existence of moral absolutes. Again, he has simply asserted that they exist.

David Robertson asks, “How do we know whether [externally imposed human morals] are right or wrong?” and illustrates his rhetorical question with the hypothetical example of a majority supporting the racist and xenophobic policies of the BNP. Robertson means that it isn’t morally right to do something simply because people think it should be done, and so moral absolutes cannot come from society.

Both Robertson and Brierley make the error of thinking they can know something that is outside their minds, i.e. that there are moral absolutes that are hard-coded into the way the world is. Yet, like the rest of us, they have only their minds as tools with which to probe the world around them. Therefore they are claiming to know something that they cannot possibly know. Typical theists, they start from the assumption that they have the answers, and construct arguments to fit their pre-existing conclusions.

The atheist starts with no assumptions at all. He looks for moral absolutes and finds no evidence that there are such things. Further, he recognises that proof of the existence of moral absolutes, should it ever be found, would not necessarily provide the slightest clue as to where those absolutes might have come from. Theists leap straight from their ‘moral absolutes’ assertion to the Judaeo-Christian God. Some theists, including David Robertson, have the audacity to suggest that the modern world’s morality arises from Christian teaching. Tell that to the millions infected with HIV as a direct result of the Catholic Church’s meddling in Africa.

I do not think the existence of moral absolutes has ever been demonstrated. Rather, I think morality comes from our responses to situations, real or hypothetical. Why is slavery wrong? It is wrong because we can consider the viewpoint of the slave, his liberty and dignity stolen from him. Murder is wrong for the same reason. We can empathise with the victim and we recognise his right not to be murdered, just as we would not wish anyone to murder us. Those are easy examples. Another such example is child murder. Who would deem it morally acceptable to murder one’s child in order to prove loyalty to a capricious dictator? No-one in their right mind, I would hope. Yet was that not exactly what Abraham, the founder of the three great monotheisms including Christianity, is held up to us as a shining example for being prepared to do? Yes, God stayed his viciously murderous hand at the last second, but that does not legitimise either Abraham’s intended foul act nor the brutal cruelty of the despot who coerced him into it.

Mr Robertson and Mr Brierley, don’t you dare foist your disgusting celestial dictator on me. Don’t you dare assert that I would not know the difference between right and wrong but for his filthy interference in the natural world. Don’t you dare suggest that if it were not for his ordination of divine laws I would not be able to treat fellow humans and other sentient creatures with the compassion and respect that I myself would wish to receive. Such a suggestion smacks of breathtaking arrogance on your part. Moreover, it is a moral abomination to insult the ability of human beings to recognise what is right and what is wrong without supposed divine, dictatorially binding assistance. How do I know that it is a moral abomination? I know because the thought of making such an assertion, and of thus looking down my theistic nose at my fellows, turns my stomach.

I was a little surprised that Euthyphro’s dilemma did not figure in the discussion. The argument goes like this. If God is deemed to be good, then to what standard higher than Himself is He compared? If there be no higher standard than God, and the ideas of good and bad exist because God decreed them, then it is meaningless to say that God is good. If, on the other hand, moral absolutes exist against which we can show God to be good, then we do not need God to exist in order for good and bad to exist, for they are logically anterior to God. However, although the dilemma is interesting, if there be no moral absolutes (as indeed I believe there are not) then it is little more than a word game.

Brierley returns to his point about purposeless evolution. He appears incredulous that simple atoms could give rise to morality. This is of course nothing more than the old argument from personal incredulity that held sway for so long before Darwin. We know that brains have evolved slowly over millions of years by natural selection, and we have no evidence that minds are anything other than the product of evolved brains. Morality is a product of minds, which can recognise the existence of, and empathise with, other minds. So, no matter how personally incredulous we might be, we have no evidence to suggest anything beyond the material, physical universe which we observe. We certainly have no right to bandy around baseless assertions about supernatural beings that ordained fictitious moral laws.

David Robertson makes plain his Christian fundamentalism, observing that transgressors will one day answer to God for their sins, and so he (Mr Robertson) need not worry too much about them for the time being. He asserts repeatedly that we are made in God’s image and it is thus that we derive our morals. This assertion is made without evidence and therefore need not be taken seriously.

“Would that you could be like me, apart from these chains,” says David Robertson, expressing his sincere wish that Paul Orton become a Christian. Mr Robertson would have Mr Orton bow and scrape to a ruthless dictator, who created him imperfect and then made impossible demands of him; who would hold Mr Orton responsible for a filthy human sacrifice that took place twenty centuries ago supposedly to take vicarious responsibility for everyone’s sins; and who would monitor Mr Orton’s every thought, awake and asleep, reserving eternal torture as punishment should he fail to make the right propitiations. To wish that on any fellow human is utterly disgusting even to the most elementary morality. Any morally enlightened person must be mightily pleased that no evidence whatsoever exists for God.
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One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
-Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS
16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008
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Here is a YouTube video of David Robertson outlining his stance on morality.

A response to William Lane Craig's thirty pages of nothing new

William Lane Craig has just published Five Arguments for God, which will no doubt impress his loyally unquestioning followers to the same degree that his earlier iterations of the same tired old arguments seem to have done.
I was alerted to the document’s existence by one such, who wowed on Twitter that it contained 30 whole pages! Formidable indeed. I’m not as clever as Dr Craig (I wouldn’t be an atheist if I were, surely) so I might not be able to match his score (and ten). Theist readers, some of whom might even have read Dr Craig’s piece, may as well start proclaiming their triumphant hero’s victory straight away.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. Such an august title promises erudition and wisdom of inarguable proportions; I may as well give up now. But let’s see what’s on offer.
Overall the essay turns out to be little more than a sustained strawman attack on Richard Dawkins, although Daniel Dennett receives a share of peevish misrepresentation too. Craig’s attempted criticism of Dennett is particularly duplicitous, and as such must be aimed primarily at readers who already support Craig, to bolster their extant impression that he can defeat the arguments of those awful ‘New Atheists’. Craig appears unconcerned that informed readers will spot the cynical deception at once. Cheers and whoops from his adoring home crowd are all he’s after.
The gymnastics around truth begin in the first paragraph on the first page. Craig implies that, when critics point out the harmful effects of religious belief upon society, they are thus attempting to argue against the truth value of religious dogmas. On the contrary, as Craig well knows, such commentators are exploring the potential damage to society resulting from belief in patently false assertions. Harmful effects of religious observance are not being held up as refutations of self-evidently false religious ‘truths’.
Craig is right insofar as his arguments for the existence of God are passé. Contrary to his next claim, however, those old arguments do still merit refutation lest they be assumed (by the ignorant) to have proved their case by default. That said, the arguments have such little merit that there is practically nothing there to refute.

After a couple of paragraphs recounting a thirty-year-old piece in Time magazine heralding a major comeback by God, Craig jumps onto his well-worn soapbox of logical ‘proofs’ with numbered steps. He outlines his case thus: each premise in an argument need not be proven true in order for the proof to work. Each premise need only, he claims, be more plausibly true than false, for the argument to be a ‘good’ argument.

Well that’s rubbish for a start. Every time we allow the grey area of mere plausibility to supplant demonstrable truth, we introduce a degree of uncertainty into our argument. The more merely ‘plausible’ steps we have, the more this uncertainty is multiplied as we proceed through the series of steps. So what do we end up proving, if our premises are not reliable to start with? Nothing worthwhile, if truth be the object of the exercise. If, on the other hand, pseudo-intellectual exhibitionism for the delight of admiring fans is what we’re after, this kind of stuff will serve quite nicely.

Cosmological Argument from Contingency

We have all heard Dr Craig trot out his favourite arguments time and again. This time he departs slightly from his yellowed script, opening with the so-called Cosmological Argument from Contingency. It runs like this.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).

Premise 1 is trivially true, although it is worth adding that we can’t always know which of its two categories any given entity might fall into. In some cases the classification is easy. The mug of tea in front of me has a chain of explanatory causes ending in its delivery to my desk a short time ago by my daughter. But what of an imaginary number, such as i, the square root of -1? Has it always existed by necessity, or was it called into existence by an otherwise unfillable gap in a human-made mathematical proof? As far as the universe is concerned, we have no information about its cause that could help us categorise it one way or the other. It may have an external cause, about which we know absolutely nothing (and neither does Dr Craig, whether or not he is honest enough to admit it) or it may be necessary for some equally unknown reason.

Premise 2 is a bald assertion with no rational justification whatsoever. I could just as well say, if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is the Great Green Arkleseizure, as imagined by the great Douglas Adams. I am reminded of a video clip I saw recently, of Dr Craig dismissing a similar candidate for the universal cause, the wonderful Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM, he argued, cannot be the cause of the universe because it is a material object extended in space and time within the universe. What a shame he did not realise that FSM adherents are not referring to a physical FSM at all, but to the non-physical, immaterial, transcendent, timeless FSM that exists eternally outside the universe.

Recognising that premise 2 is unsupportable, Craig attempts to create a diversion. His assertion A, attributed to a strawman atheist, that if atheism be true then the universe has no explanation, is extremely silly. To begin with, atheism is a lack of religious belief. Even if there were evidence for the existence of a god or gods, it would be possible to ignore it (or be ignorant of it) and remain an atheist. But now Craig is substituting the word atheism for ‘actual non-existence of a god’. Craig spent the first of his thirty pages making a distinction between things that are true, and things that we know are true. It seems ironic, then, that he now seeks to equate atheism with reality. His next trick is to reverse his strawman assertion, creating a false dichotomy. He asserts that if the universe has an explanation then atheism must be untrue, i.e. God must exist. But this is nonsense. If the universe does have a cause, the one fact we can be certain of is that we know absolutely nothing about that cause. Even given that the cause exists or existed, there is nothing to suggest that it is or was God.

Premise 3 is of course trivially true. No, I don’t mean that the existence of the universe is a trivial matter, at least not from my perspective. I mean that the premise is obviously true to the point that it need hardly be stated. All black and white cows have at least two colours. All men are male.

Conclusion 4 is trivially true because it is defined as true by premise 1. It takes the argument no further forward. Conclusion 5, however, is baseless, because it depends on the ludicrous premise 2. So much for the Cosmological Argument from Contingency, and for the list of ‘philosophers’ (in fact known religious apologists) whom Craig cites as its defenders.

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Craig now moves on to his oldest favourite, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This is almost identical to the contingency argument dealt with above. It claims to prove, trivially, that the universe must have a cause, but it says nothing at all about the nature of that cause. It is at this point that Craig misrepresents Dennett, twisting his words beyond recognition. In fact, on page 185 of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett suggests that the universe ‘created itself out of something that is well nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all’. It’s clear that Dennett is referring to the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang, which is believed to have contained all the universe’s matter and energy in a dimensionless point of infinite density. What caused the unpacking of that singularity we do not know, any more than we know what causes a particular uranium nucleus to decay at a particular moment, and Dennett does not claim to know either. Craig, however, claims to know a great deal about the cause. Believing (or expecting his audience to believe) that he has refuted Dennett, Craig goes on thus:

‘Dennett’s view is thus logically incoherent. The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe.’

What? How is this anything other than a blatant non-sequitur? We have no idea how the singularity behaved prior to the Big Bang, or what may have affected it, internally or externally. No idea at all. There is nothing on which to base claims about transcendent anything. As usual, Craig is bending the argument toward his preconception of a personal god.

Following his old script, within three paragraphs Craig gets from ‘The universe had a cause’ to a ‘personal, timeless, transcendent being’. Particularly rich is his conclusion that the ‘personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality’. Yeah, right. We all know people who are timeless and immaterial, don’t we. Both those qualities just have ‘person’ written all over them. I hesitate to resort to such sarcasm, but this really is the most transparent gibberish, delivered with the full authority of the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. It is hardly surprising that in his next sentence Craig asserts that minds are immaterial, and therefore the cause of the universe must be a mind without a body. Dr Craig, when you show me someone who can think without a brain, I will take your assertion of the immaterial nature of mind seriously.

Craig continues to act as though the three brief sentences of his cosmological argument had proved his timeless, spaceless, personal creator. Moreover, he claims, blatantly and falsely, that Richard Dawkins accepts the same silly ‘conclusions’ of the cosmological argument. Quoting a passage from Dawkins, Craig dramatically appears incredulous that Dawkins accepts those conclusions. But of course Dawkins accepts no such thing. Even out of context, the quoted passage makes Dawkins’s point crystal clear. He is simply saying that, even if the universe did have a cause, we can infer nothing whatsoever about that cause from the mere supposition of its existence. Dr Craig, your misrepresentation of Professor Dawkins is intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. (More about morality in the next section.) Before leaving the cosmological argument, Craig attempts one further sideswipe at Dawkins, asserting that ‘there can be no physical cause of any sort of the Big Bang singularity.’ How on Earth does he know that? Asserting that the cause must therefore be – yes, you’ve guessed – his personal, transcendent, etc., he then pretends that it is only the name God that Dawkins objects to. Again this is wilfully misleading and highly misrepresentative of what Dawkins actually said. Craig could not care less about the transparent fraudulence of his position. Detection by rationalists does not deter him in the slightest, so long as he continues to hold sway over his faithful flock, awed as they are by this latest in a long line of watertight rebuttals of specious atheist propaganda.

Moral Argument

This is another of Craig’s old favourites. First he explains the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘good’, before going on to quote the three succinct steps of the proof:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Before tackling premise 1 we must confront premise 2, since premise 2 appears within premise 1. Do objective moral values exist? That is to say, are there moral truths which are independent of what people might think? Obviously we cannot know, because the only means of experiencing any candidate for a moral ‘truth’ is to think about it. We have to use our minds so we cannot examine moral claims that are external to our minds. Therefore premise 2 is baseless. But is premise 2 even plausible? Let’s put it to the test. Recently I heard a podcast in which a religious apologist defended the moral argument by stating that it is wrong to torture a child. That wrongness, he said, is universal and unalterable, regardless of personal opinion. If he is right, then I must admit to having transgressed unalterable moral rules, for I have tortured my defenceless, screaming eight-year-old daughter, forcibly restraining her as a nurse stitched together the torn triangular flaps of her recently injured chin. Light anaesthaesia had been administered but my daughter, no doubt having inherited her mother’s cast iron will power, simply would not be sedated. I have no doubt that the procedure caused her immense pain and anguish at the time, but after accidentally falling and splitting her chin she was in no mood for calm reasoning. (Quick stitching was necessary, the doctor said, to avoid subsequent unsightly scarring, and I’m glad to report, three years on, that the nurse did an excellent job.)

There is no evidence whatsoever that absolute moral values, external to minds, exist. When deciding whether or not to subject someone to pain and anguish, we can imagine the situation from their point of view, and act accordingly. That is the basis of the so-called golden rule – act toward others in a way that you would have others act unto you. No overarching authority is required for this simple principle to be upheld by reasonable people. It’s worth commenting, however, that plenty of perfectly atrocious acts have been committed solely on God’s allegedly delegated authority. Apologists such as Craig routinely concede that theists are not necessarily any more moral than atheists, thinking that such a concession exempts them from having to explain the buckets of blood that have stained theistic hands down the centuries. No such exemption has been or will be granted. Those who defend religious belief must justify the filthy brutality carried out daily, solely on account of their faith, by God’s faithful.

Craig’s suggestion – that Richard Dawkins accepts the validity of the moral argument – is false and therefore does not deserve a response.

Craig’s next banana skin comprises a complete misunderstanding of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which says: either good and bad exist because God decreed them (in which case it is meaningless to say that God is good, because there exists no higher standard to which God must answer), or God’s actions are good, rather than bad, independently of the mere fact that he performed them (in which case goodness and badness do not need God in order to exist). Craig asserts that we can escape from the dilemma by taking a third route, i.e. that God wills something because he is good. I am perfectly certain that the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California is fully aware that his ‘third route’ is identical to the second choice of the Euthyphro dilemma. If it is meaningful to say that God is good rather than bad, then goodness and badness are logically anterior to God. Craig attempts to build upon his logical fallacy to perform a superficially impressive mirror trick. God, he says, has a morally good character, which makes him good. (Presumably his omnipotence is insufficiently potent to overcome the constraints of his character, should he choose so to do.) Guided by that good character he then decrees what is right and what is wrong. It is transparently obvious that this catapults us straight back into Euthyphro’s Dilemma: against what standard is the ‘goodness’ of God’s moral character judged, if it be anterior to any of his actions or decrees, and he himself is the absolute standard of everything? Really, anyone persuaded by Craig’s verbal prestidigitation is either too lazy or too brainless to think the matter through. I do not think for one moment that Craig himself is either lazy or brainless. Let’s use the last two premises to create a neat logical proof.

1. Anyone seriously propounding the moral argument is lazy, brainless or seeking wilfully to mislead their audience.
2. Articulate proponents of the moral argument are neither lazy nor brainless.
3. Therefore….

Argument from Fine Tuning

Craig cites the apparently fine-tuned nature of the physical constants, together with evidence that if any one of those constants were even slightly different then the development of life would be impossible. He spends several paragraphs distinguishing ‘fine-tuned’ from ‘designed’, obviously in an attempt to deflect the charge of circular reasoning. But we do not need to apply such a charge in order to demonstrate the speciousness of the fine tuning argument; it has more holes than an Emmental cheese. Here is the argument:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

It is immediately obvious that premise 1 is a false trichotomy. We know exactly nothing of how the physical constants came to have their values. For all we know, there may be no other possible values, or there may indeed by so incredibly many universes that a tiny proportion of them happen to be life-supporting. Craig invokes personal incredulity, claiming that no-one can grasp the stupendous improbabilities involved. But he fails to apply that same objection to the stupendous numbers of conceivably possible universes. If we cannot grasp one big number, neither can we grasp the other, so it is not reasonable to disallow one ungraspable number (the improbability of a chance occurrence of the right physical constants) by comparing it with another ungraspable number (the number of potential universes). The mere fact that we are here considering the question proves that our universe is able to support life. It serves no purpose to comment upon the improbability of what we in fact see. When the lottery numbers are drawn, perhaps the organisers should decline to pay the winner, reasoning thus: “This particular unique combination of balls is far less probable than the alternative, i.e. not getting that particular combination, so its occurrence cannot be due to chance. It must be due to design, so you have won unfairly.”

Besides, if the universe is designed, what is the purpose of designing a knife-edge existence for life? Why did God restrict the physical constants to such narrow values? Is there something inherently good about knife-edges? If he is using such an esoteric parlour trick to advertise his existence, then what of the millions who lived and died before science advanced to the point where his handiwork may be detected?

The breathtaking arrogance of Craig’s know-all position is encapsulated in the following sentence: ‘It follows [from the fine-tuning argument] that the fine-tuning is therefore due to design unless the design hypothesis can be shown to be even more implausible than its competitors.’ See how Craig assumes that the ‘competitors’, together with the design alternative, constitute all the possibilities that there are. Nowhere does he acknowledge how vanishingly little we (including he) actually know about the origins of the universe. Nowhere does he admit of possibilities that we (including he) have not even begun to imagine. How boringly, parochially, complacently typical of the theist stance.

Craig quotes others who accuse atheists of unreasonably rejecting the God hypothesis on account of an irrational desire to maintain a different world view. This is simply putting the cart before the horse. There is no reason at all to assert God without evidence, and none of Dr Craig’s arguments provides the slightest evidence in God’s favour. I shall not allow Craig to get away with assuming God and challenging others to disprove him, and then pretending that God wins by default. That is all he is doing.

Several pages follow, misdefining the word ‘simple’ in a lame attempt to claim that God is a simple explanation for the universe. Starting from one’s preferred conclusion, and trying to bludgeon words into fitting it, is not admissible to rational inquiry.

Ontological Argument

The popular version of this ‘argument’ involves imagining a perfect being, and then asserting that its perfection would be greater if it existed than if it did not. From that, proponents claim, it follows that if God can be imagined, then he must exist. This amounts to no more than a claim that imagining something makes it real, a notion popular in early childhood but out of which most of us have grown before reaching double figures. Doubtless aware of this, Craig seeks to obscure the staggeringly weak nature of the argument by dressing it up in some rags borrowed from Alvin Plantinga. The thinly-veiled version thus espoused postulates a gigantic number of possible worlds, each described by a series of logical statements. In some of those imagined worlds, the argument goes, there will exist a maximally perfect being, with (conveniently) a set of attributes that just happen to match those of God. From that, we are expected to accept that the imagined existence of a maximally perfect being in some imaginary world forces the actual existence of a maximally perfect being in all possible worlds. That illegal move, completely unsupported by logic or common sense, occurs between steps 2 and 3 of the following silly word game:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Craig’s essay discusses only premise 1, falling silent on the other premises, most notably on the conjuring trick that takes place between steps 2 and 3. Without an evidence-based explanation of why an imaginary being in some imagined worlds can give rise to such an imaginary being in every possible world, including worlds whose descriptions explicitly state that no such being exists, the argument is worthless to anyone prepared to give it a moment’s thought. Nothing in Plantinga’s argument renders it any more worthy of attention than the semi-coherent ramblings of his that I’ve endured on YouTube.

So, nothing new in Craig’s thirty pages.

Cranmer: a response to a response to a response

Recently Cranmer responded, on his blog, to Richard Dawkins writing in The Times.

Cranmer, your smoothly sententious eloquence kept me reading to the end of your unjustifiably ad hominem attack on Richard Dawkins, despite my urges simultaneously to cringe and to heave at your irritating and persistent use of the third person when writing about yourself. Christopher Hitchens has remarked upon the common link between this affectation and megalomania. I find myself doubting any ambition on your part to take over the world; perhaps it is merely a symptom of the complacency so apparent in those who draw comfort from the popularity of their superstitious, faith-based, evidence-free world view.

Look upon this as a response to a reponse to a response. I take issue with your reply to Richard Dawkins, following his comment posted on your blog, after your bizarre critique of his recent article in The Times.

Do not try to dodge the naked fact that you suggested Professor Dawkins should be arrested. If, as you claim, the interrogative makes it ‘not a suggestion’, then I’m perfectly entitled to ask you when you stopped beating your wife, and to expect an unevasive answer. And as for a ‘nuanced point’, the point of your title was about as nuanced as the point of a Zulu spear. You are backpedalling, sir.

Your arguments appear to be founded upon the complexity of written theology. You claim that Dawkins is attacking a straw man, in the same way that ignorant creationists attack evolution by misquoting or over-simplifying Darwin’s thesis. But this is merely obfuscation. Do not, sir, attempt to pass your naked emperor off as decently clad. In order to qualify as a Christian one must profess belief in a supernatural being, omniscient and yet perturbed by his creation’s fall; omnipotent and yet unable to escape subjecting himself to a filthy public execution for which we ought all to share responsibility. If I have misunderstood some complex nuance of theology that renders all this untrue, then please provide me with a reference in order that I may fill the gap in my education.

Some of your claims are either plain ignorant or fundamentally disingenuous. No genuine evolutionary biologist accommodates creationism. That would be directly analogous to Columbus accommodating belief in a flat Earth. Similarly, no true scientist entertains seriously the empty cop-out of intelligent design. To embrace either of those dogmas is to reject science in principle.

If creationists ‘sustain all manner of disjunctive contradictions and inconsistencies’, how does that contribute to their understanding of the world around them? And if they are not trying to understand or explain anything, what is their purpose?

I believe that by positing ‘the varieties of literary genre’ to be found in the Bible you are in fact saying that the Bible is not literally true. That gives us a small island of common ground at least. What, then is the Bible? You list several things that it is not, and cite the importance of knowing what it is in order to discuss it, but fail to enlighten us as to what ‘what it is’ is. And what of all those who believed – and those who still believe – that the Bible is the inerrant word of God? Perhaps the word was somewhat errant after all, if it needed the Wisdom Literature in order to clarify it. It is quite bizarre to claim that a later, external revision somehow validates a self-contradictory muddle of ancient man-made texts, and even more bizarre to expect such a ludicrous claim to be taken seriously, however ostentatiously erudite the high prose in which it be couched.

Dogma is not a prerequisite to the dismissal of belief that Adam existed. I don’t require any dogma to dismiss the existence of Tinker Bell. Rather, I require credible evidence before asserting the reality of fairies. The same goes for Adam. Besides, if Adam existed, the whole of biology goes out of the window in one. Please don’t be so silly.

Your overly-long diatribe, displaying as it does the peacock’s tail of an admirable classical education and a well-thumbed library, says little that is sharply relevant or even helpful. Away with the veil of assumed complexity, hiding the pitifully weak set of claims beneath. If you have a clear, unequivocal point to make in favour of your position, bring it on.