I finally got around to watch the Cardinal Pell\/Richard Dawkins debate which is about an hour long.<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Quite an interesting debate that was fairly civil. \u00a0I already knew Cardinal Pell was one sharp cookie, though did not know about his sense of humor and wit. \u00a0I also knew Richard Dawkins was not a serious philosophical student and he proved it here in spades. \u00a0He also seemed to be quite humorless and multiple times had to ask why people were laughing. \u00a0I guess he got the selfish gene, but not the humor one. \u00a0I did find Dawkins to be rather charming.<\/p>\n<p>Though like many debates no doubt atheists will think Dawkins got the upper hand and other will think the same of Cardinal Pell. \u00a0It was not a perfect debate performance by Cardinal Pell, but it was pretty excellent – though he went off point a couple of times in reply. \u00a0Once when the Cardinal was talking about Darwin and his theism, Dawkins called him a liar and the Cardinal replied citing the page number in Darwin’s autobiography. \u00a0There were other exchanges like that.<\/p>\n<p>Dawkins referred to “Lawrence Krauss\u2019 \u00a0book\u00a0<em>A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing<\/em>.” a couple of times – a book the Cardinal had also read. \u00a0It is a rather a shell-game of a book where nothing is really something – but a much simpler state. \u00a0The Cardinal brought up the critical review of the book from what should have been the sympathetic New York Times.<\/p>\n<p>My opinion of Dawkins is that he is really unequipped for such debates. \u00a0His understanding of Christian theology is totally undeveloped and distorted as if it was frozen at a grade school level. \u00a0That understanding opposing arguments is not a worthwhile use of his time and thus he would jump in with painfully silly questions for the Cardinal. \u00a0For example when the Cardinal explained the creation account and it’s literary form. That a truth was being told in poetical form, not in modern\u00a0historical writing. \u00a0But Dawkins oblivious to the the Cardinal was saying, responded by asking that since Adam and Eve were not real than where did original sin come from?. I felt embarrassed for Dawkins at this point. \u00a0As Mark Shea sometimes says “Scratch an Atheist, find a Fundamentalist”.<\/p>\n<p>In a related post Marc at Bad Catholic in his post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2012\/04\/religion-religioff.html\" target=\"_blank\">ReligiON, ReligiOFF <\/a>wrote in part “It hurts to even mutter the heresy, but Science didn\u2019t spring forth from Richard Dawkins\u2019 ass.” \u00a0His post is quite brilliant, especially characterizing the atheist culture at Reddit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finally got around to watch the Cardinal Pell\/Richard Dawkins debate which is about an hour long. Quite an interesting debate that was fairly civil. \u00a0I already knew Cardinal Pell…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12322,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12321\/revisions\/12322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}