Defanging The Athiest Tiger - Volume Thirteen

Audio Lectures by Father Thomas Hopko - The Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia

Written Observation by Fr Symeon Elias  - The Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A.

 "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, Jan. 17, 1961.

This presentation was very good. Father Tom does an excellent job of explaining the "makeup" of the human, and what is exceptional in his design and makeup.  I recommend this to everyone.


Audio Only for streaming or download.

Jun 19, 2010

Darwin and Christianity - Part 12:  The Soul

Ben Stein's interview with Richard Dawkins - where Dawkins admits the possibility of "Intelligent Design" and that he doesn't have the slightest idea how life began and that NOBODY else in  science knows how life began!  This is amazing because they teach millions of kids everyday that they know and they tell them just exactly how it happened, from chemical in the primitive oceans and lightening. (a physical impossibility.) 

Excerpt from Ben Stein's interview with Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction, jealous and proud of it. A petty unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive blood thirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, phillcidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Stein responded coolly, “So that's what you think of God?”

Dawkins: “Yea.”

Stein: “How 'bout if people believed in God of infinite lovingness and kindness and forgiveness and generosity, sort of like the modern day God? Why spoil it for them?

Dawkins: “Oh . . um” as his eyes rolled around in his head.

Stein: “Why not just let them have their fun and enjoy it?”

Dawkins: “Ah . . . I mean I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. I . . I write a book people can read it if . . .if they want to. Um . . I believe that it tis a liberating thing to free yourself from primitive superstitions.”

Stein: “So religion is a primitive superstition?”

Dawkins: “Oh, I think it tis, yes.”

Stein: “So you think it is liberating to tell people that there is no God?”

Dawkins: “I think a lot of people when they give up God, feel a great sense of release . . ah . . and freedom.”

Stein: “Why do you think that? I mean, what's your . . . I mean you are a scientist, what's your data?”

Dawkins: “I think . . well I've had a lot of letters saying that and I think . . .”

Stein: “There are eight billion people in the world. I mean, how many letter have you had?”

Dawkins stammers saying, “Quite true.”

As you see there is nothing scientific or even reasonable about Dawkins' general attack upon the God of the Judeo/Christian Tradition. If reason fails there is some other driver for this attack. Stein ask Dawkins if he would put an number on the likelihood that there was not God. He said, 99%. But when Stein said, “Why 99% and not 97%” and Dawkins equivocated admitting that he could not place a number on it, except to say that he thought it would be substantially higher than 50%. Then Dawkins admitted that he couldn't really put a number on it. “But . . but . . it is unlikely and I believe quite far from 50%.”

Stein: “How do you mean?”

Dawkins: “I don't know. I mean I put an argument in a book.”

Stein: “Well then who did create the heavens and the earth?”

Dawkins: “Why do you use the word who? You . . you immediately beg the question by using the word, who.”

Stein: “Well then, how did it get created?”

Dawkins: “Well, um, by a very slow process.”

Stein: “Well, then how did it start?”

Dawkins: “Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened, for the origin of life.”

Stein: “What was that?”

Dawkins: “It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.

Stein: “Right. And how did that happen?”

Dawkins: “I told you. We don't know.”

Stein: “So you have no idea how it started?”

Dawkins: “No, no . . . nor has anybody.”

Stein: “Nor has anyone else? What do you think is the possibility that there's an intelligent design that might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics for in the doctrine of evolution?”

Dawkins: “Well . . . it could come about in the following way. It could be that ah . . some earlier time, somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um . . that tis a possibility and um . . intriguing possibility, and I suppose it is possible that you might find evidence of that if you look at the . . . um . . . detail . . details of biochemistry and molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer.”Ben Stein voice over: “Wait a second Richard Dawkins thought Intelligent Design might be a legitimate pursuit? 

I don't have to bow to “sweetness” when the truth is not sweet. When I looked at Dawkins this evening and watched his silly show, his ridiculous answers to very direct, clear questions, I could see that he was willing to trust the origins of life to little green men but unable . . . no unwilling to place his visceral hatred of God aside, which he has clearly stated in text and quoted here. He could not suspend his hellish judgment of God long enough to state the obvious, the obvious to anyone with a brain and normal intelligence. That being that if design is clearly visible in the “things that are made” that another possibility for that design beside little green men from outer-space, is a higher being, possibly what men for thousands of years have called the God of Creation. If you viewed this from a "anthropological view" and from a totally secular bases, you would have to conclude that in the common human psyche is the ancestral memory of a "creator".  EVERY ancient culture on earth, every primitive society has some version of a creator in their mythology. But more than that there is the witness of the Saint, but to believe that witnesses you cannot be dead on the inside. Looking at Dawkins squirm in his seat in the back of my mind was that passage in the book of Wisdom (extra-canonical book in the old testament – I had to add that since last time I didn't a loving Bible thumper jumped on me violently saying, “I don't give a damn what's in your Koran.” <smile> ) Anyway, that passage reads, “Yes, naturally stupid are all who are unaware of God, and who from good things seen have not been able to discover Him-who-is, or, by studying the works, have not recognized the Artificer. Fire, however, or wind, or the swift air, the sphere of the stars, impetuous water, heaven's lamps, (and for Dawkins we have to add - little green men) are what they have held to be the gods who govern the world.”

Dawkins continues: “Um . . . um and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. That higher intelligence would itself would have had to come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. It could not have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.”

Did you read that right? Not that any will actually read this series, I'm having great fun listening and commenting anyway. But if you happened to have read in an earlier “volume” this will sound familiar to you.  Because, I stated that Darwinism and Evolutionism are ultimately pagan, in the fact that they trace “life” to pre-existent matter. They are materialist because they make “matter” eternal, ever existing and then the "nature of matter" become their god, the ultimate designer and creator, who is matter. Dawkins isn't the first person angry at God, caught in Gnostic foolishness, to create mythology of some alien demi-god creating life on this planet. The fact that he stepped the process to another planet, begs the question how did life start there? Well, maybe it was from a highly evolved creature from yet another planet, and yet another planet, etc. Add a billion planets in the process and you still haven't answered the questions of “where did LIFE come from?" or "How did Being derive?"   


These same people who make pretensions of metaphysics, also take great pride in reminding people that the "earth isn't the center of the universe."  I have to laugh a little at that idea, since in an ever expanding universe, which would be a "matrix" every object in that universe, from the perspective of that object, is the center of the universe. How could that be?  Because in an "expanding" universe everything is moving away from it.  If the entire universe is "expanding" it could not be perceived any other way. Consciousness on even the objects on the absolute edges of the universe would perceive everything moving away from it, just at we perceive everything moving away from us.  If that not so, then the universe isn't really expanding, but is merely "growing" still producing matter/energy in a process we cannot fathom. 

This interview is worth the time to hear it. I widens the field of understanding. I've included the the interview below because without a doubt Michael Cremo, in the last 20 years has been the most thorough researcher into the anomalous data of the mythology of Darwinism. Cremo's perspective is Hindu, and he is one of those fellows who has look with open mind at the data from many different angles. I include his interview here because this talk by Father Tom was about the nature of what it is to be human, and how that understanding of that means cannot be completed by natural science, since natural science is about "matter." Cremo goes into various models of humanity, and in particular the Hindu understanding of the nature of man and shows that evolutionism isn't an assault on that per se, but is an assault the second that natural science starts making grand statement about metaphysics and ontology. This understanding was echoed by Father Tom. That is natural science in the realm of natural science is a tool of humanity, something that humans do that apes or gnat do not do. But when it reduces the human to merely a biological entity, without soul, without spirit, it can only measure and understand part of what it means to be human. And further that science cannot answer "where" "how" and "why" life sprang into being, as Richard Dawkins readily admitted in his interview with Ben Stein, but it crosses the line at that point and makes pretensions of doing just that. The bottom line is that people who are lead to atheism because of the study of natural science are turned to fools by their "technological" study being pressed into metaphysics. If they understood the nature of God, as experience of God is proved, in participation in true and not "ego-centric" relationship with God, remembering that the latter might just be a stroll with our own ego, then nothing in the theory or teaching of evolution is a challenge to that relationship of 'faith and knowledge' except the mythology evolutions tells about the "origin of life." One of the scientist in the movies Expelled says of Darwin's work, "Darwin didn't write a book about how existing life developed into more complex forms of life. He wrote a book called "the origin of species." And nothing about evolution tell us anything about the origin of anything, only the complex mechanisms of development, and even here it is still theoretical and unproved.