Monday, October 27, 2008

The Evolution of Richard Dawkins

Melanie Phillips attends an Oxford debate between the mathematician John Lennox and atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins and discerns some subtle shifts in Dawkins' thinking.

Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion, the popularity of which seems to be inversely proportional to the cogency of its arguments (See the review in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page). In Delusion and elsewhere Dawkins insists that there is no god of any kind and flogs philosopher Antony Flew for abandoning a life-long atheism in favor of a kind of almost Christian deism (I know, that's an oxymoron. Yet in his debate with Lennox he remarks that a strong case can be made for precisely the position Flew has adopted. Are Dawkins' views evolving?

The topic of the debate was "Has Science Buried God?" and Dawkins, realizing perhaps, the hopelessness of being able to successfully defend that thesis shifts the debate instead to the foolishness of believing that Jesus was divine. What this has to do with the debate topic is unclear, but when you're trying to defend the indefensible you grasp at whatever ploy or diversion that comes to hand, I suppose.

Anyway, Phillips' column offers an interesting take on Dawkins' position in the debate.

RLC

What the Dems Hope to Do

A month or so ago I wrote that in the upcoming election voters have to keep in mind one very important fact. We're voting not just for the next president. We're voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of other very liberal and far-left Democrats. It's a vote to assist the Democrats in achieving their goals of a socialized, secularized United States.

Specifically, the Democrats and their presidential candidate aspire to do the following (based on what the Democrats have tried to do in the past and what Senator Obama has voted for in the past and said he would do in the future):

  • Remove all restrictions on abortion including partial birth abortion
  • Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman
  • Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on liberal political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution
  • Effect a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass
  • Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on western civilization
  • Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs
  • Continue the accelerating secularization of our society
  • Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare
  • Nationalize health care
  • Deny parents the choice of where they send their children to school
  • Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources
  • Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine
  • Downgrade our military preparedness
  • Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to carry them on one's person
  • Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress. If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If , however, you don't think this is what America needs then you should resist the seductions of Hope and Change and vote for McCain. There are other alternatives, of course, for the person who doesn't want to see the above items come to pass but who cannot bring him or herself to vote for McCain, but a vote for any one of those alternatives amounts to a vote for Obama.

RLC