This debate is really worth a listen. Lennox speaks very well. What follows are some classic Richard Dawkins statements. What do you think? (A, B C refer to the sound files 1 2 and 3 form the download, and the number to the time into the sound file.)
A14 I lost my faith because Darwin left me with no good reason to believe.
B2 Life is explained by Darwin. Cosmology is waiting for its Darwin.
B6 I invoke the Anthropic principle … and the multiverse.
B18 I would not for a moment say that all religion is bad or all religion is dangerous or Christianity is dangerous. Only a minority of religious people are bad or do bad things.
B20 The one belief I would give to a child is scepticism.
B28 I am not trying to say that religious people do bad things.
I do think there is a logical path from religion to doing terrible things.
If you really believe … then it is possible for an entirely rational person to do hideous things.
I cannot conceive of a logical path that says because I am an atheist therefore it is rational for me to kill or murder or be cruel.
B30 Once you grant them the premise of their faith then the terrible things that they do follow logically.
The terrible things that Stalin did did not follow from his atheism.
You will not do terrible deeds because you are an atheist – not for rational reasons.
B34 If you base your morals on the Christian Bible, your morals are likely to be hideous.
We are all to a greater or lesser extent moral. Whether we are moral or not has nothing to do with whether we read the Bible.
B35 How do I know what is moral? I don’t on the whole.
B36 Everyone knows by common sense that “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is moral. You don’t need a holy book to tell you to do that.
B37 As an evolutionist I say that …. the Darwinian pressure to be good is no longer so strong nor is the Darwinian pressure for lust as strong as it once was. That doesn’t matter.
There is something “in the air” about what it means to be moral and it clearly has nothing to do with religion because it doesn’t come from scripture.
C1 Maybe the world IS a hideous world. That doesn’t make it not true! If it is a hideous world, it gives us something to rise above. We can do a grand job of rebelling against the blind hideous physical forces that put us here.
We understand that we are here as a result of a truly hideous process. Natural Selection is an ugly process that has beautiful consequences.