Now I am a christian, which I will attempt to justify in later posts. All I will say for now is that Jesus is the Logos (word, eternal and creative reason) and as such all seeds of truth in my view, no matter what the path, lead to the philosophy of the Logos (for Jesus is the physical and historical instantiation of this eternal and creative reason). Now recently I have been preparing for a debate on whether Jesus rose from the dead by sending my argument to various distinguished philsophers, such as Alvin Plantinga, Daniel Came, Daniel Dennett, Arif Ahmed and Timothy McGrew, who were all helpful to me. Now the person who concerns this post is Richard Dawkins, who I also sent my argument too (which will be put up at a later date).
Now Dawkins is a busy man, and as expected his assistant replied, saying unfortunately due to the sheer volume of emails he receives he could not answer mine. Fair enough. However, she also said that I should post it on the discussion forum, for it would be an exciting topic to debate 'rationally and intellectually'.
With such an invitaion, I polished my article, evidencing all I claimed and made it pristine as could be (although I did discover some factual errors, which were not to far wrong but slightly off, now re corrected for the version I will share with you later). I was really looking forward to a good debate, for the discussion forum claimed to support 'critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.' I thought they would be rigorous representatives of naturalism and all that entails against my views, and as such either strengthen my own cogency or correct my falsity. Unfortunately, neither happened.
The Richard Dawkins reserves the right to not publish any article they please. Now you can understand that if say, the article was offensive, or misinformed, or whatever. But they decided not to publish my article. It did not offend anyone, was checked thoroughly and would give people a chance to rip into me. This made me very puzzled, but I think I have worked out why they did not publish it now.
If you go on the discussion page, you will find that the majority of the discussion posts are very short, not academic and basically ignorant assertions which aren't very powerful. If an article such as mine could threaten the validity of these people's views, it would be dangerous and almost self-defeating to put on. I do not want to blow my own trumpet, but I genuinely feel I have a strong case, and that Dawkins cronies don't really know how to respond to it. If they thought it was rubbish, they could have attacked it and used it as atheist propaganda against the foolishness of Christianity. But they did not, which makes me sceptical. As the head of such an organisation, does Dawkins really stand for reasonable debate, or just views which agree with his own and hounding out anyone else? Well, I think you know my view, what is yours?
Hi Nathan- it's Gabriel from choir. Fascinating stuff, I think there's definately some validity in what your saying- I think when people have such strong beliefs on topics such as that, maybe they try to block out reason and logic- but then conversely, you can argue that at the heart of studying physics, theory of evolution etc is logic and reason- quite surprised by that, you'd have thought he'd have at least let you make the point- if he was so sure that his view was right and yours, wrong- why would he/they have stopped you from posting it. I'd be interested to see what you wrote, defo following the blog :)
ReplyDeleteGosh, that's sad. Definitely send the forum administrators/Dawkins an email with a complaint, or at least ask the administrators why it was taken down.
ReplyDeleteBen.