In an earlier blog post, I collected some links to Christian apologists for the Bible. A recent discussion of Google Buzz had me exchanging ideas with a Christian apologist, an Islamic apologist, and a few others. The Islamic/Muslim apologist provided plenty of links to videos of Dr. Zakir Naik.
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I suppose you must have heard of the arguments presented by the Christian apologist Dr. Lennox. I simply want to ask you how you would refute them. Specifically the argument where he insists that faith and belief is fundamental to even science; that all science depends on a fundamental faith that the universe is rationally intelligible. But isn’t it true that, as investigators our expectations are irrelevant to what we actually observe, record, and interpret so long as we do not let our expectations (“faith”) of beauty and elegance color our judgement in these matters. Why must he insist that our faith in expecting things to turn out one way or another is exactly the same as religious persons having faith in God? He essentially uses this argument to defend their position of blind faith in the existence of God.
Two questions: First, is his argument regarding our supposed “faith” in science valid? Second, do they translate exactly to the faiths of the religious kind?
Also, I am tempted to view his science-is-based-on-faith-too idea as a straw-man argument from his side to exempt atheists from believing in anything. What are we (I am a budding atheist
) allowed/not allowed to believe/have faith in? Is wishful thinking and harmless optimism outside the confines of atheism as dictated by rationality?
Outside of this I am bound to outright disagree on one other kind of dualism that he proposes in the way we look at science and religion. He claims that while we can get away with science by viewing everything in the eyes of a skeptic, we must approach differently when we try to asses the validity of theories involving God because, “God is a person, and you will never get to know a person unless you open yourself up to the person in question”. This a completely unsatisfactory explanation for anything simply because of the ex-falso quod-libet nature of the dualism.
It’s interesting to note that Dr. Lennox is a mathematician, which is why I’m am rather interested in understanding his arguments, and not simply in refuting them.
Comment by Chidambaram Annamalai — June 7, 2011 @ 2:51 pm