John Zmirak struck gold over at Chronicles Magazine with an article about the great Dawkins-Meyer Non-Debate. Stephen Meyer showed up for it, first in the pages of The Telegraph then with a follow-up on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Richard Dawkins, challenged on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his bestseller The God Delusion, avoided engaging Dr. Meyer’s arguments in the British newspaper and dodged entirely when invited on by Piers Morgan.
New Atheism’s Faded Prospects
About the diminished prospects of Dawkins’s New Atheist phenomenon:
The excitement surrounding the prospect that the universe has no meaning, our lives no future after three-score-and-ten, and our wills no freedom seems to have faded over the years. So has the pretense that such authors were here to liberate us from the heavy hand of a moralistic judge, and deliver us to a future of calm, cerebral rationalism amidst peace and prosperity. Now, college STEM departments fight about whether mathematics is “racist” and logic “colonialist.” Psychiatric guilds that accredit professionals debate whether there are 47 genders, or only a paltry six. The future of rationalism isn’t looking spiffy, and aggressive atheism seems to have receded to its natural state, as the wishful thinking of senior professors who are sleeping with their research assistants.
The Daily Telegraph in the UK decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the book that began the boomlet, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, by inviting intelligent design researcher Stephen Meyer of Discovery Institute to offer his take on the book, and Dawkins to respond. Their exchange proved enlightening, but not in a way that would have pleased Voltaire or Diderot. Dawkins’ tone was intemperate and sneering, and failed to answer most of Meyer’s specific arguments — almost as if he hadn’t bothered to read them.
I don’t think Dawkins was pleased with the outcome of the paper debate, since he ignored an invitation from Piers Morgan to continue the debate on his show. Meyer accepted immediately, although he ended up having to trade arguments with a substitute atheist. Still, it’s worth watching the whole thing.
There’s a musty feeling about the “New” Atheism — Zmirak compares it to “20-year-old sushi” (yikes):
The excitement surrounding the prospect that the universe has no meaning, our lives no future after three-score-and-ten, and our wills no freedom seems to have faded over the years. So has the pretense that such authors were here to liberate us from the heavy hand of a moralistic judge, and deliver us to a future of calm, cerebral rationalism amidst peace and prosperity. Now, college STEM departments fight about whether mathematics is “racist” and logic “colonialist.” Psychiatric guilds that accredit professionals debate whether there are 47 genders, or only a paltry six. The future of rationalism isn’t looking spiffy, and aggressive atheism seems to have receded to its natural state, as the wishful thinking of senior professors who are sleeping with their research assistants.
That “Tidy Edwardian Theory”
The thought frame of “deterministic materialism” seemed fresh in the days Sigmund Freud.
The only problem with this tidy Edwardian theory that has dominated our assumptions in the West for so long is that the facts don’t bear it out. Meyer has spent his career explaining why. In his 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis (and its film adaptation, The Story of Everything), Meyer shows how traumatizing it was for scientific materialists to have to face the emerging evidence for the Big Bang — which many accepted only grudgingly — because it was too eerily similar to the account in the Book of Genesis. It starts with absolutely nothing, then suddenly, as if spoken into being, a singularity appears and explodes from stark simplicity into unthinkable expanse and complexity.
If Dawkins had answers to intelligent design’s evidence, he would have presented them, not least on home turf like The Telegraph.
Zmirak concludes, “In one scientific discipline after another, the claim that blind chance rules all is losing credibility, as evidence piles up of design pervading the universe. To paraphrase Dawkins, ‘There probably is a God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’” Read the rest at Chronicles.