Alister McGrath Responds to Richard Dawkins

For those of you who do not know the above-mentioned scholars, Alister McGrath is a theologian from England who holds a PhD in Theology and a PhD in Molecular Biophysics (which he studied first), and Richard Dawkins is a scientist, also from England, who argues against belief in God.

On the website "Between Two Worlds" I came across a link to download a speech given by Alister McGrath responding to Richard Dawkin's book "The God Delusion." I have been listening to this 1 1/2 hour speech in short segments, so I am not done yet, but it is interesting to hear, and apparently McGrath is publishing a book in which he responds to Dawkins (to be published in the next few months, I believe).

Here's the link to the "Between Two Worlds" post.

Hopefully, when the busy-ness of this semester is over, I will be able to post on this, as I find it fascinating, and it touches the very foundation of Christianity--can we say that God exists?

First Good Snow-storm.

At least now it looks like winter again. And I had a snow-day, so winter is looking pretty good finally. Sherri also had a snow-day from work, because when we got up at 5:30 Wednesday morning, our car was surrounded by drifts about 4 feet high. The wind was coming from the North, and so it drifted around our poor car. I will try to remember to post some pictures of it.

On another note, as I was sitting at home doing some reading, I ran across another interesting sentence from a scholar. It is in a book we have to read for Poimenics (Pastoral Counselling). This book, basically a Four Views on Christianity and Psychology, outlines how Christian counsellors or psychologists or psychiatrists view the relationship between their faith and their scientific pursuit. We had to read the introduction, which was an outline of the relationship through history, and an interesting read. However, we then had to read an essay by a scholar who takes a 'levels of understanding' approach, which is basically that faith and psychology look at the same things with different approaches, and so each can help the other see things more fully.

However, in the midst of his article was a sentence that summed up the reservations I had about his approach as I was reading it. Here's what I remember of the sentence, since I don't have the book here with me today (it's still on our kitchen table):

"I am a conservative on the family matters because the data is so convincing."

So, I would argue, if the data was convincing another way, then that is the way that this scholar would go? If the data showed that marriage between a man and a woman and as God instituted it did not work, he would be against it? As I was reading his article, I kept wondering if he was constantly trying to bolster the importance of faith by looking to his science. He kept arguing that psychology generally agrees with faith on important issues. But if science did not agree, I wonder which way he would go.

I haven't read any of the other essays yet, or the other authors' responses to this article, so I can't say if there is a better way of understanding the relationship, but for now, I have my reservations about this 'levels of understanding' approach. But perhaps this is just this one scholar's understanding of it. Even so, I find him unconvincing, and dangerously flawed. It seems, to me, to fall into the same trap that the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea has at times fallen into: it partitions things off from each other too much, giving each their own sphere of influence, without realizing that what happens in one sphere affects the others. If faith and psychology look at the same things, but from different perspectives, then we could very well do one without the other. I am of the opinion that this is undesirable and probably impossible. The way that our intellectual pursuits and beliefs and such all interact with each other is very complicated, and to partition them off from each other reduces our understanding of how they work.

Hopefully, when I read more of this book, I will be able to come to a more complete understanding, and a more informed opinion.