It sounds like the Great Man has a terminal fear of William Lane Craig.
Patrick Coffin - host of Catholic Answers - invited Dawkins to be a guest of his show. Listen to Coffin's description of the Great Rational One's inoherent response:
I was next.
The video footage may be available at some point, but my main goal was to ask him a yes or no question: would he appear on a top-rated Catholic radio show before an international audience to talk about his atheistic worldview? No debate, no questions about why he refuses to debate his nemesis, Dr. William Lane Craig, no gotcha ambushes.
The crowd went silent and turned from me to Dawkins. After a beat, he began a filibuster about why he would not share the platform with a man who supports genocide (Dawkins has a favorite Bible passage that he thinks proves God is a moral monster — Saul’s commandment to wipe out the Amaleks in 1 Samuel 15), and a longish discourse on the fact that he only debates archbishops and cardinals — including his upcoming Easter Monday debate with George Cardinal Pell. He pointed to the next questioner, but I wanted to make sure his adoring supporters plainly saw that his answer to my public invitation was to refuse the challenge. I went on (I may be misremembering the actual words), “I’m neither a cardinal nor a trained philosopher; just a lowly radio host. And I’m inviting you to have a civil, respectful conversation that gets at the specifics of your atheism. You would have a large audience around the world in which to do so. Yes, or no?”
“I have answered your question sufficiently,” he huffed, to the satisfaction of the crowd. As I was walking back to my seat, someone thought it best to share with me his belief that I am an asshole. In foyer as we were leaving, two T-shirted atheists gave me the eeeevil eye. One announced, CHRISTIANS ARE ASSHOLES, the other ARREST THE POPE, complete with a rat-like caricature of Pope Benedict XVI.
A lot of lerv in that room!
Coffin adds this report about life among Our Intellectual Betters:
The main event enjoyed a decent-sized crowd, in the low 2000s in my layman’s estimate of the size of the ballroom and balcony. It was sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, US Branch and a handful of local secular humanist clubs. Dr. Elisabeth Cornwell and Maine-based politician Sean Faircloth of the above-mentioned Foundation, spoke first. I mentioned the atheist tendency toward angry reactions. Rudeness was in the air from the get-go. Halfway through Mr. Faircloth’s earnest demagoguery, one attendee had had enough and shouted, “We came to hear Richard Dawkins, not Sean Faircloth!” He was promptly booed and hissed until silent. All in all — and I know this may be my pro-theism bias — but the crowd didn’t seem to be having a great time. Apart from the standing O when Dawkins strode center stage, the applause was polite, even tepid. Further, the laughter at the sarcastic digs against religious people and their foolish belief systems seemed pinched, not the rapturous, freely embraced laughter you’d expect when a revered figure talks to his fans. Odd.
The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (aka, the RDFRS-US, and I thought our side had dumb acronyms) is “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.” Sounds fine to me. But defining terms was not on the agenda last night, nor was making key distinctions. We got instead a marathon of half-truths, classic misrepresentations of theism, standard conflations of Islamic terror with “Christian jihad,” cliched fears of a theocracy that lurks just around the corner — causing what specific damages to atheists was not clear. (I mean, the worst fate that would befall a meeting of Richard Dawkins fans is that a Catholic might show up and ask a question that didn’t begin with, “Doctor Dawkins, you are a real inspiration to me.”) Robert and John Kennedy, along with Martin Luther King, JR, were repeatedly held up as models of secularist leadership. That two were Catholics and one an ordained Christian minister didn’t get in the way of the fiery rhetoric.
Posts
