Re: [asa] The Criticism Begins

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Schwarzwald<schwarzwald@gmail.com> wrote:
> While I am always in favor of honestly representing what a person has said -
> regardless of their status or conduct - some perspective is called for.
> Dawkins is more or less a cheerleader-clown for the modern atheist at this
> point, with "modern" adding up to "obnoxious and aggressively
> anti-theist/anti-religious". That a journalist may have taken some
> apparently ignorant quotes from him out of context is a shame, largely
> because it's not as if legitimate ones are in short supply from the man when
> it comes to religious topics.
>
> Again, that's not to defend any misrepresentation of him. But frankly, in
> perspective, I find it difficult to get too worked up about it - doubly so
> since it's not like journalists in general are stellar when it comes to this
> sort of thing, but ooooh, those CHRISTIAN journalists, why they're just
> something else.

That wasn't really what I said. I said that I expect Christian
journalists to apply better standards or rigour and honesty than their
colleagues.

Dawkins might be pretty obnoxious (though not as obnoxious as, say
P.Z. Myers), but in his own terms he is, I think, pretty honest; a
standard I find sadly missing in some of his Christian critics.

For example, many Christians have criticized his "Weasel" genetic
algorithm simulation, accusing him of introducing teleology in terms
of a target to aim at, thereby smuggling in the information at the
start. The most recent is John Lennox in "God's undertaker". What
none of these Christian commentators tell you is that on the very next
page Dawkins makes precisely the same criticism of his own example,
that it is "misleading in important ways", namely that in evolution
there is no distant target to aim for. The point being that it wasn't
to illustrate macroevolution - the point of the example was to show
how something improbable could take place through small probable steps
with the aid of natural selection.

I've not seen a Christian commentator who has given Dawkins the credit
for this honest admission of the shortcomings in his example.

Iain

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Received on Fri Jul 10 05:39:47 2009