Here's a novel idea:  A tutorial on critical thinking based on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.  For those who have not read it, Dawkins' book argues that science has replaced religion as a better explanation for everything and that belief in any sort of god is not only not necessary, it is nothing more than a delusion.  Given the critical beating this book has received, this exercise would seem to be a bit of kicking a quite dead dog.  But the Intelligent Community is using The God Delusion as an exercise in critical thinking. Utilizing a little guidebook and a series of MP3 downloads, the tutor takes you through 213 fallacies which are flagged in Dawkins' book.

I don't know who the "Intelligent Community" is or what they are about.  Since these are MP3 downloads, I couldn't play them backwards for hidden messages though one never knows about subliminal messages encoded in digital material.  (I point this out, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, for all you tinfoil hat wearers.)  That they selected Dawkins' notorious tome for their little exercise in reason makes me a bit suspicious.  They seem to support (gasp!) "intelligent design" (Horrors!  Hide the kids from the crypto-creationists!).  Hey, fair is fair, I say.  Dawkins has co-opted science for his own theological agenda. Besides, a fallacy is a fallacy whether uttered by a "faith-head" or a distinguished professor of biology.

Fallacies happen, almost like dandelions in the spring.  They mean you haven't proven your point, so you can stop doing your end zone dance because the refs flagged the play.  You could just as easily use any work of non-fiction, though Dawkins seems to commit more fallacies per page than a politician on a roll, and he does so at the high school level, making this work accessible.   I also appreciate the pedagogical use of a book that claims objectivity, evidence, and the certainty of reason.

I'm going to check this out more thoroughly, but at first glance, this exercise in critical thinking looks like ten bucks well spent.  There's some interesting stuff at the end of the guide book that I want to explore further, but they've highlighted many of the same spots I've marked in my copy of The God Delusion and more.

There is a further benefit to this exercise.  Immunization works by exposing someone to harmless bits of the real thing so that the body builds up an immune response toward it.  The God Delusion and this companion tutor would be a useful tool for teaching critical thinking at the high school level and would help immunize kids to pseudo-scientific atheism before the full-on exposure in college.

You can find The God Delusion tutor here.

Leave it to old James to hit the nail on the head.  Anger just doesn't get the job done, at least the way you'd like it.  So why are we angry so much of the time?  

I just came back from a couple of days of retreat hanging with the Benedictine monks up at St. Andrew's Abbey in the high desert of Valyermo.  I love hanging out with the Benedictines.   I love praying the Psalter with them, though their chant tones make me grateful for LSB.  I love their lavish hospitality; I always gain a pound or two.  I love their lectio divina during dinner hour.  This week's reading was an account of a pilgrimage by some American Benedictine.  I love the "great silence" from compline to the end of breakfast. There is something about the discipline of silence that does my talkative soul good.   I especially love their rather easygoing way of accepting people on an as-you-are basis.  

While I was hanging with the monks, I had plenty of time to read and reflect.  I've been reading the pop atheists lately.  Now there's some great reading for a monastery!  I plowed through The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and am now nearly finished with Sam Harris' The End of Faith.  I must admit to approaching these books with some fear and trepidation over what colossal arguments I would encounter.  Now I'm not sure why I was so worried.  I'd already read Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx et al thanks to a decent University of Chicago education.  I was hoping for something more, or at least something profound.  Oh well.  There's nothing really new under the sun, as they say.

But that's not the point of this post.  I'd like to extend an apology to Richard, Sam, Christopher, Daniel, and even PZ Myers for the diminished standards of my last post.  Of course, it's easy to become angry when you're defensive.  It's easy to be angry when Dawkins calls your God and Savior a "sky fairy."  Or when Harris says that believing anything leads to violence.  Or when Hitchens says that religion screws up everything in the world.  Or when Dennett mocks the friends who sincerely prayed that he wouldn't die by asking them "Did you sacrifice a goat?"  It's easy, even a natural reflex, to be angry.

It's easy to be angry with Richard Dawkins when he compares the catechesis of children to child abuse, or when he writes that the God of the OT is "jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pesitlential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (The God Delusion, p. 51).  Some of those words even make my spell-checker angry.

But easy doesn't justify anything.  I wondered, why the anger?  God can handle His detractors for Himself, all in good time, if He so chooses.  He doesn't need us to defend Him.  And if He has a good chuckle heaven at the hubris of humanity, what's that to me?  Why do I even bother to get angry over insults to God?

I watched the debate on The God Delusion between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox, a mathematician and Christian.  It's time well invested.   You can watch it here, or better still, buy the DVD.  The contrast between the two men over the hour and a half debate changed my attitude.  I began to feel sorry for the old biologist.  He seems so confident, even arrogant, when preaching to the choir at Berkeley.  (Believe me, I know a thing or two about preaching to choirs!)  But he looked so insecure, so anemic, so out of his league when confronted with the jovial Irishman Lennox who gave a robust witness to the historic character of the Christian faith.  I would have liked to have heard these two men engage in more unstructured debate; the format seemed stifling, particularly to Dawkins who appeared to be ill prepared.  What struck me most was how pathetically sad Richard Dawkins appeared, like a man on death row awaiting his last meal, and how happy Lennox seemed to be there debating his atheist colleague.  It wasn't one of Richard's A-moments.

I came away from that debate with a sense of shame at my anger.  What was I so mad about?  So what if some atheists make fun of religion or even my religion?  Must I become angry in order to prove my faithfulness?  Must I pull my sword like Peter to whack off the ear of Malchus to defend gentle Jesus from the playground bullies?  Atheists' mockery proves nothing, and their little syllogisms prove even less.

 I started to think of how sad it must be to live in a spiritual "flatland," a world confined to three spatial dimensions and time, a world devoid of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.  A world where matter and energy are all there is and the only purpose in life is to propagate your DNA.  A world where someone so sublime as God can be mocked as a "flying spaghetti monster."  As one who spent his college and graduate student days studying chemistry, I wondered how the noble discipline of science could have so stunted a person's imagination.

My Benedictine hosts showed me that to begin a conversation, one must accept the other person as he or she is, without any notion of changing that person.  "Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit," says the Lord.  I don't know why the atheists are so angry.  Perhaps they have good reason to be.  I know that Christians aren't always noted for their manners, much less their Jesus-like compassion for those with whom they disagree, myself included.  Maybe the angry atheists are just getting back at the playground bullies.  Fair enough. 

Ghandi once remarked, "I don't reject your Christ.  I love your Christ.  It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ."  We can't expect the other guy  to put down his sword while we are swinging ours.  That's true for many situations.  Don't expect someone who believes in nothing to put down his sword.  We're called to go first.  We claim to follow the One who said, "Turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, bless those who hate you, pray for your persecutors."

So guys, really, I'm sorry about last week's snark.  I'm praying for you.  I know you atheists don't like it when people say that, but we don't have a choice really, since Jesus shed His blood to save you guys too.

And no, Daniel, I won't be sacrificing a goat.  No need.

Richard Dawkins (The Deluded Atheist who likes to recycle 18th and 19th century arguments and act as though he just came up with them)

Christopher Hitchins (The Angry Atheist who likes to drink, smoke, and cuss and thinks religion poisons literally everything)

Sam Harris (The Intolerant Atheist on Drugs who blames religion for killing people and then makes an argument for killing religious people)

Daniel Dennett (The Enlightened Atheist who looks like Santa Claus and loves to mock friends who pray for him when he's deathly sick)

PZ Myers (the Village Idiot of Atheism who likes to autograph communion wafers to make some sort of point).  

If you want to waste a couple of hours and watch the Fab Four minus PZ whine about things over martinis, check out their video "The Four Horsemen of Atheism."  I guess even those guys know better than to invite PZ to the table.

For all the fascination with "evidence" and "reason," atheistic skepticism is largely one big fat begging the God-question.  The skeptic's arguments are basically the following five, take your pick:

1.  The existence of God can't be proven scientifically, therefore there is no God.

2.  Religious people do bad things, therefore there is no God.

3.  No one has yet to convince me there is a God, therefore there is no God.

4.  The world sucks, therefore there is no God.

5.  Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist, therefore there is no God.

Charlotte Allen rightly suggests that mockery and anger will only get you so far:

The problem with atheists -- and what makes them such excruciating snoozes -- is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God's existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God's omniscience with free will or God's goodness with human suffering. Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity, the "flying spaghetti monster" of atheists' typically lame jokes. They think that lobbing a few Gaza-style rockets accusing God of failing to create a world more to their liking ("If there's a God, why aren't I rich?" "If there's a God, why didn't he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?") will suffice to knock down the entire edifice of belief.

What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn't rationalism but anger -- anger that the world isn't perfect, that someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary. Hitchens thinks that "religion spoils everything." Dawkins contends that raising one's offspring in one's religion constitutes child abuse. Harris argues that it "may be ethical to kill people" on the basis of their beliefs. The perennial atheist litigant Michael Newdow sued (unsuccessfully) to bar President Obama from uttering the words "so help me God" when he took his oath of office.

You can read the rest here.

Michael "Under God" Newdow is back in the news and the courts again.  He's the atheist who tried to get "under God" removed from the pledge, arguing on behalf of his daughter, who happens to be a believer, who also happens not to be in his fatherly custody.  Failing that, he found some Sacramento parents who don't want their kids to say the G word and won that case in federal court.  An appeal to the supreme court is likely.  Stay tuned.  

Now he's suing to get the G-word off our money.  He should just be patient.  The US Mint inadvertently fumbled the phrase off the edge of the first release Washington dollar, so why not just let government incompetence run its natural course?  But I digress to the point of cynicism.

The phrase "in God we trust," in case you're interested, first showed up on a 2-cent piece by act of Congress in 1864 at the request of the director of the US Mint who felt there should be a "distinct and unequivocal national recognition of the divine sovereignty" on the nation's coins.  In 1955,  the same year that "under God" was officially added to the pledge, Congress required the phrase on all coins.

Newdow is that new breed of assertive atheist who doesn't want to hear or see the G-word in public, especially at public expense.  Apparently putting the G-word on currency is the equivalent of state-sponsored religion, contrary to the 1st amendment, or so he argues.  I guess no one ever thought of that back in 1864.  To call this state sponsored religion is a bit like suggesting that a teenager who says "ohmygod" every other sentence is being very religious.  

Some argue that the phrase represents the religious values upon which this country was founded, though that's not exactly what the director of the US Mint had in mind in 1864.  I suppose we could change the phrase to "In God we trusted," though I doubt Newdow would be satisfied.  Then there's the great question of which "god" it is that we claim to trust in this pluralistic society of ours.  For that matter, I'm not all that convinced of "e pluribus unum" either.

Personally I couldn't care less what is stamped on Caesar's coin.  I'm more concerned over what that coin is worth now that the Fed is cranking out money like there's literally no tomorrow under Obama's shop until we drop stimulus plan.  The ultimate leap of faith occurred in 1971 when US currency was taken off the gold standard.  Up until that time it was "in gold we trust."  It takes more faith to believe that fiat currency is worth anything than it does to stamp "in God we trust" on it.  

An MSNBC poll shows that 87% of people prefer to leave the phrase on our currency.  I wonder how many people believe that taking it off would somehow ruin the economy?

Here's the news story:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103424/

Here's a poll:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103521/

Just as funny is Colbert and Richard Dawkins.  What I don't get is why Dawkins posts this on his web site as a trophy.  Listen carefully to Dawkins' explanation of how nothing just happened to become everything all by itself through a natural process.  It's hard to tell which one is the comedian.  I've got to admit, Dawkins' is funny.

This reminded me of a great quote from C.K. Chesterton:  “It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

Here are a few paragraphs to get you going:

For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief “don’t matter”, that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

HR:  "Why I Believe Again"