If Fr Sean Fernandez had brought a ticket to the Pell-Dawkins debate, he would have asked for his money back.
There was a great deal about ABC’s Q&A of April 9 with which one could be disappointed.
In increasing gravity, one could be disappointed with the ill-mannered man who addressed the Cardinal as ‘George’; but perhaps he had not been taught manners.
One could be disappointed that Tony Jones did not interrogate Richard Dawkins regarding his weak argumentation; but perhaps he felt sorry for him.
One could feel disappointed that the ABC passed the online vote they facilitated as a ‘poll’; but perhaps they have not heard of self-selection bias.
All this pales, however, before the most disappointing aspect of the evening: the intellectual mismatch between the participants.
We were promised a stimulating debate between a world-famous atheist scientist and Australia’s most senior churchman.
The world-famous atheist’s arguments were, to put it kindly, intellectually trivial. It was akin to watching the 1982 boxing match between Larry Holmes and Tex Cobb (try googling ‘terrible boxing mismatches’).
On the other hand, I was not disappointed by Cardinal Pell’s contribution: he presented a well-researched, reasoned and considered response to the questions.
It was a witness to the rich intellectual tradition which has been part and parcel of the life of the Catholic Church.
I had set myself up for disappointment with regards to Dawkins. I had read his arguments before and heard him speak; each time I was bemused at the rapturous response he received.
He gives the impression of a man who has never read a history book. But I thought he would have prepared for this debate.
He was asked about the basis for a moral world view and responded with a hope.
Any teacher would recognise the weasel words, ‘I hope no one would think’.
He could not present a cogent and intellectually sound response; indeed, he did not respond properly at all.
He went on to make some comment about positive changes being ‘wrung out’ of Christianity.
I wonder what his sources are. Is there any basis for the comment? There are excellent books, by Charles Taylor amongst others, on the genesis of contemporary understandings of the self and of moral universes.
Has Dawkins read any of these? One gets the impression that the basis for his ideas of Christianity, history, philosophy and theology is not research, but common knowledge of the kind, ‘everyone knows that the Church teaches such and such, or did such and such,’ – no more than an appeal to everyday prejudices.
The trouble with many of these prejudices is that they are not supported by critical historical studies (I have tried in a small way to illustrate this in this newspaper in the past).
When he was asked about ‘creation from nothing’, he responded with a reference to a book by his co-traveller, Lawrence Krauss.
The Cardinal’s response was spot on. Krauss re-defines ‘nothing’ to suit his argument. His ‘nothing’ is not ‘nothing’ at all.
In the New York Times review to which the Cardinal made reference, David Albert has this to say about Kraus’ book: “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that.
He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted.
“I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.”
Dawkins tries to dig himself out of this particular hole by saying that Kraus’ ‘nothing’ is simpler than God. Dear me, the man has obviously not done elementary philosophy. Kraus’ ‘nothing’ is not simple; God, on the other hand, is truly simple.
Dawkins wants to take the path that Bertrand Russell took many years ago in his famous debate with Fr Frederick Copleston.
When Copleston raised the question, ‘Well, why stop at one particular object? Why shouldn’t one raise the question of the cause of the existence of all particular objects?’ Russell responded, ‘Because I see no reason to think there is any tout court.
The Cardinal alluded to the failure of intelligence, the failure of enquiry which this entails.
Cardinal Pell also raised the issue of contemporary biology’s research into patterns in evolution.
One biologist who has delved into this is Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge.
He writes of evolutionary convergences (his book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe is one I recommend to you as a fascinating read).
In the 2005 Boyle Lectures, he said: ‘Who hasn’t met the scientist who boomingly – and they always boom – declares that those who believe in the Deity are unavoidably crazy, “cracked” as my dear father would have said, although I should add that I have every reason to believe he was – and now hope is – on the side of the angels.’
Something else he said in that lecture is relevant: ‘It is surely telling that the apparent disagreements between science and religion are so often treated with a bluntness and unsubtlety that in any normal discourse would be dismissed as juvenile.’
I suppose I hope in vain that having seen their hero exposed as a man of straw, atheists will look for inspiration elsewhere.
It is a pity because good and informed interlocutors enrich the religious discourse.
The last word I leave to David Albert: “When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.”