Dawkins in Lynchburg

I watched Richard Dawkins on CSPAN - his talk at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg. And yes, Lynchburg means there was a busload of guys from Liberty University - Jerry Falwell's place. Their professor asked a very basic question after identifying himself and saying he'd brought his students so they could "understand the atheistic mind" and not "created atheistic straw men"; the students kept filing up with pre-prepared questions (one guy even said, "in continuation of the other guy's question") and thought they could stump him. Some hope. I'm not Dawkins, and I didn't hear a question I haven't heard before.

These are just a few of them:

One Liberty guy said he had a two-part question. Part one was "Do you draw a distinction between blind faith and reasonable faith?"

Dawkins' answer: "Do I draw a distinction between blind faith and reasonable faith? No."

The guy then tried to claim that thinking a ball will fall the next time you drop it is just reasonable faith and there is no proof. Dawkins then told him that they seemed to have a terminology difference: that is reason based on evidence, not faith.

"Okay, then (you could hear it in his voice, the gotcha!) don't you know that based on our evidence of cause and effect there has to be a cause to the Universe!"

Like Dawkins has never heard that one before. He demolished it, talking about the Darwinian explanation for how complex entities come from simple beginnings - which are "a whole lot easier to accept than complicated things. Complicated things come into the universe late." Postulating God - "who if he exists must be very complicated indeed" - as the first thing in the universe is "shooting yourself in the conceptual foot".

Then a young woman from Liberty asked, somewhat belligerently: "How can you believe in extraterrestrials as higher beings and not believe in God?"

He started to repeat it, puzzlement in his voice, and she repeated it for him. "I understand the words of your question," Dawkins said, and then gave it a shot. "An extraterrestrial being, if it is an advanced being, came into being through slow, gradual degrees. That's a very sensible explanation. God isn't like that. That's a crucial difference. They didn't just happen."

"But God's outside of nature!" was the next attempt.

"Isn't that just too easy? You exempt yourself from having to explain anything. If you're satisfied with that sort of reasoning, you're welcome to it," Dawkins said, and turned to the next question.

Which was a RMWC student wondering what you do if you're in a religious family and community and want to leave but it's not really possible yet. Dawkins addressed that with empathy, concern, and some sorrow because he had to admit that he didn't know what the answer was. He talked about the gains that gays have made, and expressed his hopes that someday this "academic matter," "this cosmological viewpoint" would be relegated to the background. She then asked him if "anger was a common symptom in people" going through the deconversion process. He was startled at the notion and asked the audience if it was common - they let him know it was.

And then a Liberty guy asked about the fossils at Liberty that are 3,000 years old - maybe 5,000. He wanted to know what Liberty could do to prove to a scientist that that's how old they are, and also how long is cosmological time? Dawkins replied that if anyone believed dinosaurs were 3,000 years old and the earth 6,000, then they were out by "a factor of a million. Which is not a trivial error." It is like believing the distance between San Francisco and New York is 28 feet. He then answered the question about proof: find the rocks and date them by several different forms of radioactive dating. He added that this wouldn't happen, of course, and was very angry that an actual university could say something like that; "that is an educational disgrace, and is debuauching the very idea of a university education," and then advised all Liberty students to find a "proper university".

The repeated question (I believe he thought he'd answered it with the 28 feet bit) about cosmological time and ID allowed him to talk about how Darwinian evolution is non-random and how enormously deep in time just the existence of life goes, let alone "cosmological time".

In all, Dawkins was collected, acerbic, eloquent, and unflustered. I don't know if anyone from Liberty was convinced - you have to be pretty deeply mired in the mindset to be a Liberty student, let alone one brought by a Liberty professor to hear the enemy talk - but the RMWC students appreciated him.