Below is an interesting discussion between atheist Richard Dawkins and theologian Alister McGrath on the existence of God and the reasonableness of religious faith generally. It was filmed for a 2006 TV Documentary called The Root of all Evil?, presented by Richard Dawkins, but was cut from the final edit. The footage is uncut and therefore at times awkward (actually, this awkwardness does add some needed light relief), but it represents a good survey of the issues of the current atheism/Christianity debate.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6474278760369344626#]
This is a great conversation. It was good to see some civility in the discussion. I think that McGrath does a better job of answering the valid questions of Dawkins in his books than he does when standing in front of a camera. There are much better answers to Dawkins’ questions out there, published by other theistic thinkers. McGrath, in my opinion, didn’t handle the conversation about suffering and the problem of evil very well, but his weakness in the clip doesn’t mean that there aren’t strong theistic answers.
I’d like to respond to Dawkins’ view, expressed at the end of the video, that belief in God stifles curiosity, exploration, and scientific investigation. He’s absolutely wrong on this point. Rodney Stark, writing about the history of science in a book published by the University of Princeton Press, shows how the Christian/Theistic world view was a necessary cause for the rise of science. Theists believed, unlike pagan Greek cultures, that the universe was not random or accidental. Made by a rational, intelligent God, it was orderly and understandable. It was not subject to the emotional whims and conflicts of the gods in the Greek pantheon. The theistic perspective was that God created natural laws and ordered the universe so that it could be explored and so that we could, through rational investigation, learn and grow in our understanding. For this reason, science emerged from Christians in Europe. For this reason, Christians established the world’s first universities. Christians have always believed that God left a lot open for us to discover and learn. Historically, the Christian perspective has inspired intellectual pursuit and discovery, not stifled it as Dawkins would suggest.
Adding to this, it seems to me that atheistic post-modern thought presents a great threat to the pursuit of knowledge. At the core of post-modernism is the view that there are no real facts, only interpretations. If there is only interpretation and no true reality, what possibility do we have of true discovery and learning. In fact, why would we even want to try?