Why Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse is not a new atheist

This one missed the religion news stream yesterday; just saw it today:

Partly it is aesthetic. They are so vulgar.

Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. To take one example, the Ontological Argument for God was first devised by Anselm and refurbished by Descartes. Roughly, it runs thus: God is by definition that than which none greater can be thought. Does He exist? Suppose He doesn’t. Then there is a greater who does exist. Contradiction! Hence, God exists.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins dismisses this longstanding and much debated philosophical argument with a few sneering paragraphs. His critique is on a par with someone arguing against Dawkins’ own body of work by saying that selfish genes cannot exist because genes cannot be selfish (and with about as much understanding or sensitivity). But hardly any serious theologian or philosopher thinks the Ontological Argument is valid in the way I have just described it. It has been reframed and reworked. Every serious theologian and philosopher knows that the argument leads us into important and sophisticated questions about the nature of existence. Does the notion of necessary existence – which must surely be true of God if he exists – even make sense? And so forth. To arrogantly dismiss the argument is bad scholarship and, worse still, bad taste. Ironically, I get on better with many of my Christian interlocutors than I do with many atheists.Michael Ruse, “I’m an atheist. But thank God I’m not a New Atheist” at Premier Christianity

Ruse’s comments followed a debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox about Science, faith and the evidence for God.

Michael Ruse is the author of Darwinism as Religion (2016) as well as many other works on Darwinism and culture.

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See also: Michael Ruse: Christianity and Darwinism as rival religions

and

Museum curator on allowing “a foot in the door” on origins questions

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