Dawkins owes nothing to Craig

A recent article in the Telegraph, implying that Richard Dawkins is answerable to William Lane Craig, has attracted reflexive nods from those whose condyles outclass their cerebral cortices. The nodders include one whose pipsqueak penchant for citing himself in the third person betrays his eminent compatibility with the asininely worshipful flock Gracing the rightmost column of his pretty, but intellectually pretty insubstantial, blog.

Let us be clear on this point. Professor Dawkins (the usage of this title is correct) owes Professor Craig nothing at all. Dawkins is not accountable to Craig, nor to anyone else who seeks to wield authority on the strength of wholly unjustified – and unjustifiable – claims. Craig purports to believe in an invisible, silent supernatural being that ignores prayers and visits calamities indiscriminately on mankind and other sentient creatures, condemning them to everlasting torture if they fail to propitiate it in the correct manner, while it simultaneously professes to love its victims. Such grotesque assertions demand at least a shred of evidence before being taken seriously, and there is none. Craig gets away without being laughed off the public stage simply because his views intersect with a currently fashionable delusion based on the still-popular myths of a bunch of wandering Babylonians, set down a mere instant ago in geological time. That fad will pass, as did much older and longer-lived crazes like the gods of prehistory. Craig has been spouting his so-called ‘proofs’ for years, and they have been roundly debunked. They do not even begin to ratify the baseless suspicion of existence popularly conferred on the God of the Bible.

William Lane Craig is a professional debater, whose set-piece speeches and logically barren numbered ‘proofs’ provoke whoops of delight from his devoted choir of cosy, secure followers. Convinced that his party games prove something, they rest comfortably assured that there is real evidence for the sky-god in whom most of them have passively believed since their brains became infected with the relevant memes in early childhood. Pretentious twerps who blog that one needs to ‘understand’ religion at some deeply significant, esoteric level of prior initiation before one can criticize it, add fuel to the fashionable fire but do little to uncover anything worthwhile. Understand this… if there were a reliable proof of God’s existence, communicable only to learned scholars, salient parts of that proof would have been translated a thousand times and more into lay language understanded of the people, as have the juiciest morsels of Andrew Wiles’s vertiginously highbrow vindication of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Until His Grace can find a more worthy source than the Telegraph, and can acquire the skill of doing his own thinking, may he find the Grace to remain silent.