19AR24-42
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AR 24:42 - Richard Dawkins' "dubious claims and assertions"
In this issue:
ATHEISM - "'no serious scholar' should make factual errors as blatant" as Dawkins makes here
MEANING - 'the tension between faith and science, death and hope'
+ an occult lifestyle that led to meaning in Christ
RELIGIOUS VIRTUE - widely circulated "erroneous paper on religion and generosity is finally retracted"
Apologia Report 24:42 (1,450)
October 24, 2019
ATHEISM
"Outgrowing Facts" by George Heath-Whyte -- begins: "Richard Dawkins was asked by journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy in an interview recently, 'If you could change the world, how would you change it?' His answer was that he would rid us of 'anything that's not evidence based, where factual knowledge is concerned.'
"Unfortunately for Dawkins, that may mean he needs to start ripping pages from his new book" - Outgrowing God [1]. Heath-Whyte includes a sample of what he calls Dawkins' "dubious claims and assertions." Dawkins makes accusations regarding "myths from the beginning of Genesis" asserting that "Genesis was written during the Babylonian captivity. The Utnapishtim story in turn comes from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh."
Heath-Whyte discredits Dawkins' claims by starting with some background knowledge. "The version of the Epic of Gilgamesh that Dawkins is talking about ... is not written in Sumerian as he seems to think, nor was it written at a time at which you could describe the people of the region as 'Sumerian'."
Next, Heath-Whyte calls attention to a related dating problem. "As well as the language, it seems as though Dawkins has confused the plot of the flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh with the plot of another Babylonian flood story, about a man called Atrahasis. ...
"Whichever of these flood stories Dawkins was thinking of, neither of them are 'Arguably the world's oldest work of literature' as Dawkins suggests." Again, details follow.
Moving on, Heath-Whyte adds: "The next set of mistakes is far more concerning.
"Dawkins starts giving his confused account of this Atrahasis-Gilgamesh-hybrid story" by finding what he suggests are telling similarities to the biblical story of Noah's flood - "including the spectacular rainbow finish." However, Heath-Whyte lists the discrepancies in Dawkins' attack and adds that "There is no rainbow mentioned anywhere" in the sources used by Dawkins.
"It gets worse. Contrary to what Dawkins writes in the final sentence of his paragraph, the goddess Ishtar is nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the flood in the Babylonian stories. ...
"The suggestion that the flood story of Genesis is based on the flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh is far older" than Dawkins attack. And, "to use a phrase Dawkins seems to be very fond of in this book, 'no serious scholar' should make factual errors as blatant as these."
And Heath-Whyte should know. As he explains in his introduction: "I'm an Assyriologist, which means I study the languages, history, and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia (including Assyria and Babylonia, both in modern day Iraq)" in his Oxford University work at the PhD level.
This item (Sep 26 '19) comes from "The Good Book" section of the "Oxford Apologetics Series". <www.bit.ly/31yvv80>
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MEANING
I've Seen the End of You: A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know, by W. Lee Warren [2] -- WaterBrook Press says this "memoir grapples with the tension between faith and science - and between death and hope - as a seasoned neurosurgeon faces insurmountable odds and grief both in the office and at home. Dr. W. Lee Warren, a practicing brain surgeon, assumed he knew most outcomes for people with glioblastoma, head injuries, and other health-care problems. Yet even as he tried to give patients hope, his own heart would sink as he realized, I've seen the end of you. But it became far more personal when the acclaimed doctor experienced an unimaginable family tragedy." These medical stories "serve as the backdrop for a raw, honest look at how we can remain on solid ground when everything goes wrong and how we can find light in the darkest hours of life. ... No matter what you're facing, this doesn't have to be the end."
The "starred review" in Publishers Weekly (Sep 23 '19) adds that Warren, an Iraq War veteran, "comes to realize, through these and other encounters, that faith may not change outcomes but can lead to better quality of life and relationships. His convictions are heart-wrenchingly put to the test by the sudden death of his 19-year-old son."
"I Spent Years Searching for Magic - I Found God Instead" by Tara Isabella Burton <taraisabellaburton.com> -- a study in the contradictions common to the occult lifestyle of rebellion and reckless abandon.
"I wanted to outrun the Nothing. And there was nothing I would not have sacrificed - friendships, relationships, the blood from the heel of my foot - to get it. ...
"I wanted magic. The kind of magic that transforms. ...
"I had consecrated myself to the exhilaration of free-fall. I had made some Bad Decisions. I had made them sound like myth. I would make more. I lived for decisions that made my life feel like myths. ...
"I had two options: a world that was enchanted, and one that was not, and the one that was enchanted was the only one I could bear to live in. I was - as it happens - in graduate school for theology, and would have called myself some kind of anodyne Episcopalian, but at my core I was thoroughly pagan. I believed in forces that had no names. I bargained with them and expected to win.
"I wanted magic. I didn’t think too much about meaning. Or at least, as long as everything meant something, the specifics didn’t seem to matter. ...
"The alternative was that nothing meant anything at all.
"I wanted to make a sachet of various herbs and contain my heartbreak within it. I wanted a world that would turn with my whispers. ...
"I started reading Tarot, often. ... If I didn’t get an answer I liked, I would ask the same question, over and over, shuffling the cards and demanding to see that the Bad Ideas I had were actually Good. ...
"I sacrificed all of myself. I emptied myself out. I hit bottom, in a thousand different ways, and got what I wanted, in a thousand more, and then, somewhere in the middle of my seeking a vague and generic sense of Poetry, I found a specific one. ...
"Which is to say: I became a Christian. ...
"I found myself meeting people who were not interesting, but kind. People whose kindness made them interesting. I found myself thinking of myself ... as part of a body of believers: all of us, together, part of a story that transcended us all.
"The faith I found proclaimed a sanctified world, and a redeemed one - an enchanted world, if you want to call it that - but one where meanings were concrete. ...
"Where everything pointed to this one thing, which is that at some point God was made man, and died, and came back from the dead....
"It is a story not just about Not-Nothing, but about Something. It is a story not just about the possibility of a world with meaning in it, but a story about a world where the meaning is, quite specifically, and utterly fully, love. ...
"In this new kingdom, the old rules of magic are broken, that fairytale arbitrage, because grace means that whatever debt you owe dark forces has already been paid in full. Jesus has died for your sins, and that means that the old bargains are invalid. ...
"The claims magic made on me - grandiose, vague, extravagant - were incompatible with the person I was becoming, who I wanted to be." Catapult, Oct 1 '19 <www.bit.ly/31vF4Vi>
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RELIGIOUS VIRTUE
"Does a Religious Upbringing Promote Generosity or Not? An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is finally retracted" by Tyler J. VanderWeele (Psychology Today, Sep 25 '19) -- "In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American. As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong. Another scholar, Azim Shariff, a leading expert on religion and pro-social behavior, was surprised by the results, as his own research and meta-analysis (combining evidence across studies from many authors) indicated that religious participation, in most settings, increased generosity. Shariff requested the data to try to understand more clearly what might explain the discrepancy.
"To Decety’s credit, he released the data. And upon re-analysis, Shariff discovered that the results were due to a coding error. ...
"Shariff’s re-analysis and correction was published in the same journal, Current Biology, in 2016. The media, however, did not follow along. While it covered extensively the initial incorrect results, only four media outlets picked up the correction.
"In fact, Decety’s paper has continued to be cited in media articles on religion. Just last month two such articles appeared (one on Buzzworthy and one on TruthTheory) citing Decety’s paper that religious children were less generous. ...
"Last month, however, the journal, Current Biology, at last formally <www.bit.ly/2NaOv7I> retracted the paper. If one looks for the paper on the journal’s website, it gives notice of the retraction by the authors." <www.bit.ly/2W2Wzev>
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Apologia Report's 24th year is coming to a close. If you want to keep AR coming, we'd like to know why (give examples). Those who fund Apologia's ministry are curious. We hope to share your input (possibly edited for brevity and/or clarity) with them. THANKS!
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide, by Richard Dawkins (Random House, 2019, hardcover, 304 pages) <www.amzn.to/33SUPaF>
2 - I've Seen the End of You: A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know, by W. Lee Warren (WaterBrook, January 2020, hardcover: 272 pages) <www.amzn.to/2My84HV>
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