Pericles,
I'm trying to properly follow and understand your position. For Dawkins' atheism, evolution is important. For you it is not.

Dawkins is obviously quite opposed to religion. Does this have or not have anything to do with his understanding of science, or is it just his personal leaning or preference?

With your disagreement with Dawkins, Does this mean you are sympathetic with Madeleine, Dawkins is not the best spokesperson for atheism?

Shadow Minister,
I didn't realise that this was a discussion about morality. I thought it was about philosophical perspectives on theism/atheism. Or must a discussion of Dawkins naturally involve such personal attacks?

Squeers,
You say I'm not being sceptical. It's true, I'm partisan. I'm happy to defend a Christian position.

But what of yourself? Previously to Saltpetre you said you weren't defending any position. That seems to have changed in that you are now willing to side with a controversial or dubious position. So what is your brand of scepticism?

“There's no evidence to say nature can't create itself, and lots to suggest it can - we just don't know for sure.” These aren't the words of a real sceptic. When unsure, a sceptic would suspend judgement, and wait until the matter can be proven.

You say evolution is credible and that Dawkins has compelling evidence that all life is related by common descent all the way back. Are we allowed to be sceptical about this? There are many who don't find the evidence so compelling.

Even those who are pretty much sold on the ideas of evolution, such as Bugsy, aren't totally convinced. He directs me to a web page that states, “Gene duplication is 'believed' to play a major role in evolution.” Is that the strongest statement they can make? Maybe they're leaving themselves some wiggle room.

You say I only defend my position on faith. Previously you asked me to put an argument involving evidence, but after I did you didn't comment on it. Should I have bothered ?

Faith has various shades of meaning. It could mean to accept something as true though the evidence is incomplete. Even Dawkins says he's not totally convinced about the existence of God, but only 'almost certain'. So do we say he has faith? Or perhaps yourself, when you're unsure of something?

For a Christian, faith is not blind. The first Christians believed Jesus was resurrected after seeing, touching, and eating with him. Yet they still called believing in him 'faith'.

Dan,

sorry for the delay.
I don't take either side in the theism/atheism debate, for me there's no call for certitude either way and, moreover, it's a trivial preoccupation that elides serious issues that both sides ought to be addressing. The theists of all persuasions profess their moralities and yet sit on their hands in a world, nay their own societies, where shallow materialism (and other evils they're meant to resent) is rife, even transcending gross inequalities in its subscription. Meanwhile Dawkins and co preside over an intellectual hegemony (once enjoyed by the church) that is cat's paw to the State and heavily invested in a political economy that runs counter to any philosophy of science worthy of the name. They profess objectivity while siding with neoliberalism, and proselytise their rationalism as aggressively as anyone.
I was only giving credit where it's due, evolution is compelling--but so were a great many other theories and doctrines that were subsequently overturned, or revised to such an extent as to be made effectively obsolete.

I sympathise with what you say about faith and that the term counts for far more than the credulous straw man atheists sometimes try to prop-up. I have a kind of weak faith myself that our reality is more than it seems, but it's nowhere near a conviction and I don't even regard it as important, comparatively, in the here and now. It seems to me then that both sides shamelessly neglect biases that are important and help to maintain the human world as it is.
Both sides ostensibly transcend worldly things (in a sense), yet neither is self-reflexive, critical or active.
Thus the "bare bones of a theistic argument" you put up is for me just as academic a position as that taken by liberal rationalists. By academic I mean of no earthly use.
I do enjoy arcane debates, but they're in the order of leisure rather than anything pressing.

Squeers,
I can relate to what your saying about arguments discussing the existence of God. By nature they tend towards the ethereal. Yet, for better or worse, however far down it is on a list of important topics, such is the topic that has put before us for discussion on this thread.

For Shadow Minister, who says he's unaware of Dawkins using evolution as proof for his atheism,

or Pericles, who challenges that Dawkins would hold science as being antithetical to religion, here's what Dawkins said:

In one interview ('Expelled' film documentary), speaking in the context of a hypothetical court case investigating the effects of evolutionary teaching, Dawkins said, “If they called me as a witness, and a lawyer said, 'Doctor Dawkins, has your study of evolution turned you towards atheism?' I would have to say, 'Yes'.”

Evolution naturally leads to atheism, at least in Dawkins' thinking.

Hence, if Dawkins is right, then the theist, Craig, is in error for not opposing evolution (and the two shouldn't be comfortably swinging hands together on the issue).

If Dawkins is wrong, and evolution is no support for atheism, then it should matter precious little to Madeleine Kirk or anyone else what Craig thinks about evolution.

However, the tension exists because the issue is real. Evolution is incompatible with the Christian faith.

Dan,

I'm sorry, but in the name of sanity you have to be wrong with the final statement of your last post:

"Evolution is incompatible with the Christian faith."

You draw a very broad brush. There are I'm sure some Christians who would hold your statement to be true, probably those who also believe that the Earth, the Universe perhaps, is only around 6 thousand years old, thus also rejecting a great swag of science as well as the evolution of species - probably in fact rejecting anything which is not directly supported by the Christian Bible.

I am a Christian, and I, and I suspect very many other Christians, am quite content with science in general, including the overwhelming evidence of the evolution of species, including the evolution of Mankind. This does not mean that I reject the possibility of outside help either in the origin of life itself, or in the progress and process of evolution through the ages. The beginnings of life remains a mystery, however the fact of evolution is not. Homo Sapiens has existed on this planet for at least fifty thousand years, and evidently much longer. The refutation of carbon dating appears to be the principal argument of the Creationists for rejecting evolution, and it is the rejection of carbon dating which is erroneous, and Creationism which is erroneous, and not the other way round. Creationism can have no adequate answer for the multitude of different species which have inhabited this planet at various times through the ages, as demonstrated by a huge fossil record, nor an adequate answer for all these species not continuing to exist today.

Jesus lived two thousand years ago, virtually yesterday, if not just a few minutes or seconds ago, in the story of this, our planet Earth, and nanoseconds ago in the history of the Universe. Did Jesus say one thing about evolution? I think not. He had more important things to convey, and among them for Man to think, to appreciate, and to act wisely. Some of His message appears to have been lost in the mist.

Saltpetre,
Squeers speaks of the depths of life's mysteries. You speak of life's beginnings as mysterious. As a Christian, you may relate to the sentiments of St Paul, who described Christ as God's mystery. In Christ are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

So did Jesus say anything about evolution? I mentioned earlier what Jesus said happened at the beginning. He said that at the beginning the creator made them male and female. Speaking in the context of marriage, he was talking about people. People have only ever been people from the beginning. Evolution says people began as something else, as non-human beings.

A synonym for 'mystery' is secret. You speak of the extent of the fossil record, which according to Gould also has it's secrets. “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

For me, there are facts and there are mysteries. If the beginnings of life are a mystery, then I don't know how you could declare evolution a fact.