By JAMES MACKEY - IRISH TIMES
Added: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:33:07 UTC

Thanks to beebub and Con Tigo for the link

RITE AND REASON: A leap of faith is required to accept the argument offered by Richard Dawkins

RICHARD DAWKINS sold himself very short indeed in Dublin recently. For he was mainly concerned with securing the claim that “if science can’t get at the truth, nothing else can”; and then with securing not just the equality but the superiority of science over religions and their theologies.

So he insisted, first, that science entertains “much mystery and magic of its own”; and, second, that the queen of science on the contemporary scene, quantum physics, reveals mysteries that would be “well beyond the impoverished imaginings of any theologian”.

Dawkins’s case is built on twin platforms. First, that evolution offers a full and adequate explanation of how the world came to be as we now know it; and this makes creator gods superfluous.

Then, second, that creator gods, and especially the Christian version, are nothing short of agents of immorality, both by example and in terms of their actual moral teachings, and the horrendous punishments threatened to enforce these.

All of which nullifies any remaining possibility of good moral behaviour on the part of a race already apparently only too prone to immorality, and increasingly so as its powers of destruction grow apace.

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TAGGED: EVOLUTION, MORALITY, RELIGION, RICHARD DAWKINS