Atheist Dawkins: The debate-ducker

Newsweek magazine’s Oct. 5 edition devotes four full pages to Britain’s atheist, Richard Dawkins.

Three of these pages are given to an article by Dawkins, under the headline “The angry evolutionist.”

The fourth page is headlined “Darwin’s Rottweiler.” It features Dawkins’ twice stipulating: “The God of the Old Testament is a monster.”

Notably, Newsweek fails to mention the fact that atheist Dawkins keeps refusing challenges to debate from Christian evangelist Ray Comfort of California.

This New-Zealand-born head of the Bellflower, Calif.-based Living Waters Ministry is also the author of several books, including the intriguingly titled: “Nothing Created Everything.”

That title is similar to another response to atheism’s claim that It-All-Fell-Together-By-Chance – which means because of nothing. This has all of the logical probability of an explosion in a printing press resulting in “Webster’s Unabridged.”

While Newsweek, in its four pages devoted to atheist Dawkins, refused to mention his Christian challenger, Comfort, WorldNetDaily, which so often has reported what Old Big Media have missed or censored, reports the following Dis-Comfort of Dawkins:

Comfort offered $20,000 to Dawkins to debate him on BBC Radio – but Dawkins, instead of responding to this challenge, declared “Ray Comfort is an ignorant fool.” To this, Comfort replied: “He gave me a special condemnation for my book, which is delightful.” (And that condemnation is on the book’s jacket.)

Comfort has been invited to debate atheists at Yale, on BBC Radio, on ABC’s “Nightline” and at a conference of the American Atheists. Dawkins was further embarrassed when Amazon.com’s list of best-sellers on atheism showed Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion” was beaten in sales by Comfort’s book “You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think.”

Comfort has noted that Dawkins goes through the Old Testament and picks out the (reported and theorized) harsh judgments of God and “makes an idol that’s repulsive. But the problem is the God that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in doesn’t exist. The God of the Bible is the God of righteousness and holiness and justice and truth and love and mercy.”

In 2004, Dawkins wrote in a book entitled “The Ancestor’s Tale”: “The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.” (Would be mad – or are?)

Comfort cites physicist Robert Matthews of England’s Ashton University: “It is now becoming clear that everything can – and probably did – come from nothing.” He also quotes physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University: “Even if we don’t have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.”

Comfort has also challenged SANE to debate. That is Students for A Nonreligious Ethos at the University of California at Berkeley, who, like Dawkins, refused to debate him.

In February, Comfort offered Dawkins $10,000 to debate him, but Dawkins, who has a general policy not to debate with Creationists, replied: “Ten thousand dollars is less than the typical fee I am ordinarily offered to lecture to a serious audience. … It is not, therefore, a worthwhile inducement for me to travel all the way across the Atlantic to debate with an ignorant fool.”

Replied Comfort: “Dawkins is afraid, and he thinks he’s safe because I won’t pay that much money for his time.”

Clarence Darrow, the world-famed defense counsel and militant atheist, once exclaimed: “Can you imagine something being created out of nothing? Take two or three days – and think about that!”

Theologians have taken two or three thousand years, and they come up with an inevitable question unanswered by the Great Debater Darrow: If God created the earth out of some kind of raw material, who is it that created that? Did an earlier God just leave that raw material around?

If God did not always exist, when did God start existing? And who created God?

The mind boggles.

Just as my mind boggles when I see the inside of a computer.

But if God was ever created, then the creator of God is the real God, and the mostly created God becomes a sort of junior deity.

The idea of God always having existed and going on forever is impossible either to prove or to understand completely. It can give us intellectual indigestion.

But there are a great many things in this life that we don’t understand fully – but we go on relating to, such as a wife, or a husband. Or have you had that absolutely mind-boggling experience of living with your youngsters as they go through adolescence?

Some of those who write books about this staggering experience write as if they know exactly how to handle an adolescent.

I think they lie.

But we go on loving wives and husbands and adolescents, even though we will never in this world completely understand them.

Clarence Darrow rejected God, among other reasons, because there were a number of things about God and the universe he found beyond the capacity of his human understanding.

Fortunately for his law practice, Mr. Darrow did not reject all clients that he was unable to understand completely.

By contrast to Clarence Darrow, one of the greatest scientists in history, Sir Isaac Newton, was able to sense the glory of God in what for me was one of the dreariest and repulsive things I was ever forced to do in school: mathematics.

For Newton observed: “God is a great mathematician.”

Those who deny the existence of God – on faith rather than evidence – simply because they can’t understand everything about Him, are like those who deny the existence of love – because they find it impossible to fully understand a wife.

One of world history’s greatest scientists, Albert Einstein, just as Sir Isaac Newton before him, said: “I can’t believe that God plays dice with the universe.”