{"id":5070,"date":"2006-10-24T08:29:55","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T08:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/remember-the-dawkinsquinn-debate.html"},"modified":"2006-10-24T08:29:55","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T08:29:55","slug":"remember-the-dawkinsquinn-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/remember-the-dawkinsquinn-debate.html","title":{"rendered":"Remember the Dawkins\/Quinn debate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zenit’s posting a transcript. Part 1 is up, part 2 will be up early this evening, I’d imagine.<\/a><\/p>\n

More Dawkins from the past week or so:<\/p>\n

Stephen Barr at First Things:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

As one moves deeper into nature\u2014to levels about which the natural historian and zoologist can tell us nothing\u2014one encounters not less and less form but increasingly magnificent mathematical structures, structures so profound that even the greatest mathematicians are having difficulty understanding them. This is what Pope Benedict was referring to in his Regensburg lecture when he spoke of \u201cthe mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, . . . the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.\u201d It is what the great mathematician Hermann Weyl meant when he said, \u201c[I]n our knowledge of physical nature we have penetrated so far that we can obtain a vision of the flawless harmony which is in conformity with sublime reason.\u201d It is what the great astrophysicist James Jeans meant when he said, \u201cThe universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.\u201d <\/p>\n

At the foundations of the natural world, we do not find merely slime or dust or some dull insensate stuff. We find ideas of sublime beauty. Dawkins looks at mind and sees atoms in motion. Physicists look at those atoms, and deep below those atoms, and see\u2014or, at least, some of them have seen\u2014the products of \u201csublime reason,\u201d \u201ca great thought,\u201d a Mind. <\/p>\n

In other words, in nature we see a different arrow: It moves from Mind to ideas and forms, and from ideas and forms to matter. In the beginning was the Logos, St. John tells us, and the Logos was God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds<\/em>, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zenit’s posting a transcript. Part 1 is up, part 2 will be up early this evening, I’d imagine. More Dawkins from the past week or so: Stephen Barr at First Things: As one moves deeper into nature\u2014to levels about which the natural historian and zoologist can tell us nothing\u2014one encounters not less and less form…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRemember the Dawkins\/Quinn debate? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/remember-the-dawkinsquinn-debate.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Remember the Dawkins\/Quinn debate? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Zenit’s posting a transcript. Part 1 is up, part 2 will be up early this evening, I’d imagine. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}