Thread by @EveKeneinan

I think I need to take a break from Richard Dawkins. The nonsense, the malice, the absurdity and shallowness of his understanding of Christianity is grating.

So, let’s have some fun with him.

This is my favorite quote:

MacIntyre is right.

Dawkins is, in his way, a TRUE WONDER OF GOD, that such a human being should be so put together! 😆

As those of you who follow me know, I love Nietzsche because he always thinks things through. Dawkins doesn’t think much of anything through, and so refutes himself from paragraph to paragraph.

Anyway, here’s Alvin Plantinga:

Science popularizer v Scientist

E. O. Wilson calls Dawkins a “journalist.”

“The arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research.”

Just so.

Very .. science-y.

This isn’t the woo you’re looking for. Move along.

And then of course there is the idea of “memes” — not the kind we make and share here on Twitter, but Dawkins’ ORIGINAL idea.

Philosopher David Stove does it some justice:

“But if a man believes that, when he was first taught Pythagoras's Theorem at school, his brain was parasitized by a certain micro-maggot which, 2,6oo years earlier, had parasitized the brain of Pythagoras, ... what can one say to him, with any hope of effect?”

My own humble take on “memes”:

It’s also effective against Dawkinsians.

“Oh, God.” – Richard Dawkins

“You’ll believe a man can fly!”

This is actually more or less the argument in “Outgrowing God.”

It’s a commonplace, but still worth noting that Dawkins behaves cognitively JUST LIKE A RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALIST.

I think this is Ed Feser.

I love this one because the earth does NOT go around the sun. We’ve know since Newton that the sun and the earth mutually orbit one another—AND since Einstein that “go around” depends on a chosen FRAME OF REFERENCE.

Then there was the time a serious philosophy publicly beat the crap out of Dawkins—argumentatively of course.

“Gene Juggling”, by Mary Midgeley, is a fine read.

Or David Stove's “Demons and Dawkins.”

Here’s Dickie saying it is time we REALLY HURT Christians, not just RIDICULE them.

I keep hearing from atheists that atheism doesn’t entail nihilism, but their Pope seems to disagree.

Let’s go BACK to “Outgrowing God” for just a moment.

Read these two passages together.

He says religion THINKS POORLY of human beings because, without higher guidance, we wouldn’t know right and wrong. He also say THERE IS NO RIGHT AND WRONG, NO GOOD OR EVIL.

It seems trivial to note that, if something doesn’t EXIST, you can’t KNOW IT.

So if there is no good, no evil—as Dawkins apparently holds—then we cannot, in fact, KNOW good and evil.

So in fact, religion is doing exactly what believers SAY it is. It says without a higher order to the cosmos that Dawkins’ “blind pitiless indifference,” he is right, and THERE IS NO GOOD AN EVIL.

He says it outright. But he can’t SUSTAIN it. (Nietzsche could.)

Which leads us to the simple modus tollens:

1 On atheism, there is “no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
2 But there is evil, is good, and “blind, pitiless indifference” is not the ultimate fact of the cosmos
3 ∴ atheism is false.