Richard Dawkins recently appeared on The Enright Files, (a CBC Radio program), along with his mirror-world counterpart, Father Richard Neuhaus. The episode is available as an MP3, here. (Apparently CBC only archives their shows for 4 weeks. If it’s no longer there, I’d be happy to send it to anyone that asks.)


The Dawkins portion of the interview didn’t contain much new material if you’ve read The God Delusion or The Blind Watchmaker, or seen any of his numerous lectures on YouTube, or his made-for-TV documentary.

However, when Michael Enright asked whether it was not possible, within the realm of speculation (not probability!), that our brains have not evolved enough to encompass the idea of a creator, Dawkins had this to say…

“I am open minded to the idea that there exist in the universe things more wonderful and more mysterious and more incomprehensible than anything that anybody has ever dreamed of, but it won’t bear any relation to something so parochial and petty and small as the god of Abraham.”

- Richard Dawkins
on The Enright Files (CBC Radio: Ideas)
September 9 2007

Some rhetorically minded theists might like to seize upon this and say, “A-ha! Dawkins believes in a God! Why can’t the Christian/Jewish/Islamic/FSM/IPU God be just a manifestation of this Dawkinsian Deity?” And that’s fine, I guess, though it misses the point.

I think what he was trying to get across, (and I’d be happy to be shown otherwise), is that he welcomes the fantastic and as-yet incomprehensible things that science will one day uncover. This fits very well with Dawkins’ concept of a “deeply religious non-believer” (see Chapter 1 of The God Delusion). The majesty of the universe is indeed just that: majestic. But this doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to never understanding it and instead accept some baseless and irrational story about it.

Father Michael Neuhaus on the other hand, came up with some fascinating ideas. The were flat-out, batshit crazy, but fascinating nonetheless. He managed to skirt the traditionally uncomfortable question of why women can’t become ordained Catholic priests in, what I thought, was a particularly novel way.

Neuhaus, apparently, would love to see female priests. He said that if he took a pad of paper and wrote all the reasons women should be priests on one side, and all the reasons that they shouldn’t on the other, he’d come up with far more points in the first column than the second. Great, right? Neuhaus is going to spearhead the female Catholic priest movement, yeah? Nope, he says that despite all the arguments that people could make, he simply can’t get past the part that the church simply doesn’t have the scriptural authority to ordain women. That’s right ladies, blame Jesus, not the Church. They’d love to ordain you. Really. It’s just that Jesus already said no.

And finally, Neuhaus’ most interesting claim of the interview was this:

“Among the young priets today … I am very struck by how often I have heard young men, and we’re talking about vibrant, and if I may use the term, manly young men in the seminaries, who have told me: one of the reasons that I found the priesthood so attractive, is precisely because of the sacrifice that is required, and precisely because of the sacrifice of celibacy.”

- Richard John Neuhaus
on The Enright Files (CBC Radio: Ideas)
September 9 2007

I call shenanigans on that. I wanted to join the priesthood because I wouldn’t have to hahttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5553101786335801689ve sex with anyone, ever? Yeah. Right.