A good post from Tim about the Mitre fuss.
He also talks about the Ditchkins controversies, on which topic this video of Peter Hitchens is worth watching.
Elizaphanian
“I come not from Heaven, but from Essex.”
A good post from Tim about the Mitre fuss.
He also talks about the Ditchkins controversies, on which topic this video of Peter Hitchens is worth watching.
Thanks for the link, Sam.
By the way, I have no idea why my google profile picture doesn’t seem to be working!!!
Thanks for the link. I particularly liked “But that’s not how it’s going to get written up in Christopher Hitchens’ next book, folks! It’s going to be all about who gets to wear ridiculous looking hats!”
On Ditchkins, I am very late to the debate but have been reading Feser’s “The Last Superstition.” He is *extremely* dismissive of the calibre of the arguments Ditchkins use – arguing that they simply haven’t bothered to understand, for example, the first thing about the theology of Thomas Aquinas before attacking him. (This something the reader has no danger of doing, and is subjected by Feser to numerous chapters of Aristotelian and Thomist argumentation.) Thus many of the arguments of Ditchkins are simply aimed at straw men. (Many of the points are quite similar to Eagleton’s Gifford lecture last year in fact.) As a non-theologian, I’d be interested to know whether Feser is considered state of the art.
There are a lot of good responses to Ditchkins (I haven’t seen Feser’s book).
The ones I would recommend are “God and the New Atheism” by John F Haught, “Is Religion dangerous?” by Keith Ward, Terry Eagleton’s “Reason, Faith and Revolution”, “What’s so great about Christianity” by Dinesh D’Souza (covers all the bases from an evangelical Christian position) and David Bentley Hart’s “Atheist Delusions” – a must read in my opinion. Hart is Eastern Orthodox.
I thought Dawkins’ book was terrible. John Lennox from Oxford has had the better of him in debate and wrote the excellent “God’s undertaker – has science buried God”
Thanks for the reading list. I had read D’Souza’s book – good in parts but I notice that on philosophy blogs they do not hold his attempts to appeal to e.g. Kant in a very high opinion. I’ll maybe have a go at David Bentley Hart’s “Atheist Delusions” then, if I ever finish Feser. (The latter is good but hard work; and it all stands or falls on whether you find Aristotle convincing.)