Just came back from a long holiday and got lots on my hands but I did take out time to watch an excellent video between Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox on whether science has buried God .
Richard Dawkins is an atheist and a vice president of the British Humanist Association and was an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and the University's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Amongst his numerous publications, he wrote The Selfish Gene. Oxford: OUP (1976), The Extended Phenotype, OUP (1982), The Blind Watchmaker. NY: W. W. Norton & Company. (1986) River Out of Eden. NY: Basic Books. (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable. NY: W. W. Norton & Company (1996) Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, (1998), A Devil's Chaplain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (2003), The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.(2004), The God Delusion. NY: Bantam Books (2006) The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press (USA), Transworld (UK) (2009), The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Free Press (2011).
Dr. Lennox is a British mathematician and philosopher of science who is Professor of Mathematics at the same university and a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College there, the Pastoral Advisor of Green Templeton College, a Fellow of Wycliffe Hall and the author of a number of books on the relations of science, religion and ethics including Informetika (2001), Has Science Buried God? (2002), Worldview (2004) with D. W. Gooding (3 volumes in Russian and Ukrainian). His most recent book is God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? (2011).His other publications include Subnormal subgroups of groups, which he wrote with Stewart E. Stonehewer. Oxford : Clarendon, 1987; with David Gooding, Key Bible Concepts, Port Colborne : Gospel Folio Press, 1997; with David Gooding, Christianity Opium or Truth,same publsiher 1997, and The Definition of Christianity, Port Colborne : same publisher 2001,The Bible & Ethics, Ontario : Myrtlefield Trust, 2011; with Derek J S Robinson, The Theory of Infinite Soluble Groups, University of Oxford & University of Illinois, 2004 , Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science, Zondervan (2011), God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway?, Lion UK, 1st edition (1 September 2011), Gunning for God: A Critique of the New Atheism, Lion UK (2011).
Dr. Lennox has engaged himself in a number of public debates with atheists, including some with Richard Dawkins (2007) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama on Dawkins' views in his book The God Delusion and a follow up debate in April 2008 at Trinity College, Oxford to expand upon topics left undeveloped during that debate and later the same year at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on whether science has buried God ; with Christopher Hitchens at the Edinburgh International Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008 on whether or not Europe should jettison its religious past and welcome the "New Atheism" and for a second time at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama on the question "Is God Great?" on the validity of some of Hitchens' claims in his book in the the same subject and also with Michael Shermer at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney, Australia on the existence of God and again in March 2009. Lennox speaks English, Russian, French, German and Spanish.
I'll let Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lennox speak for themselves.
Having seen the video, I think Dr. Lennox has definitely lost because many of his arguments are based on the fact that what the Bible said is somehow "magically" true including the creation myth, the miraculous birth of Jesus from a virgin and a Jesus who turned water into wine and could walk on water, who died on the cross and then rose from the dead etc. when the existence of God itself in question. How can he assume the "truth" of something purportedly attributed to an entity which is itself the very subject of the argument "as if" it is already proven fact in order to support his conclusion? If the existence of the Christian God is the very subject of the relevant arguments, how on earth can he quote the Christian Bible as evidence in support of his argument "as if" it contained the personally revealed words of God in the form of Jesus (whose words are by definition "true" because we cannot conceive of a lying God) which for many and certainly for me, is a collection of books riddled with inconsistencies concerning manner of the earth's creation (two versions of the genesis taken from different sources with significant differences on what was created on which day and which look suspiciously like pilferings from Persian mythology), the date, the place where Jesus was alleged to have been born and where and how exactly his resurrection (upon which the whole project of Christian salvation pivotally depends), took place.
To me, many of the "arguments" of Dr. Lennox are based on the assumption that God would give us an "ultimate" basis of justice and of morality. It is quite obvious that he belongs to the type who for personal psychological reasons, wants the kind of "absolute" certainty which the objective evidence from our observation of the phenomena of the physical, biological and psychological and social world around us simply do not support. The fact that he has such a psychological need for certainty does not of itself make the hypothesis for kind of God the Christian theologians "created" i.e. a personal God who created the world, provided its laws and is the ultimate source of human morality, true. His arguments are not convincing at all and appear to be based on little more than Christian dogma.
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