The Dawkins Delusion

                                                                

A Reply to Radical Atheism and the Denial of God

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        I read with interest Cathy Cementina's article in the January/February issue of Neighbors, Defending Richard Dawkins.  Her belief in Dawkins and atheism are evident throughout her article which ends by telling us "traditional religious myths" are being blown away by the open window of science.  In light of the fact that all polls show that the majority of Americans believe in God, and I am sure that would reflect on those who read "Neighbors" I think a reply, in line with one of the purposes of "Neighbors" -"to provide useful information", is necessary. Despite the obvious limitations of article space, I like to critique, parts of her article but more importantly I think it's necessary to deal with her source, Richard Dawkins, and in particular his book "The God Delusion".

 

        To use her own reasoning, I would ask Cathy to put aside her prejudice toward spiritual people, suspend her atheist beliefs and see if she can understand why the majority of people may be right.  It is clear that Cementina is a disciple of the new "pope' of atheist, Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins is a well-known evolutionary biologist who seems to have made it his mission to move on from science and take on God.  Cementina herself writes that some people find Dawkins " mean and arrogant in his dismissal of religion and all things spiritual."  That's a bit of an understatement!  Unlike the main voice of atheism of the last half century, Anthony Flew, Dawkins displays absolute hostility and contempt in his writings and talks toward those who believe in God.  His militant approach is evident in such statements, that teaching children to believe in God is a form of child abuse, and his call for fellow atheists to deal with some Christians "mock them, ridicule them in public and....with contempt", at a Reason Rally in Washington in 2012.  Dawkins is the master of setting up a straw man and then dismantling it with great relish. As Dr. Francis Collins, one of the worlds leading scientists and head of the Genome Project has stated "Its hard to escape the conclusion, that such repeated mischaracterizations of faith betray a vitriolic personal agenda, rather than a reliance on the rational arguments that Dawkins so cherishes in the scientific realm.".  Dawkins brand of radical atheism has turned off many members of his own atheist "family", who have problems not only with his attitude but his arguments as well.  Well known atheist philosopher, Michael Ruse has stated that "the God Delusion" "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist", and atheist Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Center for Inquiry, says of Dawkins and his like "I consider them atheist fundamentalists.  They are anti-religious and they are mean-spirited, unfortunately." 

 

        In reviewing Dawkins and his writings I openly admit I  am a Christian theist and approach the subject from that perspective.  I like to think I have an open mind and am willing to listen to other worldviews.  Toward that end over the last 25 years, I collected debate transcripts between theists and atheists and have read books by both atheists and theists, and have been particularly interested in what modern science has to show about this question.  When I bought "The God Delusion" I expected to see perhaps some new arguments.  However, as I went through the book I found it basically a rehash of many arguments from the past. It is also clear that Dawkins is not very well-read in other fields such as philosophy. Compared to reading other atheists from the 20th century, Russell, Flew, and Gould to name a few, Dawkin's book simply offers the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching, substituting turbocharged rhetoric and highly selective manipulations of facts for careful evidence-based thinking.  In a nutshell, there is surprisingly little scientific analysis in "The God Delusion" but there is a lot of pseudoscientific speculation and criticism of religion mostly borrowed from other atheist writings.  What makes Dawkins's book stand out in comparison to some other atheists I read is his anti-religious propaganda and apparent disregard for evidence not favorable to his case. Dawkins insults my intelligence by lumping belief in God as the same as orbiting teapots around the sun, Santa Claus and Spaghetti Monsters. Obviously, to any thinking person, this is a flawed analogy.  No one I know believes such nonsense! The substance of the answer in "The God Delusion" for the reason why I and others like me believe in God, is that our intellectual capacity has been warped having been hijacked by some infectious, malignant God virus. Such a speculative answer may satisfy some atheists for why all civilizations have believed in God but it's not much of an answer. 

 

        Religion is constantly displayed in the worse possible light throughout the book. It tells you a lot about Dawkins's prejudice when he can call religion one of society's great evils, "comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate", in the light of numerous Christian organizations founded upon the teachings of Jesus to help the poor and less fortunate.  With one statement Dawkins sweeps away, Mother Teresa, Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and numerous Christian groups both local and worldwide.  Yes there have been hypocrites in every religion and that just speaks to the corruption of some people but to write a book over 400 pages and have nothing good to say about Christianity and other religions in the light of numerous organizations out there helping people is plainly dishonest.  It's equally dishonest to try to blow past the monstrosities of the 20th century at the hands of atheist-centered regimes, following the core of Darwinist philosophy, and try to say their atheism had nothing to do with what they did.  Over one hundred and fifty million people were murdered by, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc., who believed like Dawkins "there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no good, nothing but pointless indifference...we are machines for propagating DNA...It is every living object's sole reason for being." With this distorted view of humans, whom the Bible says are made in the image of God, in that kind of a world, might makes right, its survival of the fittest, elimination of the inferior.  The stench of Hitler's ovens is the perfume that adorns Darwinism.

 

         I like to address the key part of his book and then review evidence that points to the existence of an intelligent Creator.  On pages 157-158, Dawkins summarizes what he calls the 'central argument of my book".  Here it is:

 

 

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to the actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinism's evolution by natural selection

5  We don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics.    
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.

Therefore God almost certainly does not exist.

        Before I go into Dawkins’ main points, I would like to address his conclusion "God almost certainly does not exist." My main issue is – how does he conclude that God doesn’t exist from the above statements? It seems to me that his conclusion just jumps out of thin air, to infer that God does not exist just shows how invalid his argument is. The only delusion is Dawkins’ conviction that his arguments undermine the existence of God. No logical rules, of inference would bring you to draw Dawkins's conclusions from the 6 premises.  At best this is an attempt to not infer God's existence on the basis of design in the universe.  But one can equally argue that design points to a designer.  Let's take a closer look at Dawkins's logic and see how sound it is.

 

       Statement one says it's a great challenge to explain the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe.  Well yes, he is right but only for those who take God out of the picture! The first statement could simply be answered that the best explanation, with the greatest explanatory power, based on our own daily observations of designed things, is that there must be a supernatural designer.  It's a bit comical that statement two draws the obvious from statement one, design requires a designer, that's not only the natural temptation but the rational conclusion!  But no says Dawkins because he says in statement three that if we accept the designer hypothesis we need to explain who designed the designer.  Really?  This is where Dawkins's pyramid crumbles.  This is an illogical straw man argument with several problems that is nothing new and has been answered many times.  First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best one, one does not need an explanation for the explanation.  That would lead to an infinite regress of explanations so that nothing could ever be explained.  If you saw the words "John loves Jane" in a heart drawn on the beach you would logically draw the conclusion the waves didn't create it but intelligence did.  You don't need to explain the drawer to know you're correct.  Second, both Dawkins and Cementina (who parrots it in her article) seem to think that the rules of the natural world apply to God.  Cathy (using Dawkins's line of thought) tells us that "complexity on the level of a divine being who manages such a feat (creation) is something that comes only after a long incremental process of evolution.....so how can there be a God of such magnificent complexity at the beginning?"  In Dawkins's words "Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.". 

Dawkins (and Cementina) are fatally flawed in their logic.  They might as well say there are such things as square circles, married bachelors, and round triangles!  God by definition as creator is not subject to its laws but is the creator of these laws.  God, is a being, a mind that by definition exists apart from the universe. Dawkins & Cementina don't have to like what theists for centuries have defined God as but they don't have the right to change Webster's dictionary to support a straw man argument either.  Even atheist philosopher Michael Ruse in the same article where he says Dawkins is an embarrassment says "I take scholarship seriously... Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim God exists necessarily.  I have taken an effort to try to understand what that means.  Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand what that means. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly "What caused God" as though he made some momentous philosophical discovery."  It's pretty telling when other professed atheists see the fatal lack of logic displayed by Dawkins's central argument! 

 

         Statement four gets pulled out of left field telling us that Darwinism is an explanation.  Of what?  Darwinism can't explain the universe and design! It has enough trouble explaining life.  I don't want to get to sidetracked here but a quick couple of points should be made.  First, no knowledgeable person denies that micro-evolution takes place.  in Cememtina's article, she brings up the changes within Iguana over time as they adapted to new environments.  Okay, we observe something like this in the many breeds of dogs as well.  We see it in breeding horses, growing roses, etc..  It's an example of how micro-evolution (changes within the species words).  But what Cementina and Darwinists do next is take a leap of faith, long on speculation and short on evidence that micro-evolution is proof that everything evolved from a common ancestor over millions of years.  I don't care how much time you have because observed micro-evolution has shown just the opposite, that changes within the species have limitations that you cannot go beyond.  We can breed animals to a certain point in size for example, and then we reach a point where the genetic makeup cannot be crossed.  Limitations are reached.  Yes, the Iguanas adapt but in the end, they are still Iguanas! The fatal flaw in Darwinism is that it uses micro-evolution(observed) to try to prove macro-evolution.  That's like saying if you shoot an arrow at 150mph and at that speed it will take it a half hour to hit a target 75 miles away.  The reason it won't is that there are limiting forces such as gravity that will slow and then stop the arrow. All observed micro-evolution has shown that there are natural limits to the amount of variation.  The gene pool only contains so much capacity for variation.  You cannot use an observation that shows that variation is limited as evidence to try to prove the existence of a process that requires unlimited variations to achieve major new innovations!  That's not science that's faith!

 

        Now back to the conclusion of Dawkin's central argument that is supposed to disprove God. Before I do let me give you one of Dawkins's famous quotes he uses on religious people. "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence." Statements 5 & 6 lead us to the grand finale "We don't have the equivalent explanation for physics.  We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising from physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology." "Therefore God almost certainly does not exist."

This is it???  He hangs himself on his own words.  Let me borrow a teaching of Jesus here for a second.  "The way you judge others is the way you will be judged".  We are told to have FAITH and not give up hope that somewhere in the future physics is going to explain what so far it hasn't been able to explain, and bingo that's going to explain how the universe looks so much like it was designed by a Designer!  Is it any wonder even atheists have winced reading Dawkins's book?  In the end, he cops out.  Despite what he says is the natural and normal conclusion, (#2 coming from #1) that the universe is designed (which common sense points to a designer), we are to disregard that (from the straw man argument #3) and simply 'evade the need to think and evaluate evidence' and conclude by faith and not give up hope that someday a better explanation will arise from physics!  Sorry Richard and Cathy.  I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. 

 

         I am supposed to disregard the numerous arguments that all seem to point to God, whose logical premises lead to a solid conclusion, and instead follow the illogical faith-based steps outlined by Dawkins?  When numerous arguments all point in different directions.  (because of limited space here I suggest readers Google these arguments to learn more)

 

        Solid arguments such as:                                                                                                                                                                                

        1)  The Cosmological Argument from Contingency (which Dawkins avoids dealing with in his book)

 

            2) The Kalam Cosmological Argument based on the Beginning of the Universe (amazingly Dawkins doesn't dispute the premises of this argument -he can't) that leads to the conclusion of a creator God who started the universe.  He complains this 'cause" hasn't been shown to be omnipotent, omniscient, good, etc., disregarding that the argument doesn't aspire to prove such things but it does lead us to the conclusion that there exists an uncaused beginner of the universe, a powerful, personal creator, who may, for all we know, also process the further properties listed by Dawkins!

 

              3)  The Moral Argument Based upon Objective Moral Values and Duties.  This argument says that if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.  Objective moral values and duties clearly do exist.  Therefore God exists.  We have already seen that Dawkins has said 'there is no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference."  And yet Dawkins does try to touch on an argument he calls the Argument from Degree which barely resembles the argument presented here.  He even goes so far as to offer his own ten commandments for guiding moral behavior seemingly oblivious to the contradiction with his ethical subjectivism foundations.

 

             4) The Teleological Argument from Fine Tuning.  In the last 50 years, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon an extremely complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself.  There are over 80 constants, that are not determined by the laws of nature.  Now all of these constants come together into an extraordinarily narrow range that allows life on this planet.  If these constants or qualities were altered, even slightly, the life-permitting balance would come unglued and no life would exist. Scientist Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford (the same school as Dawkins) comments that the odds of the Big Bang's low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 1010 (123).  Penrose goes on to say "I cannot ever recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in       1010(123).  And it's not just each constant or quantity that must be fine-tuned; their ratios to each other must be also finely tuned.  So improbability is multiplied by improbability until our minds are staggered by incomprehensible numbers!  This fine-tuning is due to either physical necessity, chance, or a designer.  It's not due to physical necessity or chance.  Therefore it points to a designer.  Dawkins attempts to rescue chance as an answer by adopting the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of randomly ordered universes composing a sort of World Ensemble.   He tries to explain this in several ways.   He concedes that yes there was a Big Bang but it was just the latest in a series of big bangs. He seems oblivious to the fact that the Oscillating model, like the Steady State model, Vacuum Fluctuation model have been rejected by the vast majority of modern scientists  He further suggests that perhaps another scenario is that daughter universes are born out of parent universes, perhaps in black holes.  Is there any concrete evidence for any of this? No, it's all speculation, we might as well say the universe popped out of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. 

        What I find interesting is that Dawkins has said he is 99% sure there is no God.  As we have seen the chances of the universe being here are so much greater, one out of 1010 (123).  Since the universe is here and God would be a very good bet at such less odds.  I actually have another reason to believe in God!  

 

            5)  The Ontological Argument from Possibility

 

To these 5,  I would add three more reasons to believe that God exists:

 

            1)  The Experience of God.  Many people though out history have claimed to have experienced God. Maybe that is a bit subjective but still cannot be denied. 

 

           2) Near-Death Experiences - while greeted with skepticism by some, there is no denying that people have had experiences that seem to indicate we are not just flesh and bones, that we do indeed have a soul that survives death, this would point to God. 

 

             3)  The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  I have spent considerable time analyzing the different theories as to what gave birth to Christianity.  In a book I wrote in 1996 "He is There and is Not Silent"(reviewing evidence for God-updated and expanded in 2017 to "Christianity vs Atheism -Which Has the Evidence of Science, Logic & History") I reviewed 7 theories, such as hallucination, woman went to the wrong tomb, disciples stole the body, etc. None of these theories best explains what follows. When you look at the core fact that a movement of people grew on the claim they saw the resurrected Jesus and they no longer were afraid to be thrown to loins and speared by the Romans, you can only conclude something remarkable happened.  To my thinking, the two best possible answers are the disciples stole the body or the resurrection happened.  However, what did these simple fishermen gain if they stole the body and invented a story?  They all got themselves killed when they could have been peacefully fishing in the Sea of Galilee!  People will die for a lie that they think is the truth.  People do not die for a lie that they know is a lie.  The resurrection best fits the facts and if that is true then it is clearly evidence for the existence of God.

 

        The evidence pointing to the existence of a Supreme Being, as I have shown, zeros in from a number of arguments from science, logic and history.  Reviewing Dawkins's arguments against God, so many of them are based on faith, not evidence, I (and many others) don't have enough faith to be an atheist.  I really wonder if Dawkins really believes his own material.  Indications are he may realize how weak his arguments are.  He has refused, even when called upon to do it by some of his atheist friends, to meet well-known Christian philosopher and debater,Dr. William Lane Craig in a debate on the existence of God at Dawkins's own school in Oxford. Craig has debated numerous atheists including Anthony Flew in 1998.  Despite pleas from the British Humanist Association and Premier Radio, invitations from the Oxford Christian Union and the Cambridge Debating Union, and Craig himself, Dawkins did not show up on Nov. 7, 2011, for the debate.  A chair with his name on it remained empty and Craig made his presentation unopposed!  Dawkins has also refused to debate Dr. Stephen Meyer, who wrong "Darwin's Doubt" and "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design". Why?  Doesn't he think his arguments are good enough?  I still have hope for Dawkins however if he follows the evidence.  Anthony Flew, the voice of atheism for 50 years, throughout the second half of the 20th century, concluded in the early 2000s that microbiology and the complexity of DNA could not have arisen by chance and required an intelligent designer.  All his life Flew had stated he would follow the evidence, and when Cementina's Window of Science opened up for him, it didn't blow away "religious myths", it blew away his atheism. In 2007 Flew wrote, "There is a God - How the World's most notorious Atheist changed his Mind"!

 

Conrad Mcintire Jr

 

 

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