Steyn returns a favour and defends Richard Dawkins' freedom of speech

After Tweeting a truth about Islam, Dawkins is attacked by the UK media:

... in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. ...” ... Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” 

 ... “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.”
... “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.”
... “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”
... “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.” 

... Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past ...but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future.  

... Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not. ...

"Evolution vs. God" video upsets atheists

Ray Comfort's video:



has sparked some angry reaction:

As for those who are angry over the film, Comfort was candid. Non-believers, he claims, are simply frustrated that their worldview is being eroded by what’s exposed in “Evolution vs. God.”

Comfort's video is reminiscent of agnostic David Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion" in which he pokes holes in militant atheists' arguments from science.

Debate: Atheism vs theism

A seven year old debate worth revisiting, Richard Dawkins vs David Quinn.  The winner, David Quinn, easily:

Richard Dawkins' father passes

Obituary written by Richard:

My father, (Clinton) John Dawkins, who has died peacefully of old age, packed an enormous amount into his 95 years. ...

Condolences, Richard and may God rest your father's soul.

[via]

Bellicose proselytizing atheists - a superb put-down

Anyone who regularly patronizes bookstores can’t help noticing the number of books pushing atheism. "The God Delusion" and "Godless" by Richard Dawkins, "God is not Great: How religion poisons everything" by Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Faith", by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett’s "Breaking the Spell", and so on ... They’ve been on the shelves for a few years now and remain prominently displayed so sales must be good.

Anyone who has read these authors couldn’t help but notice the strident, intolerant, arrogant posture the so-called New Atheists have adopted against religious belief and believers. Hitchens’s title says it all. Dawkins’ contempt is similarly blatant. And they all rely on arguments based one way or another on modern, and in quantum-physical string theory and cosmology, postmodern ‘science’.

David Berlinski, a professor of mathematics and philosophy, science writer and agnostic ("a secular Jew" whose "religious education did not take") decided, in defense of religious thought and sentiment, to take on these atheists. In his recent book, "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions", he does so with razor sharp wit and logic. Some samples:

... When [Sam Harris] writes that he has been ‘dumbstruck’ by Christian and Moslem intellectual commitments, I believe the word has met the man.
... The sciences, many scientists argue, require no criticism because the sciences
comprise a uniquely self-critical institution ... Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgements are collective.
... physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail". Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science."
... Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off.... he has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem ... A man must really know his limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
To an editorial in ‘Nature’ that claims: "The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is ‘unassailable fact’ ... With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside." [Berlinski replies:] Those not willing to put such sentiments aside, the scientific community has concluded, are afflicted by a form of intellectual ingratitude. – It is remarkable how widespread ingratitude really is.
I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.
On Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg’s nihilism: "The more comprehensible the universe becomes ... the more it also seems pointless." He has a point. The arena of the elementary particles – his arena – is a rather depressing place ... What is it’s point?

Berlinski doesn’t argue in favour of any particular religious beliefs but instead shows how the bellicose proselytizing atheists’ arguments from science are full of logical holes.

"The Devil’s Delusion" is a real gem. Berlinski is a credit to agnostics; the religious will thank him; atheists will hate him. It’s win, win, win.

The (not so) “new atheism”

Having recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I very much appreciated the insights offered in this essay by Damon Linker (published in today’s National Post). Linker provides an excellent overview of the history of atheistic thought and puts into context the nasty, ideological "new atheism" espoused by Dawkins, Hitchens and others:

Mindless argument found in godless books [Essay subtitle]
..."the new atheism" is not particularly new. It belongs to an intellectual genealogy stretching back hundreds of years ... [It is]driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others....
... In describing their atheism as illiberal, I do not mean to imply that the new atheists are closet totalitarians. On the contrary ... Yet the fact remains that the atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is a brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith, out to rack up conversions.
... the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open ['The God Delusion'] will be atheists when they put it down."
... It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism.
... To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.
Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not.