Well, Bill, Dr. Daniel Dennett was one of the four horsemen of the new atheist, Dawkins,

Hitchins, Harris, and Dennett. He passed away in April of this year, so let's do an overview on him.

His research is centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology particularly as those fields

relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

The bulk of his teaching career was at Tufts University and he famously called your speech at the Greerherd Forum in New Orleans of Virtuoso.

That was in 2009, Bill. Yes, I was part of the Greer-Hurd Forum at New Orleans Baptist

Theological Seminary organized by Robert Stewart and the paper I presented was on theistic

arguments arguments for the existence of God and I responded to some of the criticisms of these arguments,

including Dennett's own criticisms and exposed how fallacious they were.

And when he got up to respond to my paper,

to my shock, he said that was a virtuoso performance. And then his response to my

refutations of his objections was this. He said, I guess what this shows is that when you have arguments for obviously false

conclusions that are based on really convincing premises, then you need to go back and

examine those premises and try to find the mistake. In other words he was so closed-minded that since

atheism is true these theistic arguments had to be fallacious, even though he couldn't find the fallacy.

They just had to be wrong. That is an illustration of how set and concrete his views were.

In a New York Times article that was just written,

Jonathan Kandel said of Dennett, quote,

espousing his ideas and bestsellers, he insisted that religion was an illusion.

Free will was a fantasy, and evolution could only be explained by natural selection, end of good.

And that last line is significant

because many evolutionists, like Stephen Gould,

...