Wednesday, December 19, 2007

4 Important Modern Atheists Discuss Their Work

In recent years, no authors have given more influential arguments for nonbelief than Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris. A recent meeting of the four great minds was recorded and will be available soon on www.RichardDawkins.net

The discussion can be watched online here:

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris Discuss Nonbelief and Reactions to their Work

Here are some choice quotes from the discussion:

"Religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity and you are faced with the choice of articulating the criticism or buttoning your lip.” Daniel Dennett

"If you play the faith card and say that you’re a Christian and you therefore have to believe, at that point we must say, then you have to excuse yourself from the discussion because you have declared yourself incompetent to proceed with an open mind. If you really can’t defend your view [with reasons] then you can’t put it forward. You can’t defend what your holy book says as true, you can’t do it by acknowledging that all you have is faith. Daniel Dennett

"A creative intelligence who is sufficiently intelligent to create all of the finely tuned constants of the universe to give rise to us has got to be a lot more fine tuned itself. And some explanation would need to be given of it." Richard Dawkins

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Mr. McCormick, I appreciate your opinion of faith-based Christians; especially the part where we are all naive, incompetent, and completely incapable of debating succesfully against anyone who disagrees with our beliefs. Apparently you have never heard of Dr. Brown and the FIRE School of Ministry. Even a simple dropout, such as myself, will have no trouble at all defending any and all points in Christianity using modern and classic techniques involving, but not limited to
: Theology, Science, Ethics, empirical proof, and (as I'm sure you'll thoroughly enjoy) Philosophy.

However, the synopsis of your book intrigues me as I can only hope it isn't as closed minded as it would first appear. I may just have to invest in a copy!