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Technorati"Our evolutionary past built into us a lust for sex and by the same token it built into us a lust to be good," Dawkins purported. "I think it partly comes from that."
It also comes from something else, something he calls the Shifting Moral Zeitgeist. Racism, sexual discrimination, and cruelty widely regarded as wrong characterize those living in the 21st century which would not have necessarily characterized ancestors from 200 years ago. Scripture, however, doesn't change in the way that people's attitudes have, he said, rejecting that morality comes from religion.
Dawkins couldn't pinpoint what exactly it is except that there's "something in the air" of what is moral and that "whatever it is, it's not religion."
Meanwhile, Lennox rebutted that the fact that human beings do show a common core of morality "is evidence that we are moral beings made in the image of God."
"Of course we can be good without God ... but I’m not sure we can find foundations for the concept of being good without God."
Concluding remarks
In his concluding argument, Lennox defended the person of Jesus Christ, his mandates to do good, and his resurrection.
"The justice is real. And our sense of morality does not mock us because if there is no resurrection, if there's nothing after death, in the end the terrorists, the fanatics have got away with it," he said.
The debate gave Dawkins the last word out of "Christian charity," as the moderator stated.
"It all quite really comes down to the resurrection of Jesus. It has a fundamental incompatibility [with] the sophisticated scientist," said Dawkins.
"It's (resurrection of Christ argument) so petty, it's so trivial, it's so local, it's so earth-bound, it's so unworthy of the universe."
In the end, Darwin's Rottweiler stayed loyal and praised Darwin.
"It seems so obvious that if you got a garden, there must be a gardener who created it," said Dawkins, alluding to the common argument Christians use to defend creationism. "What Darwin did was to show the staggeringly counterintuitive fact that this not only can be explained by an undirected presence (natural selection). He showed not only a garden but everything in the living world and in principle not just on this earth but on any other planet, wherever you see the organized complexity that we understand, that we call life, that it has an explanation which can derive it from simple beginnings by comprehensible, rational means.
"That is possibly the greatest achievement that any human mind has ever accomplished," he concluded.
The God Delusion debate, sponsored by Christian think tank Fixed Point Foundation, comes as more atheists in the United States are "coming out" of the closet, as Dawkins has encouraged them to. About 5 million American adults claim to be atheists and staunchly reject the existence of God, according to The Barna Group. If adding the agnostics and other Americans who have doubts of God's existence but do not outright reject a Supreme Being, roughly 20 million people in the nation belong to the "no faith" group.
This fall, Lennox releases God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? - a response to the atheist's position that the nature of science points toward the non-existence of God.
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