12.02
Open Letter to Atheist Authors
(Note: This is an old post that I just realized never got published.) The latest tome I’m making my way through is Douglas Preston’s Blasphemy. I’ve been on a big Douglas Preston kick lately. His stuff with Lincoln Child is great and I’ve read one of his previous(The Codex) solo books before. He’s a good writer. I don’t claim to know what his worldview is, but he seems to at least be an agnostic, if not an atheist. That’s as far as I want to go without doing more research. I make this assumption because of the characters in his books. The smart ones are all atheistic and the imbecils are all Christian. I say Christian specifically because he seems to be endeared to Eastern religion in some way, but again, I’m not going to speculate.
All that being said, let me get to the point. In Blasphemy there is an interchange between the lead scientist on the supercollider project and a local missionary preacher. Through the whole interchange the preacher is portrayed as a fiery know-nothing idiot who doesn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning without his bible. The lead scientist, on the other hand, is the gracious, noble model of sincerity. Preston describes him as having a “warm smile” and a “warm and sincere” voice, and being the model of patience. Now contrast that with Melinda’s treatment of Richard Dawkins in her blog post:
After viewing the video of Dawkins apparently being “stumped by creationists’ question,” I did some digging to find his response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he was likely just trying to frame his answer in a succinct way, or that he was flustered for some reason other than a lack of an answer.
…Dawkins gives a seemingly unrelated answer, so I searched online to find a more detailed written response by Dawkins to this interview, and found it here…
…I suspect, from his written piece, that we’re mostly talking past each other. He doesn’t seem to understand the precise nature of the question (or of information)…
Melinda Penner, STR Blog
Now, Melinda’s handling of Dawkins was gracious and very accomodating. On an ideological front, Dawkins is her mortal enemy. But that didn’t make her resort to caricature. She cares more about getting to the bottom of what Dawkins was actually saying and responding to that, rather than some straw man made in his image. After all, he could’ve been right. Just because someone doesn’t share our worldview, it doesn’t mean that everything that comes out of their mouth is wrong. I’m sure that Melinda and Richard both agree that killing people for fun is wrong. That truth is not somehow wrong when Dawkins says it just because he’s an atheist.
So to Douglas Preston and like-minded authors, I would say this. Give Christianity a fair treatment. I’ll say the same thing I said in one of my Neil Peart posts. Attacking Christianity via caricature and straw men is beneath your level. You’re too smart for that. It’s much too easy. In fact, I can probably do it better than most atheists could. It’s more challenging to respond to our well reasoned arguments coming from the big Christian thinkers of our time. And it makes people like me have more respect for you in general.
