Richard Dawkins was recently challenged to a debate with William Lane Craig. He declined. Craig, he said, was a “deplorable apologist for genocide” with whom he would not share a platform. The genocide in question is that of the Canaanites in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy (see link).

One of Richards more famous quotes from “The God Delusion” on this issue is:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

One of the biggest problems that many people have with God as detailed in the Bible, which Richard has so clearly demonstrated above, is that of His judgment against nations like the Canaanites. One only has to read Biblical history to find God commanding the slaughter of the Canaanite men, women and children. Not even the livestock are spared. So what are we make of this? Is God a moral monster?

Paul Copan has attempted to answer this challenge in his book “Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God.” His answer to the charge that God commanded the genocide of the Canaanites is that this was not the genocide that it appears to be from a simple at face value reading of the text; that the text is hyperbolic and an exaggeration of what actually happened; that these were more like disabling raids of the military bases/cities and religious centers and not the leave no survivors destructive conquest that one might assume from a face value reading of the text. The passages on the women and children are just sweeping language being used as a disabling metaphor where central structures are undermined so that the Canaanite influence is disabled. For a more thorough explanation you can check out this interview (3rd hour) with Greg Koukl on his radio show at STR or their blog. Otherwise you can get his book.

While Paul Copan’s explanation on the issues of slavery, bigamy, child sacrifice and the treatment of women in the Old testament seems sound to me, I think Clay Jones comes to the correct conclusion on the issue of the “divine genocide” of the Canaanites. He argues in his treatise, “We Don’t Hate Sin. So We Don’t  Understand What Happened to the Canaanites”, that the face value interpretation of the text is the correct interpretation. Clay also appeared on Greg Koukl’s radio show in an interview that can be found here (3rd Hour) which is where I got most of his answers for the rest of this blog post.

The first thing that needs to be examined is the culture and behavior of the Canaanites to see if there could be any justification for their obliteration as described in the Old Testament. Archeologist William Allbright tells of an ancient Canaanite poem where the Canaanite God Baal, rapes his sister while she is in the form of a calf 77 even 88 times. We have here rape, incest and beastiality in the same act. Baal also has sex with his mother and daughter. If this is who the Canaanites worshiped, if this is their God whom they emulate, then according to Jones, this is certainly what they themselves are doing. And these acts are borne out with further study of Canaanite culture. God outlaws these practices in Leviticus and this sin is punished when both the Canaanites and Israel committed them. And that punishment was harsh. Sodom and Gomorrah were examples of Canaanite cities who were judged by God with good moral justification.

So how does Clay Jones answer the complete destruction passages of the Canaanites in the Old Testament? Clay starts off by making an observation of our own culture. We seem to have been inoculated to sin. Average people just does not care anymore about many sins. Our culture does not even recognize them as sin, let alone understand what the term sin actually means. We have become so Canaanite-like in our own culture to the point where, as Clay put it, “Studying these things over the years has led me to wonder if the Canaanites might stand up at the Judgment and condemn this generation”.

Livestock

Why kill all the livestock? You do not want to be around animals that are used to having sex with people. In Clay’s article he gives an example of a female gorilla sexually attacking a psychologist.

Women

If you want to erradicate these practices from a culture, then why would you leave women who were just as guilty and as equally dangerous as the men in participating in these practices.

Children

Yes the children too. Firstly what age do you start separating children from adults? 18? 12? Clay tells of fostering children because he and his wife could not have their own children. They learned that kids coming into your house at from as young as 4 years old were bringing their culture with them. Now, what if you had killed their parents? What would teenage rebellion look like for those children who were spared. Certainly they were exposed to a highly sexualised culture and were very much likely to have been molested by that time.

So how do you stomp out that culture in order to prevent if from affecting the Israelites adversely? If you want to erradicate the sinfullness of the Canaanites, how else can you do it?

But wait, I hear you say, the Bible talks of the continued Canaanite presence in the region after this “divine genocide” occurred. How does Clay answer that? Clay directs our attention to those “divine genocide” texts and points out that Gods command was only for a specific region. There was still a Canaanite presence outside the region that the Israelites were to inhabit and that’s why there were commands still in place not to take wives from outside the Israelite culture etc. But as we read further into the text, the likes of Kings David and Solomon did not uphold these commands perfectly (by taking wives from outside the Israelite community) and thus the Canaanite culture was reintroduced into the Israels culture and corrupted them to the point where God then dealt harshly with the Israelites via the Assyrians and Babylonians.

So in conclusion, I think we can accept the text at face value. The question that remains is what do you think of God for commanding such a thing? Does God have a right to do with His creation as He pleases? If you have a problem with the selective judgment of the Canaanites then how do you feel about the almost complete destruction wrought by God of the whole world during the Flood? And how do you feel about the impending destruction of everything at Armageddon?

In a November 2006 interview with Time Magazine, Dawkins gets it so miserably wrong;

TIME [Magazine]: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1553986-2,00.html

In depth discussions of epistemology aside, I believe Dawkins is making a category error which results in a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premise. You see science, which is limited to observations of interactions within the “natural” world, is being used to come to the conclusion that a “supernatural” creator does not exist. Or put another way, if it turns out that science doesn’t have the tools to “test” for the existence of supernatural things, then it stands to reason that it cannot be used to come to the conclusion that a supernatural creator does not exist. I think that’s fairly straight-forward.

Thinking that science (defined as it is within a materialistic framework) can be used to make such conclusions on questions like this, is like concluding that chickens have no weight because the thermometer we used to investigate this question failed to provide any answers. Science can only deal with physical things governed by physical laws. So by very definition then, science cannot directly address the question of whether non-physical things, like God, exist or not. Such a question is outside its capabilities.

But there is another point to be made here concerning the use of reason and logic. Reason and logic, it turns out, are tools that science depends upon, yet they are not physical things that science can test. To illustrate, what scientific experiment could you do to verify reason? Can you put it in a test tube and watch what happens when it’s heated? Can you measure its diameter or weight, or check it’s reaction to various external stimuli? No of course not. Instead science must assume the presence of immaterial things such as reason and logic to be able to make a scientific case for anything! They must therefore rely on the presence of the immaterial to make sense of the material. But that’s not all folks! Not only must atheists like Dawkins assume that reason and logic exist to be able to do the science that he thinks disproves the existence of God, but he must also assume that his own mind (another non-physical entity) can make accurate assessments pertaining to these non-physical things, which if anything, implies the existence of God, rather than evidence against. No amount of high-tech lab equipment can take a sample of reason or a few milligrams of logic, put it under the microscope and test its properties. These are things that only a mind can grasp and put to use, because minds, like thoughts, reason and logic, are not physical things. In other words they’re real, but not physical.

So if reason and logic and the mind are immaterial things that we know exist, even though we know science cannot possibly test them, then is it at all correct for Dawkins to claim that the answer to the question, “Does God Exist?” is a scientific one to which the “answer is no”? Absolutely not! This is a category error. It’s like trying to weigh a chicken with a thermometer. Science can teach us some pretty awesome things about the universe that God created (and to a certain point, about God Himself), but science alone can never disprove God. It’s not a scientific question.

In conjunction with the Global Atheist Conference which concluded yesterday, Australia’s national broadcasting station, the ABC, invited Professor Richard Dawkins onto to it’s program of panelists, Q and A. The topic to be discussed was, none too coincidentally, “God, Science and Sanity”. And given the makeup of the panel on last Monday night (8 March 2010), it comes as no surprise that Prof. Dawkins stole the show.

For those of you unaware – of which I assume this is the vast majority of you – the Q and A program pits pollies, professionals and “pundits” up against each other while passing the questioning over to the audience, whether to a member in the studio or to someone watching at home who participates via the program’s website. The idea is quite simple: grab a hodge-podge of celebrities, specialists and politicians, throw them in the same room, given them a topic and then let the public “have at it”.

And “have at it” was the operative word last Monday; but not against Prof. Dawkins – that was one parrot that wasn’t going to get knocked off his perch. But the other panelists, namely those who identify as theists, sure did get a hammering.

Read the rest of this entry

On September 12, 2009, The Wall Street Journal published two responses to the question “Where does evolution leave God?”.^[1] On September 21, The Australian republished this discussion framing it as a debate on their front page. As it turns out this was a misnomer. Rather than a debate, it was nothing more than two independent responses by Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong, both of whom already believe that evolution is virtually ipso facto.

In fact neither Dawkins or Armstrong appear to have been given the opportunity to respond to their opponents’ opening remarks - not that it would have been necessary though, as Armstrong spends half her time agreeing with Dawkins anyway.

The article begins, “We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question “Where does evolution leave God?” Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.”

Read the rest of this entry

Jonathan Sarfati’s response to Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth is quite adequately titled The Greatest Hoax on Earth.

Note, this is not a book review as I haven’t even yet had the privilege of holding it my hands, let alone read any of it. But having read many of the articles and books that Dr. Sarfati produces, knowing also that he has a high authority for scripture, and having seen/heard him debate and speak in person on several occasions, I can hardly think of a person I’d rather read in response to Dawkins.

From CMI’s store-page advertisement:

Richard Dawkins, the undisputed high priest of evolution/atheism, says his book The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution is the first time he has presented all the evidence for evolution/long ages. It is promoted as an unanswerable demolition of creation. Scientist, logician, chessmaster and author of the world’s biggest-selling creationist book, CMI’s Dr Jonathan Sarfati, relentlessly demolishes Dawkin’s claims point-by-point, showing biblical creation makes more sense of the evidence.

The introductory chapter of the book is available to read for free online.

The book is only AU$20 for single orders. But if you can spare it I’d recommend you fork out the extra 20 bucks and get two additional recent DVD presentations by Dr. Sarfati as well: Evolution and the Holocaust and Leaving Your Brains at the Church Door