The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is possibly the most ubiquitous atheist on the planet. He has dedicated himself to countless books, lectures, and public debates in service to his cause. For his efforts, in 1996 the American Humanist Association, a notoriously atheist organization, voted him Humanist of the Year. Dawkins’ most formidable effort to demolish every reason for religion is his book The God Delusion (2006). Most telling about his blitzkrieg assault against religion in general is that as one reads along on almost every page one detects a seething contempt for the Judeo-Christian traditions in particular. Dawkins calls the God of the Old Testament a “psychotic delinquent,” and incredibly refers to Paul of Tarsus, not Jesus, as the founder of Christianity.
Dawkins’ knowledge of religious history in America (like that of fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens) is glaringly deficient. He would have us believe that many of the Founders were secularists who denied the existence of God. Like Hitchens, he mistakenly puts Jefferson and Paine in that camp, though Jefferson had declared in a letter to John Adams the following words: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and infinite power in every atom of its composition….” Whereas Paine, possibly the only hostile opponent of traditional Christianity among the Founders, wrote a book titled Atheism Refuted. It seems an odd strategy that Dawkins would choose to invoke the Founders on his side when they could so easily be quoted against him.
Moreover, when identifying the religious wars of the past as the cruelest of perversions, you would think Dawkins had never heard of the multiple wars and persecutions promoted in just one century by infamous atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Nor, it seems, does Dawkins account for the countless homicides and heinous crimes committed by those who have never seen the inside of a church but may have more often than once seen the inside of a prison cell. Dawkins opines that the reverse is true, that there are fewer atheists in prison than believers, though he offers no proof for a claim that goes so heavily against common sense. As I was in prison ministry for ten years, what I saw was disheartening: very few prisoners at religious services.
The Anti-Catholic Blitzkrieg
On the apologetics front, Dawkins is not reluctant to take on the old heavy hitters of Christianity. St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God comes in for a thorough drubbing, though again Dawkins makes an unforced error by using “fair minded atheist” Bertrand Russell to help refute Anselm. Russell was not always fair-minded, nor was he an atheist, a point he made in his famous radio debate with Jesuit philosopher Frederick Coppleston. Russell was more clever by far than Dawkins, believing, as no doubt he did, that there cannot be a cogent or compelling argument against the existence of God. Dawkins again is not reluctant to quote Einstein in his diatribe against the existence of a personal God. But once more we see shabby research in play, for Einstein adamantly insisted on several occasions that although he did not believe in the Christian God, neither was he an atheist. So the very stalwart opponents of traditional religion that Dawkins invokes could be just as well invoked against atheism as against religion.
Next comes the pummeling of Thomas Aquinas. The first three of Aquinas’ famous five arguments for the existence of God are summarily dismissed as “vacuous,” this despite the fact that a finite regress to a first cause has been given a startling boost with the Big Bang theory, which posits a beginning to time and the universe, followed by a colossal display of light in the early universe reminiscent of God saying “Let there be light” in Genesis. Dawkins also dismisses the intelligent design proof of Aquinas by arguing that Darwin’s theory of evolution replaces design with evolution as the mechanism by which life exists. But what Darwin did not account for was the original seed of life which could not have evolved, because there was no life to evolve from. Abiogenesis (the eruption of life from non-life) still baffles biologists. Moreover, even if it were possible for scientists to create life from non-life in the laboratory, the obvious thing to note is that their effort were guided by intelligent design, which is fatal to Dawkins’ thesis that evolution is the product of nature as a “blind watchmaker,” but not an Intelligent Designer.
Now comes the assault on Blaise Pascal and the famous wager argument for God. Pascal’s argument, in brief, is that we must bet on God or against God. We have no choice in the matter. Those who bet against God risk losing everything. Those who bet for God stand to gain everything. Dawkins says “Pascal was probably joking.” The fate of one’s immortal soul is hardly a joke, and Pascal was dead serious about that. Dawkins says one cannot just decide to believe if one does not. And if one decides to declare one’s belief, it would hardly amount to anything but hypocrisy on a grand scale. Does Dawkins believe all the martyred converts in history would have died protesting they were just joking about believing in God?
Then there is the argument from beauty, described by Dawkins as “vacuous” (apparently his favorite word to describe any aspect of religion). What can one reply to someone who does not see that there is divine inspiration in the Sistine Chapel or in Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus”? Plainly, there is music that is inspirational, and especially in our time, music that is demonic. The simple answer to give is that if Mozart lived in our time, in all likelihood he would never have written a symphony called The Expanding Universe, a theme Dawkins seems to imagine might be just as profoundly inspirational as Mozart’s sublime hymn to the Eucharist. What Dawkins fails to consider is why, if there is no God, sacred art evokes such profound powerful response in the people who experience it. Isn’t it because there must be a God that such art virtually brings us to our knees in adoration? By the same token, isn’t it because of the music called “acid rock” that we sense demonic spirits at work inspiring the ugly above the beautiful?
“Certainly” There Is No God?
Oddly enough, Dawkins devotes a large chunk of his book (50 pages) to a theme of “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.” Almost Certainly? So … not quite certainly? Doesn’t that translate finally to not certainly at all? But why is Dawkins not quite certain? Is it because, like so many relativists, he believes nothing is certain? Having left the door open a crack, might we not just as legitimately say there almost certainly might be a God? No, he thinks. The usual evidence for God is addressed as certainly false. The Intelligent Design movement in the scientific community he dismisses as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” Though many eminent physicists have noted the extreme improbability of our universe being created in such a way as to make life possible without the laws of the universe being designed precisely as they are by a Supreme Intelligence, Dawkins falls back on “natural selection” as the ultimate explanation. It is no explanation at all, because it is not even “selection.” Nature has no mind of its own with which to select its own laws, and those very first laws set down billions of years ago not almost but most certainly did not emerge by anything remotely resembling Darwinian natural selection. Yet emerge they did!
More Proof of God Needed?
Shifting his strategy, Dawkins asks why anyone should believe the myths of religion that are presented as true and convincing. There is nothing about religion that can be fact checked, certainly not the entire history of miracles that are supposed to have been done by God and the saints. Dawkins agrees with Bertrand Russell’s stipulation that if God does exist and should ask him on the day of judgment to account for his lack of faith, Russell would reply: “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” This puts both Dawkins and Russell squarely in the camp of scientism, the philosophy that denies knowledge of anything that cannot be tested by the scientific method. What more evidence would Dawkins and Russell require to be convinced? The command performance of a miracle? But surely a built-in escape route from witnessing a miracle would be the retort that one has been deceived (don’t believe your lying eyes!), or that science and technology would some day show how the illusion of a miracle could occur.
Atheism Is Fatherless
Dawkins then asks why the one thing God requires of us that is most important is that we believe in him. The answer to this objection is obvious: Why did God bother to create us if He did not plan to have a relationship with us? What better way of not getting God’s friendship than to deny He exists? In his fascinating book Faith of the Fatherless, Dr. Paul Vitz has built a well documented case to explain why so many atheists so vigorously flee from God, the most sure-fire escape route being to deny He exists.
Why Be Good?
At one point Dawkins asks the question he often hears Christians asking: “If there is no God, why be good?” He answers that we simply do not need God in order to be good. No doubt Dawkins and other atheists are good in many ways we know and do not know. But who is Dawkins to say that if God is everywhere ruled out of existence, goodness would be equally inclined to exist as it exists with the worship of a God of love who inspires love in all His children?
At another point Dawkins insists there is not the least evidence that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. How then would he account for any officially atheistic governments (China and North Korea, for examples) systematically persecuting religious citizens and depriving them of their human rights? More to the point, is there any evidence at all that atheism systematically influences people to do good things? Certainly not in the way that proper religious instruction faithfully passed on to children teaches principles of right and wrong that they would not get elsewhere than from their parents, who may or may not have moral values, but who, even if they had them, may or may not be bothered to teach them?
How does atheism accomplish much good when, by itself, it is too specific and narrow a claim to convey moral insights and teaches nothing with respect to good and evil the way traditional religions do? In general, with atheism people are islands of self invented and clashing moralities that can do nothing to provide a moral glue sufficient to keep societies together. The “dictatorship of relativism” to which Benedict XVI referred will prevail and people will choose not to sacrifice their egos for a common good.
But the lure of atheism is not so beneficent as Dawkins makes out. He sees it as an escape from the trials and tribulations of Christian thinking about life; thinking about such things as the meaning of life (atheists reject meaning in life); thinking about our sins and our guilt (atheists reject sin); thinking about our obligation to care for the lonely, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the orphans, etc. (there is no atheist creed that requires such obligations); thinking about forgiving our enemies (again no requirement). More than all that, atheists do not have to think about being as good as they can be, as perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect ( because for atheists there is no heavenly Father, and perfection in any case is out of everyone’s reach).
Why Was He Against Religion?
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world,” Dawkins said. Dawkins thinks Christians should not want to be spiritual since we really are no more spiritual than the brute beasts of the earth. Other animals relish the world they have been given and are satisfied with not understanding it. Religion never tells us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. It teaches us to understand the most important thing in the world: that humans are given souls with an immortal destiny. That is more than atheism will ever pretend to teach us; for atheism teaches us only ultimate doom, and that at the point of dying there is no human destiny worth a hoot.
Does Atheism Encourage Life?
It is no surprise that the one thing Dawkins chooses not to fully discuss, though he seems to be all for lawfully assisting it, is suicide. Despair has always been one of the primary motives for suicide. The blitzkrieg of Dawkins’ fallacies could seduce any young, untrained mind. The parents of young Jesse Kilgore in 2008 reported that Jesse’s suicide was partly induced by despair after reading The God Delusion, which destroyed his belief in God.1
A substantial number of scholarly studies have shown that suicide is more common in nations known for a higher rate of atheism. This makes eminent sense because such nations may be lacking in the communities (churches, for example) that provide help for combating loneliness and despair. Also, studies have shown that a higher percentage of atheists than theists remain unmarried throughout life, and that single people are more prone to suicide. These studies can be accessed at the Conservapedia website.
Religion Is Irrational and Dangerous?
But Dawkins’ view is not tolerant of the good done by religious institutions. He thinks a great deal of damage is done to children by religious instruction, and he thinks that damage is profound enough to ruin many lives. This is a view he shares with Bertrand Russell who, according to his daughter, could never bring himself to admit all the good done by religion in the world. So it is no surprise that Dawkins, viewing religion as a collection of evil cults, offers in the appendix to his book a lengthy list of support groups for individuals needing help to escape from the evils of religion.
Speaking of such evil effects, Dawkins sees the Christian objection to abortion as without merit, and he mocks Mother Teresa for her remark that “The great destroyer of peace is abortion.” He speaks of her as possessing “cock-eyed judgment … [being] sanctimoniously hypocritical,” and unworthy of the Nobel Prize. But instead of addressing the morality of abortion itself (whether an innocent human being’s life is taken) Dawkins chooses to address the morality of those supposedly religious bigots who oppose abortion. He raises the case of Paul Hill who in 2003 was executed for killing an abortionist and his bodyguard. Dawkins falsely claims that his religion is what led Hill to murder. Not so. It was Hill’s inner demon who led him to murder. There is no known sanction in religion for murder. Yes, there is intense and widespread religious opposition to abortion as a type of murder, but every religious group condemns murder.
When it is brought to the attention of Dawkins that Stalin and Mao, both atheists, were mass murderers more fiendish than any others in human history, he replies that they only happened to be atheists, that it was the dogmatic Marxism, not the atheism, that drove the mass murders. Well, of course Marx was also a dogmatic atheist. The simple fact is that religion forbids murder, but atheism by itself cannot point to a God who forbids it.
Wicked Censure of Sodomy & Transgenderism?
Dawkins likewise takes to task Christian and Muslim sects that censure sodomy. They are condemned as irrational and without charity. He does not, however, talk about the intrinsically wicked nature of sodomy, condemned by Dawkins’ hero Thomas Jefferson, who while governor of Virginia fought to obtain serious penalties for both male and female sodomy. From ancient to modern times sodomy was controversial in Christian and non-Christian cultures, and ever since it has been abhorred by people with enough common sense to recognize the flaunting of natural law when they see it. The scourge of AIDS is nature’s judgment and punishment of the act, and always has been since the Greeks and Roman promoted it and St. Paul commented on it in Romans 1:27: “Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own person the penalty for their perversity.”
Since receiving the American Humanist Association’s award as an “exemplar of humanist values” and the writing of The God Delusion (2006) transgenderism has surfaced as the next radical revolution in sexual morality. Recently Dawkins became a victim of the Left’s newest cause celebre. At one point he tweeted: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”
For this tweet, which was Dawkins’ invitation to dialogue, the atheistic Humanist Association stripped him of his Humanist of the Year award with the comment: “His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.” So now Dawkins has learned to his chagrin that systemic atheism, like organized religion, recognizes its own heresies and will excommunicate its own heretics.
A Dawkins Concession
Since the publication of The God Delusion Dawkins seems to have softened his stance on the evils of religion. Looking at a recent survey, he opines that religion might actually do at least one thing well: it gives potentially bad people a reason to believe someone (their imaginary deity?) is watching them. This is, of course, a tacit admission that atheism has no comparable brake on the accelerating rush toward the triumph of evil everywhere observed in our time.
Religion is not to be tolerated just because it is morally pragmatic, but rather embraced because it is true. As St. Paul says in Romans 2:15, “The demands of the law are written on our hearts,” and that includes the First Commandment written on Richard Dawkins’ heart: “Love God and one another.” (Mark 12:30) It is not merely social order and sanity that might be saved by religion, but the everlasting souls of all God’s children. When we erase the First commandment from our hearts by erasing God, we do not worship God any longer, but rather the demons we have invited into our hearts.
Some years ago a Dominican friar reminded me that atheism, for all its mounting pretensions as a threat to religion, is nowhere near as dangerous as a universal indifference to God. This recalled to me Jacques Maritain’s great insight about practical atheists, people who call themselves religious according to one sect or another, but have no authentic spiritual lifeline to God and could care less about starting one. Add all these souls to the number of those who are self declared atheists openly hostile to religion, and it is possible to see why the evils of our age, already approaching total insanity, have acquired the upper hand over everyone.
Plato is reported to have said that atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding. Informed and sensible people know in their hearts that a disastrous spiritual disease afflicts the world. Perhaps not since the early Church has there been so widespread a suspicion, if not conviction, that the End Times are near. How to heal the twofold disease of moral and intellectual decline eludes the grasp of most astute analysts, who cannot agree how to make the world right again; and if they could agree how to fix it, who and how many on earth would agree to follow them?
The old belief in objective moral and spiritual values has largely diminished in the West. The only way to remedy the situation is to return to the way of the spirit. A prelude to this return might require descending so far down to the bottom of chaos and hell, as ancient Rome did, that there is no way left for the spirit to move but up. Was this not one reason why Jesus appeared just where he did, and why Christianity took hold and exploded throughout western civilization just when it did, at precisely the moment that the Romans abandoned their pagan gods and embraced, at last, the living God they had murdered on a cross?
What happened once, could it happen again? Why not?
Sursum corda ad Dominum!
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1 Dad links son’s suicide to ‘The God Delusion’, World Net Daily, November 20, 2008 (https://www.wnd.com/2008/11/81459/)
