Richard Dawkins: Biblical Scholar

In a recent interview with Playboy, the world's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, answered a few questions. Couched among the dross of the merely banal or lame was this gem of absurdity:

DAWKINS: The evidence [Jesus] existed is surprisingly shaky. The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It’s almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren’t that interested in whether Jesus was real. Even if he’s fictional, whoever wrote his lines was ahead of his time in terms of moral philosophy.

PLAYBOY: You’ve read the Bible.

DAWKINS: I haven’t read it all, but my knowledge of the Bible is a lot better than most fundamentalist Christians.

Let's pass over the breathtaking hubris of declaring one's self sufficiently knowledgeable of a book that one hasn't even read in its entirety in withering silence. Well, not in silence.

On one level, it's flatly absurd to suggest that Paul "wasn't interested" in whether Jesus existed -- as somehow evidenced by the Epistles being written before the Gospels -- since Paul's entire ministry is founded on the reality of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as anyone who has read Paul attentively knows. Everything Paul teaches hinges on this. Over at Uncommon Descent they have an effective little riposte to Dawkins on this count.

On another level, Dawkins is intuiting something true, but not what he thinks. Namely that Paul isn't greatly concerned about proving Jesus' existence because it wasn't in question. Neither in his own mind nor in that of the churches he was writing to. Paul didn't know he was writing something that would come to be called "the New Testament", which would be a document modern inquirers, millenia in the future, would use to examine the "truth" of Jesus' existence -- a truth he took for granted, as did all of his hearers. He was preaching and expounding on who Jesus was, the true nature of the Faith, calling out the errors of misguided followers of Jesus, spreading the Gospel, pastoring Christ's flock etc. Contrary to what Dawkins seems to think, it's not at all surprising that this would be the first order of apostolic business, rather than documenting the narrative of Christ's life which was everywhere around in oral form or in first-hand experiences.

These are exactly the conditions we would expect to be present if there was no question about Jesus' existence because it was taken as a given. How would it come to be taken as a given so widely, so assuredly, and so quickly unless -- at the very least -- Jesus existed?  Of course, even to this day in virtually all serious first-century historical and Biblical scholarship -- even that of a strongly secular bent -- Jesus' existence still isn't questioned -- as it wasn't in the first century -- precisely because such a theory doesn't comport with reason and the evidence at all. You know, reason and evidence, those things that Dawkins follows unwaveringly, wherever they may lead.

Virtual Monkeys Write Shakespeare! - Giving Randomness a Boost

There is an old thought experiment, which I've read versions of in Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker [sic] and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which imagines thousands or millions of monkeys randomly hitting keys on a keyboard and one of them producing a work of Shakespeare by chance. The point of the thought experiment was to show that it's possible for the appearance of design to arise from randomness without a designer. The thought experiment has now apparently been 'tested' in a virtual experiment that sets millions of virtual monkeys to smashing away at virtual keyboards.

But, given just how immensely, inconceivably improbable it would be for even a million monkeys banging on keyboards for billions of years to produce one work of Shakespeare, the authors of the thought experiments realize that they can't leave it at that. The conductor of the virtual experiment knows this as well -- even the most powerful processors running pure randomness algorithms at astonishing rates wouldn't be able to run enough iterations to ever realistically arrive at Shakespeare, much less the complete works of Shakespeare.

Their solution for salvaging the analogy on behalf of evolution is to introduce 'selection' into the process, which is aware of the result that is being sought. Of course, blind material processes would have no idea what end they were working towards, and so with even the slightest bit of critical examination the analogy falls apart swiftly and fully.

Reading the BBC article this becomes glaring. The program is not a virtual simulation of randomness only. It virtually simulates the random key-strikes of million of monkeys and then compares 9-character blocks of text to a known goal -- the complete works of Shakespeare -- and keeps the blocks of text that appear somewhere in the works and disregard the rest. Where did such an ability come from? Where does the knowledge of what the desired end is come from? And even if the end was known, how would a monkey, or even a team of extremely intelligent monkeys, know how to cross-check the 9-character blocks of text against the enormous database of information that is the complete works of Shakespeare? Surely this is far beyond the capability of any monkey, any group of monkeys or any human, for that matter. It certainly is not a blind, random process of nature. Dawkins and Dennett make similar adjustments to their thought experiments, claiming that evolution can and does do something similar (which David Berlinski similarly and acutely deconstructs).

A more accurate headline would read that "Millions of Virtual Monkeys Striking Keys Randomly Can Re-Create Shakespeare, After They Give the Results Over to a Super-Computer That is Already Aware of What the Works of Shakespeare Look Like Beforehand and Which Aids in The Reconstruction". Not nearly as exciting or interesting, is it?