Christian professor became an Atheist

[bjorn]

An illuminating interview with a former Christian professor of astrophysics, Øystein Elgarøy, "who defended his faith in articles and at debates", at richarddawkins.net/article,2732,Oystein-Elgaroy----the-Christian-defender-who-became-an-Atheist,Even-Gran

To me this shows little else than a thoughtfull person who managed (somehow) to keep his liberal faith untill recently, and when starting to think about the issues from a grown up position realised that his childhood faith provided no real answers.

He has all the signs of someone who not really had worked on the issues (e.g. believed as a Christian that religion and science are non-overlapping spheres), and when finally challenged to do it after too many years in all honesty couldn't keep a faith which was not more grounded in reasonable arguments (which he now even insists must be empirical).

Even as a Christian he did not contribute in any really helpfull way in discussions on faith and science, nor to mention reasons for why one should believe in God.

I was - to put it mildly - rather disappointed every time I came across an interview or article by him. We both participated in the book mentioned in the interview. I wrote 75 pages (almost half the book), Elgarøy was interviewed over eleven pages together with another Christian scientist and they both mainly delivered platitudes on how grand and mysterious the universe and its laws are.

Insisting he became an atheist from listening to Hitchens debating McGrath, is in my view so incredible for a thinking person that it must reflect a far longer process.

OTOH, McGrath's serious and reflective style comes across a lot less effective than Hitchens's rethoric. The rushjob he did with answering Dawkins in "The Dawkins Delusion", not touching much on why one should think God exsists, has made him a usefull idiot for new atheists.

[James Hannam]

Nevertheless, it is still sad and something of the propaganda coup for the other side. I suppose it balances out Flew groping in the other direction.

On your last point, I don't think we should underestimate the power of rhetoric to sway people. I have a friend who went from atheist to agnostic, but then decisively back to atheist when he read Dawkins's screel. People need to be receptive in the first place, but rhetoric that panders to people's existing unacknowledged prejudices is quite capable of producing about turns.

Best wishes

James

[unkleE]

McGrath's serious and reflective style comes across a lot less effective than Hitchens's rethoric. The rushjob he did with answering Dawkins in "The Dawkins Delusion", not touching much on why one should think God exsists, has made him a usefull idiot for new atheists.

I agree. I haven't actually read the book, but I was disappointed with a discussion he had with Dawkins, where Dawkins hammered while McGrath waffled. (An MP3 was at Times Online, but the link no longer works.) I had expected more of McGrath after reading transcripts of some of his talks online (e.g. www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/mcgrath/lecture.html) and his "Twilight of Atheism", which was strong if a little nasty.

I recently was given a little book responding to "The God Delusion" that was popular, readable and surprisingly good (I thought). It was by a Scottish minister, David Robertson, and it apparently began as an "open letter" on his church's website, but it was picked up and presented on the Dawkins website, with accompanying scorn and invective. This led to about a dozen more "letters" that became the chapters of the book. I began it expecting it to be well-meaning but weak, but found it built up well after a slowish start. It is the sort of little book you could easily give to someone who wasn't interested in too much academic discussion.

I don't think we should underestimate the power of rhetoric to sway people.

I strongly agree with this too. I think we ned to be a lot smarter, and sometimes a lot less academic.

[humphreyclarke]

I have seen some debates with Hitchens on youtube and while I find him entertaining I don’t see how anyone could take him seriously. His whole pitch is basically a sort of ‘reductio ad absurdum’ of the Christian bible, sprinkled with some pop-historicity. What he is good at is soundbites like describing the Catholic Church’s policy as ‘No Child’s behind left’. The minute he strays over into science he noticeably has no idea what he is taking about and relies on anecdotes from people like Lawrence Krauss. I liked the way that, as a former Marxist, he managed to sidestep the crimes of communist atheism by claiming that the Russian people were softened into dotage by the Orthodox Church; which is sort of akin to raping someone and then blaming the victim. History is supposed to be the guy’s strongest suit but I think that anyone who has read Burleigh’s ‘Earthly Powers’ and ‘Sacred Causes’ would be able to beat him up on that with little difficulty. As for mocking the bible, I think that like most atheists he assumes that everyone is a biblical literalist, which to be fair, is a common media stereotype.

Dawkins’s approach to debating is quite amusing. He starts off by framing the discussion with some provocative title like ‘Religion has been the cause of every genocide in history’ and when his opponent has invested all their time and energy in refuting it, he turns around and says ‘well I don’t care about whether it is good or bad, I care about whether it’s true!’. Which is all well and good but it wasn’t the discussion topic. In his case the place to beat him up is on the infinite multiverse which he seems to have invested a lot of stall in despite the complete lack of evidence for it and the inconvenient presence of those multiple copies of Elvis in alternate dimensions; one might also say that in another dimension there is a creationist Dawkins who joined the discovery institute and wrote ‘Of Pandas and People’ instead of ‘The Selfish Gene’. You could also bring up those elusive memes which he seems to gone quiet about, again probably because he is trying to present himself as a man of evidence. A bit of a walk through the history of Science would be interesting as well. Newton, Lemaître, Dobzhansky and Godel would do for starters.

[Al Moritz]

Even though I am sharply critical of the supposed "rationality" of atheists, it is understandable to me how a science-oriented Christian can become an atheist.

Although I am a biochemist, I was not immune to Intelligent Design ideas -- actually, I developed them independently for biochemical pathways before I became aware of that movement. Yet two years ago I informed myself thoroughly about evolution and said farewell to the Intelligent Design idea, and I also had just discovered that an origin of life by natural causes is highly plausible *) -- however, at the time the implications of the fine-tuning argument of the laws of nature had not yet fully set in in my thinking. At this point I would have been very vulnerable to the lure of atheism had I not had thorough knowledge of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

Only this knowledge, acquired rather by fortunate circumstances than on own merit of intellectual curiosity, prevented me from making stupid intellectual moves. Later, of course, after studying the fine-tuning argument (also through reading Stephen Barr's excellent "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith") I realized that there was no way that atheism could even remotely convince me on an intellectual level -- and the more I think about its arguments, the sillier atheism seems to me now.



*) I have written a review of the research on the topic for the leading evolution website, talkorigins. org:

talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

[unkleE]

Al,

I am a complete layperson on this, and I write to question something you have said, not because I presume to know anything, but more to learn. (I have skimmed through your paper, but I think it is a little too specialist for me!) The bit I want to question is this:

an origin of life by natural causes is highly plausible

I am quite happy with this statement, indeed I am quite happy with everything you say. I have concluded that ID is an irrelevant scientific idea because it can almost certainly never be proven, even if it was in fact correct. If God stuck his finger in the soup at the appropriate time, science would never be able to detect that, and it would simply look like life arose from that mix.

But of course, it would also be true that the opposite could not be proven either - no-one can show that God didn't interfere, only that we don't require that mechanism.

And here's my problem. Modern science assumes it can explain everything. It then rejects any idea of ID because of that assumption, and no matter how difficult it may become to explain abiogenesis naturally, scientists will always believe that they will crack the nut one day. And yet even if they do crack the nut, it won't (I understand) be "proof" in the normal scientific sense, but something less than that, as outlined in this quote from W. Ford Doolittle, Biochemistry Professor, Dalhousie University, Canada:

"Questions about the past - whether in cosmology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, or human cultural and political history - are different. We cannot do experiments in the past, so any attempt to reconstruct it must be based on indirect and inferential methods.

Evolutionary biologists who seek to reconstruct life's history have three such inferential methods: (1) comparisons of the properties of living species; (2) study of relics, such as biological and chemical fossils, or apparently primitive features retained by modern cells; and (3) feasibility experiments. The comparative approach can in principle take us back to the last common ancestor of all currently living things, and the fossil record (biological and chemical) may go a bit further, to something close to the first cells. For the origin of earthly life itself, and perhaps even up through the appearance of the earliest true cells, we must rely on feasibility experiments. In these experiments, hypotheses about what might have happened in the past are shown to be plausible by demonstration that similar events can be made to happen today, in the lab.

Certainty and completeness in reconstructing life's ancient history will never be possible, nor indeed are they possible even in reconstructing the very recent history of a nation or society. But it would be foolish to deny that we already know a tremendous amount, or that what we do know provides a compelling story of how past became present."

So "proof" in this case is showing a process is feasible plus a commitment (almost on faith) that there is a natural explanation. I am perfectly happy to believe what the scientists tell me, and I think it would be better apologetic tactics to agree even if I had doubts, but I can't help feeling the scientists are pulling the wool over our eyes a little by claiming more certainty than is actually the case.

Do you think I am wrong to think this?

[bjorn]

Barr is a healthy antidote, indeed.

One important aspect of this story seems BTW to be the clash between the rather fideistic tradition ØE had grown up with in his private life and the evidencialistic approach in his professional life.

It was less about faith vs. reason than fideism vs. logical empiricism. To a scientist then, the choice was easy, even if sad.

[jamierobertson]

I'm also disappointed with McGrath's recent works - The Dawkins Delusion really looked like it had been scribbled on a beer napkin, which is sad considering how much I enjoyed Twilight Of Atheism and In The Beginning.

As you were, gentlemen

[Al Moritz]

Unklee,

Not that I don't agree with the core of what Doolittle says, but:

Observations in science are mostly "after the fact" -- in that sense the vast majority of science performs "experiments in the past", to quote Doolittle. Certainly, if I see the color in my test tube change while adding a certain chemical to another one, this is observation in "real time", but those are the exceptions. For instance, if in my current work I analyze the phosphorylation state of proteins in my cell sample, I have to first harvest it, digest the proteins, extract the peptides, purify phosphopeptides, analyze them on the mass spectrometry machine, and get the data after processing. All this takes a week or longer. Can I still be confident that a week later the read-out gives me the status of the cell's phosphorylation patterns at the time of harvest? You bet I can. Now, if the observations are a week, or millions, billions of years after the fact (evolution, Big Bang) is *in principle* irrelevant.

Of course, it is not *that* simple. I have been there at the cell harvest, and I know which drugs I added to the cells before harvest. Yet still, it is not until days later that I know my drug treatment actually worked; I first have to demonstrate that. And only then can I draw the conclusions about the conditions of my experiment that allow me to establish new findings upon wider analysis. I infer that my drug treatment worked from the effects that I see. Thus in fact science works from "indirect and inferential methods", to quote Doolittle again, all the time.

***

I would say that showing that a process is feasible is enough "proof" -- even if we haven't been there and cannot actually tell which precise options nature did choose in that historic moment 3.5 billion years ago when life first arose.

You said:

"So "proof" in this case is showing a process is feasible plus a commitment (almost on faith) that there is a natural explanation."

Once you have shown that a process is feasible, you don't need faith anymore that there is a natural explanation -- you have already shown it. I would agree, however, that the prior faith that there is a natural explanation for everything is what, in fact, drives science in the first place.

"Modern science assumes it can explain everything."

It assumes that it will have an answer for the "how" in all material processes, yes. I disagree, on the other hand, with those who think that the success of science in explaining the "how" of the laws of nature also allows for an expectation of similar success when it comes to explaining the "why" of the laws of nature. This is an entirely different question, and science is simply out of its league on this one.

Al

[Al Moritz]

Jul 2, 2008 9:21:03 GMT bjorn said:

One important aspect of this story seems BTW to be the clash between the rather fideistic tradition ØE had grown up with in his private life and the evidencialistic approach in his professional life.

It was less about faith vs. reason than fideism vs. logical empiricism. To a scientist then, the choice was easy, even if sad.

Bjorn,

Yes, since I am Catholic I always knew that there can be no real clash between religion and what science says about reality, and that the acceptance of evolution is fine. I just didn't agree with the mechanisms proposed until I studied the issue in more detail.

By the way, the link you posted does not work. This does:

richarddawkins.net/article,2732,Oystein-Elgaroy----the-Christian-defender-who-became-an-Atheist,Even-Gran

Al

[bjorn]

Thanks, they obviously decided to drop the . after some days. I have corrected my link now.

[travis]

I like to think if I ever lost my faith and became an atheist that Richarddawkins.net would be the last place I'd hang out. That man and his lackeys (not to mention his accursed book) have caused me untold annoyances these past few years, especially on the internet.

Still, it's always sad to see a Christian walk away from the faith. Even worse is his new found insistence that reason and faith are now incompatible, just more fuel for the atheists.

[John Spears]

I've read all of Mcgraths content on Dawkins and I've seen a couple of debates and I've always been dissapointed. He does have a solid grip on dismantling the atheist position but he leaves us with agnosticism, very rarely trying to articulate why anyone should believe in God (maybe he has and I haven't seen it) which is dissapointing compared to the combative style of some of his opponents.
He may have his reasons for this I don't know but I certainly enjoyed watching rabbi boteach go on the offensive against Chris Hitchens.

[element771]

I agree about McGrath. I think that he is an good writer but in live debates he does not do so well. I remember watching the debate between him and Dawkins and cringing. Dawkins had him in retreat for most of the time but Dawkins points were paper tigers. I remember yelling at my computer "Say This!".."Bring up that".

I really wish Dawkins would go up against a seasoned debater like WLC or Habermas. Although Lennox did a great job but the format of the debate sucked.