Dawkins
The lecture by Richard Dawkins was very amusing; Dawkins got in any number of cheap shots against organized religion, but several of his points were really compelling. He actually re-iterated with a picture his old point about religion running in families and the assumption that children of four know their religious beliefs (or can be assumed to share their parents' religious beliefs).
The use of fundamentalist tracts in his slides produced a lot of comedy (he was even the target of one cartoon he reproduced), but I don't think he was arguing against his strongest opponents. If all you knew of religion was what appeared in that presentation, you would certainly think it was absolutely ludicrous, but there are some more intelligent presentations of religious ideas out there.
In some places, Dawkins was quite moving, especially when he quoted from the late Carl Sagan.
The audience was mostly non-religious; the best question by someone who seemed to disagree with Dawkins seemed to me to be based on an argument due to Phillip Johnson (who conceivably could have been somewhere in the audience) -- whether scientists view naturalism as a prescientific commitment (or as part of science) or whether they find naturalism to be an empirical conclusion from their research.
Dawkins didn't quite understand the question; I did, I think, only because I read Johnson's books which advised people to ask pro-evolution scientists a question just like that. For example, Johnson's Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds invites audiences to ask
one simple question:
What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?
I think that's what this audience member was asking -- did you come to naturalism empirically, or do you believe that the world has to be like that? And this is a seriously valid question and the answer Dawkins gave was very capable even though he didn't quite understand it. Dawkins said that there are likely things other than matter and energy as we understand them but that our understanding will improve in time and there's no particular reason that we shouldn't understand the nature of the other things we discover in the future which we don't understand now. (Perhaps he had dark matter in mind, for instance.)
And this is certainly what I generally thought in the past: if there were a "supernatural" realm, it wouldn't even be supernatural because it would have laws by which it operated and those laws could be investigated and learned and then, what do you know, the supernatural realm is actually just a particular corner of the natural realm which hadn't been discovered or studied before!
(One argument in support of this idea is the discovery of things like radio, which would have been considered supernatural if they had been observed or demonstrated a long time ago. Near-instantaneous communication around the world through the air? That's like divination, or telepathy! But with Maxwell's equations we understood radio pretty well for a while, up until Einstein.)
On the other hand, proponents of the supernatural may argue that we are unfairly defining the supernatural out of existence by asserting that everything that exists operates through, well, natural laws. So one claim would be that there are things which aren't subject to any laws (some theology would say the will of God, and some people say that supernatural magic works for supernatural reasons not described by any intelligible natural law), and another claim would be that supernatural laws exist but are of a totally different character than natural laws (for example, that they can't be defined through or reduced to mathematical formulae showing definite relations of entities).
Dawkins complains that actual theistic proponents of supernatural explanations aren't really giving an explanation (a slightly subtler formulation of the "God of the gaps" argument). For example, he says, the Christian God is much more complex than a human, so saying that God created humans fails to "explain" how something as complex as a human exists, because it raises the new and even more difficult question of how something as complex as God exists. Ignotum per ignotiora. (Dawkins seems to be suggesting that it is more plausible that humans have always existed than that God has always existed, because humans are much simpler. I should read Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being.)
And I think that Dawkins has an extremely strong point there, and it was a new one to me. Still, if a true supernatural is not logically contradictory, it could exist, right? And that could be the way things really are. But Dawkins would probably exist that there is no credible evidence for it and no reason to believe it -- and "science can't explain X" is not one. (He mentioned "directed panspermia", the theory where life on Earth was seeded by intelligent aliens, as more likely than creation by God, in that the aliens are more likely to exist or require less explanation or less departure from things we already know about.)
