A.N. Wilson's Return to Belief

Read the very excellent entire piece here.

Excerpts from "Why I believe again"
A N Wilson

Published 02 April 2009, New Statesman

But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi’s own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?

...

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

...

For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief “don’t matter”, that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

...

I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God “a category mistake”. Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”

This piece is so excellent. I don't care about scoring points by noting which atheists have changed their minds. Rather, I am taken aback by the deeply emotional and honest depiction of a man who, learned and serious, has met intellectual issues with the devastating sting of what it means to be human. That God is difficult to comprehend is a given; that His love seems sometimes distant or gone is admitted; that He still provides and manifests Himself so perfectly to all who are willing to hear is the most wonderful and glorious truth of all. I aim constantly for a better understanding of God, His existence, His attributes, His nature, His truth, and do not generally look down upon science or the natural explanations given thereby. But perhaps there is a part of life itself, that part pricked by Wilson, which exposes so majestically the near-infinitely narrow scope of human understanding. Indeed, "we are spiritual beings, and...the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true."

Amen.

[All italics mine]

Rainy Days

5 superb rainy day records:

Unwed Sailor, The Faithful Anchor
The World on Higher Downs, Land Patterns
Mono & World's End Girlfriend, Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain
Bitcrush, Epilogue in Waves
Yndi Halda, Enjoy Eternal Bliss

Maybe someday I can live where the rain and fog never dry or clear.

Vox Day on the Problem of Evil

The answer of evil
Posted: April 13, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

For more than 2,000 years, men have wrestled with the so-called problem of evil. Presumed to have first been formulated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus and also known as the Epicurean Paradox, the problem concerns balancing the obvious existence of evil with belief in the existence of God. How, Epicurus wondered, could evil and an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God exist simultaneously? Centuries later, the problem was addressed by the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume, who considered the matter in his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion." Hume wrote:

Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

The most obvious flaws in these proposed problems lies not so much with their logic, as with their improper definitions and misapplications to specific religions. For example, it is clear that the omnibenevolence queried by Epicurus does not fit the description of the biblical God, due to the way the biblical God's curse on various individuals and nations is chronicled throughout the Bible. It's worth noting, however, that Epicurus is not believed to have ever applied his paradox to the biblical God for the very good reason that he died in 270 B.C. Hume, on the other hand, does not have the benefit of the same excuse, and indeed, the error in his formulation verges on intellectual dishonesty. For no competent philosopher could possibly describe an unwillingness to prevent evil as requiring malevolence. While it would be reasonable to describe one who causes evil as malevolent, the worst accusation that can be reasonably hurled at one who merely fails to prevent evil is one of indifference. This may explain why Epicurus formulated his paradox as a justification for a philosophy of indifferent stoicism, not as a logical argument against the existence of God.

However, the main reason that the problem of evil has no reasonable application to Christianity is that the entire basis of the Christian religion is predicated on the existence of evil. Without evil, Christianity makes no sense. It has no purpose, its Savior has accomplished nothing, and Christians are, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "of all people most to be pitied." Christianity absolutely requires the observable existence of evil, for both logical and documentary reasons.

The Bible is very clear on the existence of evil. It even goes so far as to explain, in part, the immutable evil of human nature. The Old Testament is full of one party or another doing "evil in the eyes of the Lord"; the phrase resounds like an ominous drumbeat leading toward the ultimate fall of the kingdom of Israel. The New Testament, for its part, repeatedly describes the world as an evil place ruled by an evil spirit, the customs of which the believer is to avoid. In fact, there is no science more readily falsifiable than Christianity, as finding a single individual, just one single man or woman, entirely free from sin will suffice to dismiss Christian theology once and for all time.

If evil did not exist, then man would not be condemned by God. If man were not condemned by God, there would have been no reason for Jesus Christ to incarnate, to die and to rise again to pay the price of man's redemption. Therefore, while one may use the problem of evil to argue against the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, only an irrational fool would attempt to use the problem of evil as the basis of an argument against the existence of the Christian God or the tenets of the Christian faith.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.

– John 7:7

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Christians celebrate a risen Lord Jesus Christ. We celebrate him because we know the evil of the world, we know the evil of our hearts and we know he has defeated them. Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

The Problem of Evil, Final

So I didn't really post many of my thoughts as I went, because it's time consuming. But here is the anti-climactic paper. It's so short I really can't get much into it, especially since in this context I have to talk about Descartes and his "solution" even though he is really addressing a pretty limited and narrow scope, as it pertained to his Meditation. Anyways... here it is:



"God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or he is able and unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able, or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and is unable, he is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if he is able and unwilling, he is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if he is neither willing nor able he is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if he is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does he not remove them?”1

Neither a new problem before the 1st Century, nor a forgotten one in the 21st, the problem of evil seems to be almost obviously understood. As Epicurus asked, how can evil and God be reconciled? That is, if we suppose there is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, how can we account for the presence of evil in the world? What we typically mean by the problem of evil is that we see evil both moral and natural all around, and so to suppose that a wholly good and powerful God exists is to present a logical contradiction. If God can rid the world of evil (is omnipotent), and if God desires to get rid of evil (is omnibenevolent), how can it be that evil exists, other than to conclude that God does not?

Descartes understood the problem when it arose in his Fourth Meditation. As he sought to find that which was clear and distinct, he had to account for error. In other words, if some things were clearly not clear, it must be because he is finite and limited. But, since he had a clear and distinct idea of God, he found it necessary to explain how his imperfections could come from a perfect Being. Establishing that error was a defect, a privation, it could not be blamed on God. And God, of course, cannot deceive or cause us to err if he is God at all.2

Descartes saw that God is necessarily perfect, infinite and complete, and that he himself is not. If the opposite of God is nothingness, then he finds himself caught somewhere in between this nothingness and the totality of God, and is therefore sufficiently convinced that error is due to the finite nature of his knowledge and will. And, moreover, that he wills further than he understands, which is the ultimate cause of his own error. Because he wills what he does not understand, he loses sight of what is clear and distinct, abandoning that which God has given him the ability to know and therefore deceives himself and falls into sin.3

For Descartes, there is now a clear and distinct idea of why it is that he commits errors. God is not to blame, and it is not merely that he chooses to do wrong. It is the case that his intellect and will, and the freedom in which they operate, are not sufficiently in sync.4 But it is not clear how this explains the assumed contradiction between God’s goodness and evil in the world. Even if Descartes can explain his finite intellect and will, he has not properly answered for God’s allowing evil to persist in any other form.

But given that perhaps Descartes never set out to solve such a problem in the context of his Meditations, which were purely to find out what he could know “indubitably”. We can carry on this discussion in the way it has traditionally been framed: that if God were God, he would end the evil and suffering in the world because He would desire to and be able to. To properly understand this argument, a proper form may be illuminating. That is, (1) There is a God who is all-powerful and all-loving, and (2) Evil exists. This is a problem initially of logic, although it has never been shown how this provides an actual, explicit logical contradiction.5 Typically there are at least 2 hidden assumptions within this argument. First, that if God is all-powerful, He can prevent evil and second, that if God is all-good, He would prevent it. These assumptions hold that God could create beings who always freely choose what is good, and that God could end all natural evil.

But, this argument, on these assumptions, is purely speculative, and if it is even possible that humans have free will, our first and second assumptions are not necessarily true. Again, that both an all-good and all-powerful God exist and that evil exists is no contradiction. So the most basic of claims to the contrary is defeated. The problem in sum may not be, but holding this set of assertions is.

J.L. Mackie brings about a second problem, however, which is the question of egregious, gratuitous evil, and especially nature evil that does not hinge on human free will.6 That is, that there is an inconsistency between the God of love and the vastness of evil. But again, there are hidden assumptions here to reckon with.

First, we assume that there is more evil than there ought to be in the world. That is, we assume God could have still allowed some evil (especially of the moral sort) but less natural evil. But it is possible that God could not have created a world with less evil and kept the same amount of good. It is possible that God has allowed the current amount of evil because it brings about the most possible good for humankind. It is further possible that with the total eradication of evil there would not be good at all, which would be contrary to the attributes the theistic God is generally thought to have.

Truly, the assumption in terms of how we view the quantity of evil really betrays the position that we believe we have any ground to stand on in judging God’s moral decisions. It is completely possible that if God has sufficient moral reasons for allowing any evil (e.g., hardship causes us to grow and mature), then God could have morally sufficient reasons to allow all evil. To argue to the contrary is pure speculation.

Furthermore, as finite, limited beings, we are not capable of establishing where God is justified and where he is not. We must admit that there are a vast amount of evils or difficulties or sufferings in which we cannot immediately see a reason, but which later may make sense or be capable of being explained in a larger, historical or even personal context. The God who is all-powerful is also outside of space and time and transcends the limitations which are often to blame for our anger or misunderstanding of evil. It is simply unreasonable to assume that if God had morally sufficient reasons for allowing some evil that we would know what those reasons are.

This all amounts, of course, not to an actual theodicy. In this context, what is primary is to establish a defense. That is to say, to show that the problem of evil is not the problem it seems to be, one must only show that it is not logically impossible or incompatible for God and evil to exist. To establish a theodicy, or reason for why, exactly, God allows evil, is perhaps important, but is a separate endeavor from our present one of a defense of the theistic God in terms of the evil present in the world.

So what Descartes saw as his finite ability to know as far as he wills, and the separation between himself and God can be helpful in this regard. We ought not throw up our hands in despair, nor do we let God off the hook because He is God and we just cannot know. We ought not appeal to mystery or ignorance, but we make careful our assumptions and think clearly about our response to problems. Taken in isolation, the problem of evil is problematic, but in sum it approaches nothing near a contradiction or crushing blow.

Citations

1. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), quoted by Lactantuis (A.D. 260-340) in William Dyrness' Christian Apologetics in a World Community (Inter-Varsity Press, 1983), p. 153.

2. Rene Descartes Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, "Meditation Four" (Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 82-83.

3. Ibid, p. 85.

4. Ibid, p. 86-87.

5. See various speeches and writings of Dr. William Lane Craig and J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982) pp. 154-155.

The Problem of Evil, Part 1

I have due in a week or so a paper on the Problem of Evil. The problem is well-traveled, and is indeed a problem. But, as we have seen, problems are not beyond what we can overcome, and may indeed have an answer. No need to through out the baby with the bathwater on this one.

I have a stack of books to go through, so I will be using this space to sort out their individual contributions, and perhaps also my final thoughts. To begin the process, a very brief introduction can be given by Alister McGrath in his Christian Theology.

The problem, he briefly states as: "How can the presence of evil or suffering be reconciled with the Christian affirmation of the goodness of the God who created the world?" (263) He begins with Irenaeus, who, like many Greeks of his time, saw humans as potential. It is the case for these thinkers that humans have the capacity and ability to develop, and have within them ultimately this potentiality. It is the view many hold today in some sense, in that it views the problem in terms of what God wants us to become; it is a form of "soul-making". If it is God's will that we learn humility and develop a sense of compassion, perhaps there is some merit. Francis Collins and Timothy Keller have both recently adopted something of this view, noting that some of the times humans grow and learn the most is in the presence of suffering, deserved or otherwise. It is in these times that we learn forgiveness, mercy, and grace, and where we most earnestly seek God. McGrath credits this view in part to John Hick, who holds that in order for humans to become what God desires for them, they must endure evil as they take part in a free world. Choosing good only has value in the event that one is not compelled to, and that choosing evil is at all times an option.

But there is a problem. Is this a picture of a God who allows suffering to teach us lessons? Where this might make sense on a personal level, what lessons are we to learn, individually or collectively from created tragedies like genocide or natural ones like tsunamis? This seems to come dangerously close to the view that people "deserve" natural disasters because God is angry, and does nothing but perpetrate the idea that God is out for blood. God will judge, to be sure, but the view that he is in the process of doing so constantly, and that we ought to mind our manners lest he smite us is anything but helpful, and certainly not Biblical. It also brings into question our duty to resist evil if God has purposed evil in the world. If evil is the maker of the soul, on what grounds should it be defeated or fought against?

He then mentions St. Augustine, who was combating the notion of the Gnostics that evil the world was because matter itself is evil, and that creation came to be by an evil being. Redemption would be by a different god, one who was different from the "demigod" of creation. Augustine understood that creation and redemption were necessarily both the work of God. And it is human freedom that introduces evil by way of the temptation by Satan and fall in the Garden of Eden. But, the problem here is that humans could only choose evil if God put it in the Garden, which was supposed to be perfect, where God and man mutually cohabited, for them to choose. Augustine explained that Satan fell from Heaven when he was tempted, but again, who tempted Satan? Was their sin and evil in Heaven? How can we account for the origin of rebellion against God? McGrath, and apparently Augustine have no answer at this point, and is one I think needs to be answered by the sovereignty of God. But we will have to return to this point later on.

McGrath, Alister E. Christian Theology: An Introduction, Second Edition Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Regent College, Vancouver. Blackwell Publishers, 1997, Pgs 263-267.

An Update... and a Bible Difficulty

For anyone who might read this who otherwise might not know, I have a few things going on that are prohibiting me from spending as much time on this as I would like.

The first of those things is school. It isn't that I have too much to do, or that it's too difficult, but that, as per the nature of philosophy, my homework isn't limited to what has been explicitly assigned. And, as per the current nature of the University, philosophy courses regularly make jokes and invectives at the expense of believers in anything other than scientific naturalism (or whatever other view the professor happens to prefer, be it Jungian or Spinozist or whatever else). What this means is that I am constantly under fire for positions held, and spend more time better understanding and solidifying my positions than actually doing homework. It is both a blessing and a curse. I have been pushed to be able to defend myself, which I welcome and accept, but have had to deal with a good deal of unnecessary and childish ridicule. The real disappointment at the end of the day isn't my feelings, but the resolve of those who are less committed to truth and more easily swayed by one-liners and philosophical quips. Professors deliberately tell half-truths on issues of high importance to score points in laughter like their tenure depended on it.

So, what I will do from now on, instead of trying to put together groups of blogs about certain topics, is write about what it is that I'm doing at any given time. It should give me a chance to nail down some thoughts and collect my ideas, as well as open them to some criticism to whomever wishes to criticize.

That being said...

I have spent the last few days trying to find the best way to answer my Modern Philosophy teacher and skeptical classmates that the Bible is not wrong about the value of Pi. For those not in the know, 1 Kings 7:23 says the following:

"And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." (KJV, italics mine)

Ok, so a molten sea is a great big vessel, which we see here is "ten cubits from the one brim to the other," has a height of five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about. And a cubit, we know, was approximately the distance between the elbow and the tip of the outstretched hand, or about 18 inches. So then, this molten sea had the following dimensions:

Height: 5 cubits, or 90 inches, or 7.5 feet
Diameter: 10 cubits, or 180 inches, or 15 feet
Circumference: 30 cubits, or 540 inches, or 45 feet

Problem? The ratio of the circumference and diameter of a circle is necessarily 3.141592... or "pi". Here it seems the Bible thinks pi=3 (30 cubits / 10 cubits). If you believe that is what the Bible says, then you are likely to see in this passage an error so basic that it renders the entire Bible unreliable.

So after a couple days trying to sort this out (it's more complicated than you might think), I have come to the following couple of conclusions.

First of all, it does matter. Second of all, it does not mean that God says pi is 3, and mathematicians are wrong. But what we can say is that, (1) Cubits are an inherently imprecise standard of measurement. Using a body part is clearly not standardized, and is therefore better suited to rough approximations, such as how we might make rough measurements of our own. When using cubits, the Bible does not use them with much precision. It measures things in half cubits, but not thirds or fourths. It just isn't reasonable to do so. With that in mind, it is easy to see how 30.4 cubits could become 30 cubits, and 9.68 cubits could become 10 cubits, which is an example of numbers with a ratio of 3.141592 between them. And 30.4 cubits would be about 45 feet, 7 inches, or 540 inches, plus 7 inches. Plus or minus 7 inches matters to a mathematician, but not to someone measuring in 18 inch segments of forearms. It is therefore an error--a category mistake--to assume that round numbers are certainly false.

If gas was $3.06 per gallon, it would not be incorrect to say that gas was $3 per gallon. Or if a room was 10'2" x 12'1", 10x12 would be a sufficient measurement.

Some have argued that the Bible doesn't explicitly say they are round numbers, so we cannot assume that. But we know for a fact that if it was a round vessel, then 10 and 30 were not the actual numbers, so assuming a round figure is logically sound. And in the examples of our speech today, one need not qualify the figures given as round numbers, because they suit our audience. If we are in court we may have to say exactly how much gas cost. If we are ordering carpet we may have to say exactly what the measurements are, but for a general measurement it would not be necessary.

Furthermore, in his book, The Joy of Pi, David Blatner includes the following:

"What is pi?

Mathematician: Pi is the number expressing the relationship between the
circumference of a circle and its diameter.
Physicist: Pi is 3.1415927 plus or minus 0.000000005.
Engineer: Pi is about 3."

(http://www.abarim-publications.com/Bible_Commentary/1Kings7v23.html)

That site offers that quote from Blatner, and goes on to offer several solutions to this problem by way of some advanced mathematical theories concerning the validity of using numbers at all, which are very interesting, but a bit off topic. But their conclusion is that the Biblical context for these numbers is more important than the actual values of numbers at all.

All of this is really the blown up way of saying that the Bible's inerrancy is not threatened by this problem. It is a difficulty for sure, but not an error. The bottom line for me is that this a contextual description of the vessel, not a blueprint for it. The writer may or may not have had the technical prowess to know the extended theoretical value of pi, but in either case is not wrong per se in his description.

And that is what I will attempt to persuade my Professor and his anti-Bible minions of in the morning.

The God Delusion, Pt. 1

I have been meaning to get around to reading completely and tackling the issues in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion for quite some time. This has been done well in several places around the internet, but perhaps I can sum up some critiques and add some of my own for anyone who might have landed here. I will return to C.S. Lewis' Miracles after this...

First of all, this book represents a classic example of the sort of thing Christians who expect to engage modern culture on almost any level ought to familiarize themselves with. But not because it's good or convincing, but because people think it is. Of course every atheist or agnostic or God-hater I know thinks this book is tremendous, and at least one former Christian I know of read this book and went off the deep end, convinced his faith was a fraud. The former case is to be expected, but the latter is disappointing and unnecessary in the highest.

The arguments in this book are presented with unbridled arrogance and spotty logic, which makes it hard for the common reader to refute. (And apparently it makes it hard for the "intelligent" ones, too, given the several pages of praise offered at the beginning and back cover of the book.)

One final point before beginning with Chapter 1 is that the paperback version (which I have) has a Preface where Dawkins responds (sort of) to some of the alleged frequent responses to his book. I will deal with these at the end of the review.

Chapter 1 is called, "A Deeply Religious Non-Believer". It begins with Dawkins' usual praise for science and scientists, squeezing everything else out. He quotes Carl Sagan almost immediately, asking:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. (32-33).

This is almost too easy. First of all, what Christian (which, by the way, is the main religion attacked throughout the book) has ever said such a thing as 'My god is a little god"? And which Christians do not proclaim the absolute majesty, grandness and scope of the Universe?

But what Dawkins wants is to make science the one who notices the wonder of the world, complaining about the "transcendent wonder that religion monopolized over the past centuries" (33). This opening chapter is at pains to explain to the reader than whatever Dawkins asserts, or believes, no matter what it is, is based in only science, not faith or religion. What this does for the uncritical reader is put Dawkins on one side (the high road; the intellectual road) and faith and religion on the other. It's a tactic he must establish because his position is absolute that the religious cannot take part in science. This type of exclusivity is par for Dawkins type, who uphold science as the only real arena for scholarly or serious discussion. The length at which he goes to avoid the possibility of God can be clearly seen when he says, "Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain" (34). He doesn't explain how this is possible, just that they do, and if you disagree, well, so much for your theory. If this isn't a faith-statement and a central tenet of the naturalist and Neo-Darwinian religions, I don't know what it is.

This discussion is closely tied to that of the Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism. To say that all thing emerge from nature is begging the question, assuming that naturalism must be true. But supernatualism is not a logical impossibility and to therefore assert that naturalism is true because nature is all there is is tantamount to saying, "I'm the boss because I make all the rules." (But why do you make the rules? Because I'm the boss...) Consider:

Premise 1: IF nature is all there is, THEN naturalism is true.
Premise 2: Nature is all there is.
Conclusion: Naturalism is true.

This is a logically valid argument, known in formal logic as Modus Ponens. (If A, then B. A, therefore B.) This rule of inference says that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. But what is not guaranteed is the truth of the premises, because formal logic is not concerned with truth values. However, it is not necessarily true that nature is all there is. This argument can be, and is, unsound, and to dismiss supernaturalism on these grounds is an unjustifiable position.

As a scientist Dawkins believes he must take this position because it is his job to always search for the natural explanations in the face of unanswered questions, but to simply assert that things "emerge" from a nature that is itself not self-existent is as bankrupt and unhelpful a position as any he seeks to attack.

To be continued...