Letters to the Editor | 16 December 2006

Dawkins vs God

From R.F. Clements

Sir: Richard Dawkins might be convinced of the existence of God (‘A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God’, December 9) by ‘a large-scale miracle which could not have been engineered by a conjuror’. What evidence does he want for the greatest miracle of all time? It happened 2,000 years ago. The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ was attested by some 600 people, most of whom had no idea that Jesus had to suffer and die on the cross and would be raised by the power of God. But (Acts x 40) ‘God raised up (Jesus) the third day, and showed him openly …even to us who did eat and drink with him.’ The experience of meeting the risen Lord changed their lives. Utterly convinced, they set out to preach the gospel of salvation to a pagan world. They suffered persecution, hardship and death for their beliefs, in anticipation that through faith they would live with Jesus in the future Kingdom of God on earth.
Roy Clements
Monmouth

From Steven Sidley

Sir: I believe that Rod Liddle has overlooked the most powerful weaponry of the Dawkinsian approach. A faith- or belief-based system brooks no counter-argument, no matter how compelling the logic (Stalinism falls into this category as much as any religion). A scientific approach, by definition, will step down when faced with an argument of superior logic, or contra-evidence. So Mr Liddle’s proclamation of a threadbare Darwinism or other perceived weaknesses in Dawkins’s arguments may well be true, but they don’t begin to falsify the gestalt of his position — they are merely minor smudges on a large and powerful canvas. When those smudges grow enough to change the larger picture, perhaps we can retire Richard Dawkins, but until then his position remains formidable.
Falsification (of which there is no equivalent in belief systems) is the great Popperian check and balance of scientific theory.