People are being rather tough on Richard Dawkins over his latest statement.
“I wrote [an] article called ‘Atheists for Jesus,’ I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: ‘Atheists for Jesus.’ Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”
When you have a restricted viewpoint allowing no possibility of God than you are limited to only having certain opinions that flow from it. Plus all of us have some degree of belief in what we accept and think our apprehension of truth to be truth. So an atheist saying someone, even Jesus, would come to the same conclusion they had is to be expected. The problem is not with what Dawkins said, but with his underlying philosophy. The joke goes as a philosopher Dawkins is a good biologist.
When I first heard Dawkins’ statement I thought of C.S. Lewis’s famous alliteration that Jesus is either Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Update: Actually the source is Josh McDowell and as Steve Greydanus pointed out “The traditional formulation is a dilemma, not a trilemma. (either God or bad man)”
Creative Minority Report thinking along the same lines quotes in full the relevant passage from C.S. Lewis.
Now from the famous alliteration Dawkins is limited to two options. So if he says Jesus would be an atheist that means he would either be a lying atheist or a lunatic atheist.
This type of nonsense also reminds me of the meme liberal theology explored where Jesus did not know he was God. By their perspective I guess they would also allow Jesus to be a fleeting agnostic or atheist. Pretty bad when you don’t believe in yourself or are not convinced of the evidence relating to yourself. Liberal theology gives us an amnesiac Jesus more fitting for a soap opera plot. In Jesus’s case finding yourself and finding God are the same thing. I would recommend Fr. Most’s “The Consciousness of Christ” for a thorough-going refutation of this idea and the magisterial teachings that totally contradict it.
5 comments
The traditional forumla is a dilemma by McDowell? But Lewis used it in “Mere Christianity” decades before McDowell. And it is widely regarded as a trilemma:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis's_trilemma
“The trilemma has been further popularised in Christian apologetics since Lewis, notably by writers like Josh McDowell. “
The argument is:
1. Everyone above a certain level of intelligence who knows what we know today is an atheist.
2. Jesus was above that certain level of intelligence.
3. Therefore, Jesus would have been an atheist if He knew what we know today.
Okay, so #1 is empirically false, and #2 is unknowable, and #3 doesn’t follow from #1 and #2.
Other than that, what’s the problem?
(And how long till we have to start admitting that he’s not a good scientist?)
He’s a decent scientist–from what I understand his book on evolutionary biology are fairly respected–but he’s a horrible philosopher, meta-physicist, and theologian.
I can say nothing against his contributions to evolutionary biology. But the bit Jeff quotes above is aggressively anti-scientific.
I don’t think that a person need to be a Richard Dawkins to know that Jesus was a man and all men do have their limit as to what they will put UP with before they lose their cool you might say. Most Richard Dawkins might also agree that all men just like steal will bend just so far in reality before they brake but then today in the twenty first century cartoons is accepted by some as reality to describe what can be accepted to be good and/or bad.
And your point is?
Well, if Jesus was really God and if He was to lose His temper, would He turn into “The Anti-Christ” or would He simply blame “IT” all on science?
Go Figure! 🙂
Peace