An Interesting... and Somewhat Disappointing... Debate

I watched (well, listened to, mostly) this entire debate today.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/richard-dawkins-loses-debate-against-former-anglican-head-rowan-williams-at-cambridge-university-full-video-89364/

The actual debate can be viewed here:

http://gnli.christianpost.com/video/richard-dawkins-andrew-copson-amp-arif-ahmed-debate-rowan-williams-tariq-ramadan-amp-douglas-murray-8404

I could really write a lot about the debate, but I really only want to comment on two things.  First, I found the questions from the audience extremely disappointing.  I suppose I was quite hopeful that they would be more thoughtful and critical.  Instead, many of them were based on false premises and wouldn't have been asked if a bit more thought were put into them.

I must confess that, one of my greatest concerns for this blog is that it come off as being very negative.  In truth, I am and have always been a very positive and optimistic person.  However, I think we have to be realistic about the state of our culture.  And one of the things I will likely post about frequently is that I believe, as a people, that we have lost the ability to think.  Thinking is a skill, and it is a skill that requires a lot of work.  To be able to spot logical fallacies, to have the mental acuity to not only pick out the premises behind one's arguments but to point out their falsity is an incredibly rare ability today.  I certainly do not believe that I am a skilled thinker in any way, but I do attempt to practice this skill.  We are, unfortunately, a highly unreflective people.  When we do reflect, we often only think as far as, "How can I object to argument 'x' because I believe 'y'?"  This is the source of most of the questions asked.  They didn't engage the material presented in a thoughtful way but sought to simply rebuff arguments before they even had to consider what was being said.

Second, I was (as I often am) extremely disappointed first in Richard Dawkin's presentation and more so in his warm reception.  He is welcomed by so many as a true intellectual, but he hardly has an original or (as he is so fond of demanding of others) an "open-minded" thought.  The monks at St. Gregory Palamas in Etna had a wonderful article in Orthodox Tradition essentially challenging him as a pseudo-intellectual and, for lack of a better term, a hack.  (That article can be found in this collection: http://www.ctosonline.org/new/DD.html)

So to have someone who is so intellectually dishonest and, frankly, unscholarly (not to mention intolerant and sadly shallow) so welcomed in our culture as a stalwart of scientific thought and icon of brilliance says either something very terrible about the intellectual state of our culture or the sad state of atheism.  Either way, I find it incredible how very far his presentation of Christianity is from the Orthodox understanding of things.  I doubt, however, that becoming aware of the depth and differences of Orthodoxy would change his mind, much... It's just unfortunate that so many people accept his criticism of a Christianity I don't know.

With all that considered, it was still an interesting debate.