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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

O'Reilly to Dawkins: "I Think Intelligent Design Made Everything Happen"

By Rick Pearcey • October 5, 2011, 09:25 PM

Bill O'Reilly aired an interview with arch-atheist Richard Dawkins last hour on "The Factor." 

During the interview Dawkins said atheism has absolutely nothing to do with the evil of Pol Pot, Mao, or Joseph Stalin, but that there is a logical connection between belief in God and evil in the world.

O'Reilly countered that religion provides a restraining influence on people like Mao and Stalin -- for example, "Thou shalt not kill."

O'Reilly also said he thinks you cannot explain existence simply on the basis of something like a "meteor crashed into the earth" and everything resulted from that.

"I think Intelligent Design made everything happen," O'Reilly concluded.

As a follow-up to this discussion, Dawkins (if he is open-minded) and O'Reilly might find Does God Exist?, a DVD discussion by Dr. Stephen Meyer, of interest.

Meyer is co-founder of the Discovery Institute, that notorious outfit that talks a lot about . . . Intelligent Design.

Nancy and I would argue that affirming the existence of God is about following the evidence wherever it might lead and that the Judeo-Christian worldview alone has demonstrated an ability to answer adequately the basic philosophic questions that every serious worldview must deal with and that every seeking person honestly asks.

Trust ("faith"), then, is a matter of the whole person making a commitment on the basis of good and sufficient evidence (as Francis Schaeffer so often put it).

It's not "blind faith" or that dumbed-down substitute called "religion" that some secularists are happy to shackle genuine critical thinkers with. 

The point? The affirmation of Intelligent Design emerges out of the evidence, not against it.

So, who knows, maybe we'll see the likes of a Stephen Meyer on "O'Reilly" in the not-too-distant future.

A "Factor" discussion about Intelligent Design and scientific evidence for the Creator would seem to make sense: It would, after all, fit rather nicely with the Founders' insistence that the Creator is so real, and that information from Him is so valid, that it is actionable politically up to the high level of being the basis for American freedom.

What did they write and spill their blood for? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If there is no Creator, Mr. Dawkins, all of this exceptionalism falls to the ground. And the sun, the moon, and all the rocks and particles of your impersonal, mindless, meaningless, explanationless cosmos couldn't care less.

But if there is a Creator and unalienable human rights are among the "blessings of liberty" -- as the empirical data, historical data, and reason itself leads us to conclude -- everything changes culturally and politically, for the good.

You could ask King George. Or Stephen Meyer. Or Richard Dawkins, if he's willing to think outside that very tiny materialistic box.