Min venn fra 80-årenes L’Abri, Bjørn Are Davidsen, er en av de få nordmenn som over lang tid har prøvd å ta livet av de mange oppdiktede mytene om kristendommen, og slik drevet godt apologetisk arbeid. Han kommenterer noen ganger her på bloggen, og har sin egen blog: Dekodet. Han har også gitt ut flere bøker, bl.a. en helt ny en som heter: Da jorden ble flat – om myter og vandrehistorier om kirkens forhold til fremskrittet.
Jeg kom til å tenke på Bjørn Are da jeg leste videre i David B. Harts artkkel om ny-ateismen, der han bl.a. karakteriserer den berømte kristendomsangriperen Richard Dawkins på følgende måte:
… But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress – a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?
Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism. …