There was a recent, and surprisingly civil, debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox (a mathematician) in Birmingham Ala. They are both Oxfordians. This is the first time Dawkins has ventured into the Bible Belt for a debate, a region he once dubbed “the country’s reptilian brain” as opposed to the North and east and west coasts which he has dubbed the country’s “cerebral cortex”. No prejudices reflected there! Here is a link to a Wall Street Journal review article on the debate which James Foster kindly sent me.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010724

For those interested in two recent good rebuttals to the fulminations of Dawkins see: 1) Alistair and Coleen McGrath’s The Dawkin’s Delusion (IVP); and just released, the marvelous story of how one of the world’s most famous atheists Anthony Flew became a theist– “There is A God– How the World’s Most Famous Atheist Changed his Mind” (Harper Collins). Francis Collins says this book will infuriate the fundamentalist atheists.

What I would remind folks on either side of the debate is that atheism is a religious point of view, not a scientific one. Why? Because it requires a certain kind of faith on the part of a mortal who is not omniscient to believe adamantly or event to pretend to know that there is no God, and to think that the evidence is so overwhelming that the counter evidence can be dismissed as non-scientific, insubstantial, purely subjective etc. This is indeed a form of fundamentalism, like various other sorts of fundamentalisms since there IS evidence, indeed strong evidence that a reasonable person could count as for the existence of God, including empirical evidence. Indeed, the vast, vast majority of human beings in all ages, intelligent or otherwise, have always thought that the evidence as we have it at least favors the existence of God. Atheism has always been a tiny minority view point, and continues to be such. It’s just that some atheists have become more high profile and more provocative in the last ten years and they are getting more of a hearing than they did in the past.

But I will not spoil the reading of these two good books. They speak for themselves.