My Answer To Richard Dawkins

 

I have all the respect in the world in Richard Dawkins’ expertise in zoology and biology, and I would not question him in those areas. After all, who am I to question him in his area of expertise? But in his book, The God Delusion, he does not stay within those disciplines. He dabbles in other areas, such as philosophy, ethics, theology, biblical exegesis, religious studies, history and other branches of science. He must do this because science by itself only deals with the physical realm and cannot say anything concerning metaphysical issues such as the existence of God.

 

Dawkins as an evolutionist

 

I have no problem with his argument for evolution. But evolution itself does not disprove the existence of God. There are many famous Christians who have believed in evolution - C. S, Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dinesh D’Souza, Kenneth Miller, and Pope John Paul II. So in order for Dawkins to use evolution to disprove God, he needs to make some philosophical conclusions.

 

If evolution was the only thing we can look at, I agree that evolution by itself would seem to be more compatible with atheism than it would with theism. If evolution is true, why would God take so long to create us? If our existence can be explained by natural selection, does that not mean that we will soon have no need to postulate God in explaining the existence of anything?

 

But as much as evolution is more compatible with atheism, so is other discoveries in philosophy, history, and other branches of science are far more compatible to the belief in God than to atheism.

 

Dawkins as a philosopher and a theologian

 

Evolution may by itself be more compatible with atheism, but it does not contradict the belief in the existence of God. Dawkins argued that since God took so long to create us, this is not the most efficient use of his time – he would have been lazy ¹. The world is 14.5 billion years old. Our earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Why did it take God so long to create us? This would not be the most inefficient use of his time. Evolution is incompatible with the belief in God. Therefore, according to Dawkins, God does not exist.

 

But this argument has a simplistic view of God, both theologically and philosophically. But God is not just a big fat creature. God is totally unlike us. To God, one method would not be easier than another. It would not be easier for God to create one planet as opposed to a billion planets.  It would not be a more efficient use of His time to create us in one week as opposed to a billion years.

 

God is outside of time – He is in the eternal now. Dawkins mocks this idea that a being can be outside of time. But I would think that Dawkins, as a scientist, should know better. The Big Bang theory states that the universe started at a point of singularity. At that point, space and time began ². So if a Supreme Being had created the universe, then that means that this Being would Himself be outside of time. Also, Einstein’s theory of relativity has shown that time is relative. If a person was able to travel at the speed of light, he would experience the stillness of time.

 

Even the string theory supports the relativity of time. According to the string theory, we experience three dimensions – length, width, and depth. And then there is an added dimension – time. The string theory is that there may be more dimensions out there. So if there are dimensions out there, there could be more time dimensions that we are not aware. According to the string theory, there could be a dimension where one second can be a billion years in our dimension. A being who exists in that higher dimension could see time totally different than how we see it.

 

True, all this does not prove that a God outside of time does exist. And there are scientists who question the validity of the string theory ². All this shows is that the idea is not as incredible as Dawkins leads his readers to think it is.

 

Dawkins admits that an atheist cannot disprove the existence of God. How can you disprove a negative? But he contends that the burden of proof is on believers to prove that God does exist. If we cannot prove that God exists then we should assume that He does not, just as we assume that a Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist without needing to present evidence to the contrary.

 

But Dawkins is being inconsistent. He himself believes in many things that cannot be verified. He believes in zillions of parallel worlds in other dimensions. But there is no verifiable evidence that this is so. He also believes that the seed of life on our planet was brought here by aliens³, although there is no evidence that aliens exist.

 

Throughout his book Dawkins writes that we should only go where the evidence leads us, and the evidence is simply insufficient to believe in God. But I think he is being disingenuous here. In another book, he wrote:

 

If a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat is as a miracle, because all our experience and knowledge tells that marble doesn’t behave like that. [but science would not judge this as] utterly impossible [but only] very improbable…In the case of marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostling of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happened to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move. If they all reversed direction at the same moment, the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for a marble statue to wave at us. It could happen. The odds against such a coincidence are unimaginably great but are not incalculably great. The number is so large that the entire age of the universe so far is too short a time to wrote out all the noughts. It is theoretically possible for a cow to jump over the moon with something like the same improbability. The conclusion to this part of the argument is that we can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater that we can imagine as plausible. ⁴

 

So it is not true that the reason he does not believe in God is because there is insufficient evidence. In the above quote, Dawkins betrays the fact that he would not believe no matter what the evidence we have – even if a statue should wave at him! One has to wonder, then, what evidence could possibly convince Dawkins. Even if God should appear to him, would he not just pass it off as a hallucination, or that the molecules in the air just condensed to appear as God?

 

In chapter 4 of his book, Dawkins goes through the argument used by believers on the existence of God. But he ignored one very important argument - our free will. As a materialist, Dawkins reduces everything to the material. We are nothing but mindless robots who are programmed by our genes.

 

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.

— Richard Dawkins

http://www.todayinsci.com/D/Dawkins_Richard/DawkinsRichard-Quotations.htm

 

But if we do not have a free will, then what is the point in Dawkins trying to persuade us that there is no God? We are just robots carrying out the programming of our DNA. And why should we even bother to listen to Dawkins? How can we know that Dawkins is right, since he himself would also be a product of his genes? In chapter 6, Dawkins argues that any good we do is because of the programming of our selfish genes. Even though our genes no longer need these altruistic acts to survive, we are still programmed to think this way. Dawkins calls this a “precious misfiring of evolution”. But how does Dawkins know this is “precious”? To be consistent, Dawkins must admit that his own evaluation of this being “precious” is also a programming from his genes. Ultimately, this way of thinking questions our ability to know any truth. If we are not free-will beings then can we ever rationally come up with any truth?

 

But if free will exists how is this compatible with atheism? Atheism generally rejects the immaterial. All that exists is matter. Dawkins argues that the immaterial is nothing. There is no God, no souls, and no life after death. The immaterial does exist. But the implication of this is that free will does not exist, since free will is immaterial. You cannot hold free will, You cannot look at free will under a microscope. So if free will exists then the immaterial can exist. If the immaterial exists, then so can God, our souls, and life after death exist.

 

 

Dawkins believes that he has the silver bullet against the existence of God. His argument is that since the world is so complex, then a God who designed this world would have to be even more complex. So who designed the designer?

 

This is really just a new wrinkle to the old atheist argument of who created the creator. If we need God as an explanation for our existence, then what explains God’s existence? But the fundamental flaw with this argument is a faulty view of what we Christians believe concerning God. Our view of God is that God is the Uncaused Cause, the Uncreated Creator, and the Ground of all being. By definition, our God would not have been caused, or created, or be grounded in another being. He is the first principle of all. His existence is a brute fact. Atheists used to see the universe as a brute fact since they believed it was eternal. The Big bang has now disproved that. The universe is not eternal. It had a beginning. So the brute fact argument can no longer apply to the universe. But since our view of God is that He is eternal, then His existence would be a brute fact, and no explanation would be needed for his existence. Dawkins cannot object to the brute fact argument for an eternal God, since atheists themselves had argued that an eternal universe is a brute fact.

 

Also, the Christian view of God is that God is pure simplicity. He is pure spirit. He has no complex body parts. This has been taught in the Bible and in 2,000 years of Christian theology. Dawkins throws this away and says the God (who he says does not exist) must be complex. But this is creating a straw man, only to attack it. Christians do not believe that God’s essence is complex. His existence is very simple.

 

Dawkins argued that since we are complex that God must be more complex – that something complex (such as us) could not have originated from something simple (such as a God who is pure simplicity). But this is simply (pun) not true. And architect can have an idea for a cathedral. The cathedral itself is far more complex than the idea, but the cathedral originated from the idea.

 

Also, offering God as explanation for the universe does not require us to first explain God’s existence. We normally do not require an explanation to also have an explanation. If we did require this then we would have to then provide an explanation for that explanation, and so and so on; we would have infinite regress. We would not be able to explain anything. For instance, if archaeologists dug up some ancient pottery, they would conclude that the pottery came from some ancient civilization. They know nothing about that civilization; they do not have explanation where that civilization came from. But this does not preclude them from using that civilization as an explanation for those objects. In the same way, we do not have to explain God before we can use God as an explanation of the universe. God is eternal. He simply is. His existence is a brute fact. The universe is not eternal. It had a beginning. So the existence universe cannot just be a brute fact. Since the universe had a beginning, what or who caused the universe to come into existence?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dawkins as a physicist

 

Throughout his book, Dawkins gives the impression that science is always in the advance and religion is on the retreat. That is true to some extent. But it is also true that sometimes it was atheism that has been on retreat.

This is especially true concerning the Big Bang theory. This theory came about in the 1930’s by a scientist-priest named Georges Lemaître ⁶. This theory so upset Einstein’s atheism that he implored someone t o disprove it. Up until that point scientists believed that the world was eternal. The world is just a brute fact, it needed no explanation for its existence. But scientists discovered that the universe is expanding. That means that we if can go back in time, we can go back to a point when the universe was just a tiny, very dense speck – and then BANG! It started to explode. This made many atheists very uneasy, including Einstein ⁵. It seems that the scientists were all wrong and Genesis in the Bible was right!

Dawkins turns to the fine-tuning of our planet and our universe. Scientists are discovering that our planet is finely-tuned to allow for life. Dawkins shrugs this off by pointing out the billions and billions of other planets in the universe, that the odds are that eventually there would be a planet like ours to produce life.

 

On the surface, it seems plausible, given the vastness of our universe, that it would be just a matter of time that a planet such as ours would allow complex, intelligent life to exist. But scientists are realizing just how rare our planet is. The sun cannot be too large or too small. If our planet was too close to the sun, we would fry. If we were too far, we would freeze. If we did not have the moon at just the right size and distance orbiting our planet, our oceans would not be naturally purified from its tides. Our earth’s tectonic activity is rare, but necessary for the earth’s rich elements to rise to the surface. If the earth was too large, the gravity would have crushed us. If too small, we would float into space. These are just some things that are unique to our planet and is necessary for life. There are others too numerous to mention ⁷.

 

But a bigger problem is that the whole universe is finely tuned for life. For instance, scientists now realize that the Big Bang was more of a Big Bloom. The bang was a controlled expansion. If the expansion was too fast, stars would have not been able to form. If the expansion was too slow, the tremendous gravity would have forced the expanding universe to implode back into a speck. There are certain constants in the universe that if they were off by just a little then no life would exist anywhere on the universe ⁸.

 

So how did the universe get everything just right? After all, here we are dealing with only one universe. The universe had only one chance to get it right. What are the odds of our universe getting all this right by chance? Again, Dawkins sees no problem. He has an explanation – there are an infinite number of parallel worlds out there. Most of these other worlds are not finely-tuned, we just happen to be one of the lucky ones ⁹.

 

 

But there is no scientific evidence that these worlds exist. Science is at its best when it deals with objects that are observable and quantifiable. But other dimensions parallel to ours are not observable or quantifiable. No one has ever been there. No one has observed these other dimensions or measured these other dimensions. The belief in an infinite number of universes is more science fiction than science.

 

This is something that one has to accept by faith, just like our faith in God. Dawkins realized this, but he contends that the belief in multiverses is more “probable” than the belief in God ¹⁰. He never explains what he means by this. He wrote that it is statistically more probable. But he does not explain how statistical probability works into this. Statistical probability is such as there being a 1 in 6 chance that a certain number comes up when a die is thrown because there are 6 sides of number on a die, or that if in the past meteorologists observed that it rained 80% when conditions are the way they are today, meteorologists can say there is an 80% chance of it raining. But God and multiverses are not observable or quantifiable. It is hard to see how statistical probability comes into play.

 

He also tries to apply Occam’s Razor to determine which of these explanations is likely. Occam’s Razor states that it you need to choose between two explanations, to choose the simpler explanation of the two. Dawkins argues that the belief in multiverses is simpler than the belief in God. He asserts it is simpler, but an assertion is not an argument. Personally, I think that the existence of one infinite Supreme Being is simpler to understand than the string theory, the Bubble Theory, the M-Theory, Schrodinger’s Cat theory, which are all variations of the theory of an infinite number of universes.

 

The only argument for the belief in multiverses is the finely tuned universe. But this can also be an argument for God and like the multiverse theory there are many other arguments for the existence of God besides the finely-tuned universe – such as the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the experiential argument and the free will argument.

 

But even if theses multiverses exist, that does not explain away God. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that objects left to themselves tend to entrophy – that is, they become less and less finely-tuned. So if our finely-tuned world came from another world, then that world would have to have been more finely tuned than our world. So who designed that world?

 

What is more, the idea of multiple worlds would actually reinforce the belief in God. It would cause a death blow to materialism. Materialism is the belief that since there is no God; only the material exists – only what is scientifically verifiable. There is no God, or angelic spirits, or souls that exist after death. There is no heaven or hell. Only what we can see exists. But these other worlds are not scientifically verifiable.

 

If these worlds exist, then how do we know that one of them is not heaven, and another is hell? Dawkins wrote that the belief in God is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But if there are an infinite number of alternate universes, then the odds are pretty good that one of those universes would contain any kind of being we can possibly imagine, even a Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even a Supreme Being such as God. Dawkins once wrote another book called “Climbing Mount Improbable”. The central theme in this book is that the improbable happens all the time. But if that is the case, how can he now in this book say that God is improbable and therefore does not exist?

 

One part of science that Dawkins was strangely silent on was quantum physics. Quantum physics is the study of the subatomic world. It is here that we have the most recent evidence of the existence of God. Until recently, it was assumed that matter existed before intelligence. But now we know, because of quantum physics, that intelligence existed before matter – that matter is the result of intelligence ¹³.

 

 

This world is a mystery. It is not just that we do not understand now; we can never understand it. The reason we can never understand it is because the more we try to observe the particles in the micro-world, the more they behave differently! But how is that possible? These particles have no brains; they have no life. But somehow there is some Consciousness that is aware that It is being watched! How is this possible? And how can we solve this mystery when the particles behave differently when they are being observed?

 

Quantum physicists conducted some experiments with light, using walls with slits in them. They would beam a light ray onto a wall. The light photons would hit the wall like waves. But then they directly observe the light. Then the light would hit the wall like particles. Then they would have light hit a wall from the opposite direction. Initially, they both hit the light as waves. But when light photon A is observed, it then hits the wall as a particle, the photon B hits the wall as a particle as well. This is really weird. It is as if photon B “knew” what was happening to photon A and acted according. Then they moved source of photon B closer to its target than the source of photon A to its wall. Using super atomic measurements, they could measure the time the light B hits it wall before light A hits its wall. Then they decided to directly observe light A, but not B. The light photon B would hit the wall as a particle before light photon A was observed. The cause and effect still happened, even though the effect happened before the cause was going to happen!

 

In classic physics, scientists were finding that what people interpreted as a mystery had natural, scientific explanations. Scientists such as Dawkins were confident that eventually everything can be explained. But in modern quantum physics, the opposite is true. The more they researched the sub-atomic world, the more they found that the world was mysterious, if not bizarre. Sub-atomic particles act as if they know they are being watched! In some way, in the micro-world, there is a consciousness that defies explanations. So it is not that intelligence can be reduced to mere matter, but rather matter is reduced to an intelligence – which I would say is an Intelligent Mind calling all the shots.

 

The materialist, using classic, old-fashioned physics, assumed that consciousness came from matter. But the modern quantam physicist sees that matter came from consciousness. Dawkins is still in the old science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dawkins as an ethicist

 

Dawkins argues that we can come up with our own morality without the need for God. He shows this by coming up with his own version of the Ten Commandments. Sure, anyone can come up with their own commandments. That is not the point. The issue is not whether Dawkins can come up with a set of principles, but whether anyone else should bother to abide by them. The atheist Friedrich Nietzsche criticized his fellow atheists for being “atheistic Christians”. They deny God but still want to hold to some of part of the traditional morality. This exactly fits Dawkins, who calls even himself a “cultural Christian” ¹⁴. Dawkins mocks the assertion made by Dostoyevsky that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, as if one is going to run out and kill or rape someone simply because he longer believes in God. But I do not think that was what Dostoyevsky was saying. Of course I would not run out and kill or rape someone if I was to become an atheist. But just like Dawkins, even if I were an atheist, I would still be culturally conditioned to accept traditionally Christian values. But can the same be said about subsequent generations? Can Dawkins guarantee that if atheism takes hold on society that we would not enter a brave new world where man is gradually dehumanized, atrocities are accepted, and everything is permitted?

 

Atheism does not have a good track record when it permeates society. Close to 50% of all atheistic regimes has killed over 2,000 of its own citizens in the 20^th century ¹⁵. Continental Europe is currently more entrenched in atheism and Michel Onfray with his radical form of atheism is far more popular there than Dawkins ¹¹. Onfray would come right out and say human life has no intrinsic value since there is no God. He criticized Dawkins for still holding onto Christianity. Onfray argues that since there is no God, we must radically transform our value system. I could not find Dawkins anywhere trying to refute Onfray. It is not enough for Dawkins to argue that an atheist can be good and be atheist. He must argue why an atheist should be good. He must argue how Onfray is wrong. Until he refutes Onfray, how do we not know that the future of atheism will not be Onfray’s brand of atheism?

 

Later on in the book, Dawkins writes about the priestly molestation scandal. I was surprise that he did not make more of this. But he wrote that the priests are guilty of a far more heinous act, far worse than child molestation. Based on anecdotal stories of three individuals (a very scientific study) he declared that a priest who taught a child about hell was more evil than he who molested children ¹⁶. Think of the implications of this! We send child molesters to prison. So if teaching a religion with a hell is worse than molestation, then should we not also send priests, ministers, Sunday School teachers and even Christian parents to prison as well ¹⁷?

 

 

Dawkins as a historian

 

 

Dawkins then also responds to C.S. Lewis’s classic argument, which is thus:

 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

 

Dawkins retorts that there is a third option – that He was simply mistaken ¹⁹. But Dawkins is missing Lewis’s point. A person who teaches that He is uniquely the Son of God, in a strictly monotheistic Jewish culture, could not just have been honestly mistaken. Even in our culture we tend to put those who say they are Napoleon in mental wards. We do not say that they are simply mistaken. When David Koresh said he was the second coming of Christ, we did not just view him as being simply mistaken. He was either a charlatan or nuts! So how could Jesus be simply mistaken when he made even more radical claims about himself?

 

What sets Christianity different from all other religions is that Christianity is based on historical events – especially the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christianity professes that its Founder lived at a specific place and time, died under a historical Pontius Pilate, and rose bodily from a well-guarded tomb. Since this is what we Christians are asserting, then our religion is based on events that one can verify or falsify.

 

Dr William Lane Craig, whom many Christians consider as one the most foremost defenders of the Christian faith, has argued that there are three undisputed facts which most scholars, even skeptics, accept: the empty tomb, the testimony of His followers that He appeared to them, and the radical belief in the resurrection of an individual that was not in pagan religions or Judaism at that time. Craig then demonstrated that the best explanation to these facts, unless one has an a priori, anti-supernaturalistic bias, is the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Dawkins had refused to debate Craig, saying that he does not debate Creationists. This I do not understand, if Dawkins believes that a belief in God is delusional and only an idiot would believe in God, then why is he so reluctant to debate one of the best defenders of the Christian faith ²⁰?

 

Dawkins especially enjoyed attacking the Catholic faith. For instance, he tried to show how illogical the argument for purgatory was. According to Dawkins, Catholics argue the existence of purgatory by showing that in the past Catholics have prayed for souls in purgatory. So it is a circular argument: We should pray for those in purgatory because we always prayed for those in purgatory. But this is a caricature of the Catholic argument. The Catholic argument was never intended for the atheist but for Protestant who shares the Catholic belief in the deity of Christ. Protestants generally believe that Catholics added all their Catholic doctrines in the Middle Ages, and that the early Christian Church was devoid of these Catholic doctrines and practices. The Catholic argument is to show that the very early Christians prayed for the souls after death. The closer we can get the practice of the early church, the more likely it is that these practices were based on the oral teachings of Christ and His apostles.

 

Another example is his case about the miracle of Fatima on 1917. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three children. On the last appearance, there were 55,000 to 100,000 onlookers waiting for a sign that Mary had promised. They saw the sun moving in the sky, and coming towards them. This lasted for several minutes, and then it went back to its original position. Dawkins admitted that the evidence is so strong that this event is hard to write off - but for one thing. If the sun had moved, then it would have been noticed throughout the world and been in all the papers, and it was not. So although the evidence is hard to write off, it could not be true.

 

It may seem improbable that seventy thousand people could simultaneously be deluded, or could simultaneously collude in a mass lie. Or that history is mistaken in recording the seventy thousand people saw a \claimed to see the sun dance. Or that they simultaneously saw a mirage…But any of those apparent improbabilities is far more probable that the alternative: that the Earth was suddenly yanked sideways in its orbit, and the solar system destroyed, with nobody outside Fatima noticing.

 

TGD (page 117)

 

I agree with Dawkins. No matter how improbable a mass hallucination or a mass lie is, it is still more probable than for then sun to actually have moved around our solar system. BUT I do not think that is what any Catholic who believes in the Fatima miracle thinks that this is what actually happened! Rather, this was a phenomenological miracle. The miracle was what all the people all saw. Does this mean that it was merely a mass hallucination? There are problems with this explanation. The vision of the sun dancing in the sky had physical effects on the onlookers. It was raining all day, and everyone was drenched. After the vision was over, all the people testified that their clothes were totally dry. Also, people who were not in at the site testified to seeing this vision. This was even record in Fatima’s secular newspaper.  What is more, Mary made some prophesies that all came true. First, she predicted that the two youngest seers would die and be with the Lord soon. They died within a couple of years. She predicted that the current war (World War I) would end but a greater war would start, and that great lights from the north would precede the war. She also prophesied of the rise and demise of communism in Russia ²¹

 

 

 

 

 

Dawkins as a theologian

 

One of the arguments or the existence of God is the moral argument. We Christian would argue that if there is no God, then there is no basis to morality. Dawkins would retort that the same can be said even if God entered into the picture. Dawkins would argue that either God arbitrarily chose good over evil, or God recognized that good was better than evil. If God arbitrarily chose good over evil, then He could have just as easily chosen evil over good. If He recognized good as always being better than evil, then there is a standard over God to determine good over evil. The atheist merely removes the middle man.

 

But there is a third option that Dawkins simply ignores. Unlike popular belief, according to the Bible, orthodox Christian theology, and Christian philosophy, there are certain things God just cannot do. He cannot create a rock He cannot lift. He cannot create a square circle. He cannot lie. He cannot cause himself to no longer exist. He cannot change. Since God cannot change, any attributes He has are essential to being. He not only loves but is love. He did not choose to be good, He essentially is good.  Goodness is anything that conforms to His nature. Evil is anything against his nature. He cannot be evil or choose evil, because that would go against His very being. Nothing or no one forces him to choose good. It is with his very nature, and He cannot deny Himself.

 

Dawkins argued that the doctrine of the death of Jesus Christ was the most hideous thing he ever heard. Why would God make His Son suffer so for our sins? Why did He just not forgive us without causing so much agony on his Son?

 

 

But since He cannot change, any attributes He has He cannot change. Two of the attributes is His holiness and His justice. His holiness means that He cannot, not just will not, stand sin. He did not choose at anytime to be holy. He has always been holy. It has always been part of his essence. No one above Him forces Him to be holy.

 

But God is not only holy, he also loves us. And here is the dilemma. We are all sinners. So God had to provide a plan that would save us and yet satisfy his holiness for us. He can only save us in a just manner. I once heard the following as a good illustration. Suppose you were caught speeding and went before a judge. And suppose the judge was your father. Since you broke the law, you had to pay the penalty, and it would be unjust for the judge to let you off simply because he loved you. The penalty had to be paid. But the judge could pay the penalty for you.

 

This is what happened at the cross. At the cross, justice and mercy kissed each other. The penalty, which God was obligated by his own nature, was paid so that God can accept us into heaven.

 

What Dawkins misses is that that the cross was not an arbitrary act, but was driven by God’s holiness, justice and love.

 

Dawkins as a sociologist

 

Since atheists generally see to invalidate Christianity by pointing out its similarities with other religions especially ancient of primitive religions. The logic is as follows.

 

1. Christianity has similarity with other religions

2. This shows that Christianity has taken ideas from other religions

3. Therefore, Christianity is false

 

For instance, it has been argued that Christianity’s belief in the resurrection of Christ came from the myth of a dying and rising Osiris, the Egyptian god who died and was raised to the dead. Also, Dawkins cites the Cargo Cults, especially John Frum, whom island natives made up myths about that are similar to the beliefs concerning Christ.

 

But given the history of the world, there are bound to be similarities between religion and even other events. For instance, take the bizarre similarities between of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; Kennedy in 1946. Lincoln was elected President in 1860; Kennedy in 1960. Both Lincoln and Kennedy contained 7 letters. Both we shot in the head on a Friday. Both assassins had 3 names. Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and was discovered hiding in a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and was arrested in a theater. Booth was born in 1839. Oswald was born in 1939. Do these amazing similarities show that Kennedy was merely a fabrication taken from the events in Lincoln’s life? I sincerely doubt that. I have not heard anyone asserting this. There are just coincidences. I agree with http://www.snopes.com/history/american/lincoln-kennedy.asp. This web site points out that the similarities are emphasized and the differences are ignored in order to foster this urban legend.

 

In the same way, why should similarities between Christianity and other religions be anything more than just coincidences? And as N.T Wright show in his comprehensive research in The Resurrection of the Son of God, the differences Christianity on other religions are often overlooked.

 

On page 258, Dawkins used a study showed that atheists are just as moral as believers. This study was done by Marc Hauser and Peter Singer. Singer is an interesting guy. He has stated that an adult animal has more value than a newborn baby.

 

Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many non-human animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel pain (sentience), and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week, a month, or even a year old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee

 

Peter Singer, "Taking life: abortion", in Practical Ethics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 118.] (emphasis added)

From http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_23singerglobalethics.html

 

He also sees nothing wrong with bestiality. This shows what is wrong with this study. How can there be study that compares the morality of atheists to the morality of believers when there is no objective standard of defining what is moral?

 

 

 

Can we know for certain?

 

My purpose in this paper is more modest than Dawkins in his book. I do not think we can prove with certainty that God exists or does not exist. According to my Christian faith, God would not have given us absolute evidence of His existence, since this would nullify a need for faith as one of the criteria for our salvation. The Bible makes it very clear that without faith it is impossible to please God. We are saved by grace through faith. But what is point of making faith necessary for our salvation and then giving us absolute evidence for his existence? It is like a teacher giving the answers of the test to the students. What point then would there be in taking the test in the first place? This is why God does not generally appear to us to provide absolute evidence for His existence (He will one day in the future appear to all of us, but by that time the test will be over).

 

That does not mean that He has not provided us with any evidence. He has provided enough evidence that will convince those who want to believe, but not so much evidence that it will convince those who do not want to believe. His evidence is the recent scientific discoveries that the universe had a beginning, that we have a finely-tuned planet and even the finely tuned universe for life, our sense and need for objective morals, the existence of our free will, the recent discoveries in quantum mechanics, and the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead as well as other historical miracles. The evidence is not absolute. That will not happen until we see Christ. But the universe does seem to be more compatible to the belief in God than to atheism.

 

Science by itself cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Recent studies showed that the majority of scientists do not believe in God. Some atheists draw the false conclusion that this means that science has disproven God. But this seems to me to be an over-simplification. There are other factors to explain the study.

 

1. Intellectuals on a certain expertise tend to have a myopic view of the world only through their expertise (if I had only a hammer then everything is a nail). Atheists, with their materialistic presuppositions that only the material exists, would gravitate to a field that only deals with material solutions.

 

2.         Politics in the scientific community. Scientists are still humans – so it is natural that there an element of politics in science. There is no central, infallible magisterium for science. Science is not monolithic. Scientists at times win their positions not by the strength of their arguments but by their political maneuverings.

 

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

 

Max Planck http://thinkexist.com/quotation/a_new_scientific_truth_does_not_triumph_by/158371.html

 

 

3. Discrimination within the scientific community

 

 

What is more, there have been statements made by famous atheistic scientists that show that they are not atheists because of the scientific evidence against god, but in spite of the scientific evidence for God. Here are some examples:

 

o   Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

 

Richard Lewontin in article Billions and Billions of Demons

 

o   Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

 

Francis Crick (TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY)

 

 

o   A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

 

Sir Fred Hoyle (Hoyle later became a believer)

 

o   For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

 

Robert Jastrow

 

o   Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me … I should like to find a genuine loophole.

 

Arthur Eddington

 

o   There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all ... it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming."

 

Paul Davies

 

 

These are all atheists and scientists who said this (Fred Hoyle converted later on in his life). This shows that scientists would still hold onto their atheism in spite of the scientific evidence, not because of it.

 

(Find these quotes at http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/quotes/universe.html)

 

There is one more quote I have from a scientist who is an atheist:

 

A serious case could be made for a deistic God

 

Richard Dawkins

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2543431/is-richard-dawkins-still-evolving.thtml

 

 

Recently, Richard Dawkins had a debate with a fellow Oxford scholar, John Lennox, an evangelical Christian. Lennox used the many of the scientific evidence I presented here. Afterwards listening to Lennox’s scientific arguments for the existence of God, in an interview, Dawkins conceded that a God could exist. He makes the distinction that he only concedes on the existence of a deistic God. Deism is the general belief in God without believing that God still performs miracles such as those recorded in the Bible. But this is still a huge concession! I guess we believers are not so delusional after all.

 

 

NOTES

 

•  

¹ TGD page 144 He quotes approvingly from Woody Allen “If it turns out that there is no God, I don’t think he is evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that he is an underachiever”

 

2 The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago.

 

The Beginning Of Time

Stephen Hawking (atheist and famous physicist)

 

 

³ Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit  and The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of the String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Next - by Lee Smolin. Both authors argued that the string theory is not scientifically verified and cannot be theoretically falsified. Throughout TGD, Dawkins asserts that science is verifiable and something we can rely on, but religion is all just based on faith – to believe in God is like believing in a Flying-Spaghetti Monster. But there are many things that scientists, along with Dawkins, just accept without any verifiable evidence. The string theory is one example.

 

⁴ See http://darwinianfundamentalism.blogspot.com/2009/11/transcript-of-interview-of-richard.html

 

⁵ Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker, 159-160

 

⁶ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

 

 

⁷ The atheist Einstein was very upset with the Big Bang. He said “The circumstances of an expanding universe irritates me... To admit such possibilities seems senseless.”

 

Einstein realized that if the universe was expanding away from a point, then it had a beginning at that point. If the universe had a beginning then it must have a "Beginner", he surmised. This discovery disturbed Einstein so much that for a time he included an imaginary mathematical "cosmological constant" to his formula. He did this to make the effect of the expanding universe go away. He later stated that this was the biggest error of his entire career.

 

http://www.siprep.org/faculty/phanley/200files/Einsteinan_Hawkin_God.html

 

 

⁸ See Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe

 

⁹ TGD page 170

 

¹⁰ TGD page 175-176 “The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God   hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical, is simple, God, or any intelligent, decision-taking calculating agent would have to be highly improbable in the very statistical sense as the entities as the entities he is supposed to explain. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are not postulating anything highly improbable”. The logic here is convoluted. How is the existence of zillions of parallel worlds statistically more probable than the existence of one creator? Statistical probability is determined by surveying how many times an event occurs. For instance, there are 6 sides to a die cube, so the statistical probability of throwing a die and getting a certain number is 1:6. But how does statistical probability relate to the existence of God versus the existence of multiple worlds? Either God exists or the multiverses exist. Or they can both exist. But there is no statistic to support which is more probable. Also, how is the existence of an infinite number of universes simple? The reason that the multiverses is postulated is to explain how our intricately designed universe could exist by chance. Since our own universe is not simple, why should we assume that zillions of other worlds would be simple? And not only that, but the whole system that generates these other world would to be at least as complex as the most complex world the system generated.

 

 

 

 

 

13  As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

 

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

 

Max Planck

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

 

¹⁴ See Dawkins: I'm a cultural Christian

 

¹⁵ See the Irrational Atheist

 

 

¹⁶ See pages 358 – 366, where Dawkins argues that teaching children the traditional Christian religion is worse than molesting them.

 

¹⁷ He also advocates that the state should intervene and prevent parents from bringing up their children in their religion. He quotes approvingly from Nicholas Humphrey: “In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible…”(page 367).

 

¹⁸ In classical Christian theism, God is simple, not composite, not made up of thing upon thing. In other words, the characteristics of God are not parts of God that together make God what he is. Because God is simple, his properties are identical with himself so, for example, God does not have goodness, but simply is goodness.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_simplicity). The doctrine of divine simplicity is associated with the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, whereby God is understood as radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical (http://www.theopedia.com/Simplicity_of_God).

 

¹⁹ “The fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken” (TGD p. 117). But this argument just does not cut it. Jesus said that He was the Christ, the Son of God, making Himself equal to God. That cannot be just an honest mistake. If were to go around and tell everyone that I was God, people would not just think I was honestly mistaken. People would think I was either nuts or a charlatan. To top it off, in the strictly monotheistic culture of the Jews in the first century, this was blasphemy. According to the New Testament, this is why Jesus was crucified. So a person who insists that he is God despite tremendous hostility from other, which resulted in His death, could not have been just mistaken. You can be honestly mistaken about whether there is or is not a God. But you cannot be honestly mistaken on whether you are God.

 

²⁰ Dawkins argues that Craig is nobody, so why should he debate him? See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8511931/Richard-Dawkins-accused-of-cowardice-for-refusing-to-debate-existence-of-God.html. He also rationalized his refusal to debate Craig by saying that Craig is a Creationist, and he does not debate Creationists. But Dr. Craig does not use Creationism in his argument for the Christian faith. He rejects evolution on scientific grounds, not because of his faith. In fact. Craig asserts that if evolution is true the conditions would have to be so finely-tuned for evolution to occur that evolution would also be evidence for the existence of God. It does look that Dawkins is running scared. After dropping the bombshell that only those deficient in critical thinking believe in God, he refuses to debate the premier defender of the Christian faith. Dr Craig is considered a formidable debater even among atheists. See Common Sense Atheism.  For an analysis of Dawkins’ reason for not debating Craig, go to http://www.bethinking.org/what-is-apologetics/dawkins-refuses-god-debate-with-william-lane-craig.htm.

 

 

He are links of other debates that Dr Craig has had with the premier proponents of atheism:

Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig & Gerd Ludemann.

 

The Great Debate: Atheism vs. Christianity. William Lane Craig vs. Frank Zindler

 

William Lane Craig vs. Sam Huff: Does Good Come From God?

 

 

 

For debates by Craig (and D’Souza along with others) in MP3 format, go to http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/audio.htm#WilliamLaneCraig

 

 

²¹ The best book on historical evidence of Mary’s appearance that I found is God Sent: A History of Accredited Apparitions of Mary by Roy Abraham Varghese.

 

²¹ See Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? True, Dawkins did not say that a serious case can be made for a Christian God, only a deistic God. But Deism is the belief in a God who created the universe, but not a God that has intervened since. It is God without the miracles in the Bible. But Christians share much in common with the Deist, especially the cosmological argument, much that Dawkins argued in his book as being absurd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix A

 

If you have suffered all the way through my amateurish attempts to Christian (and sometimes specifically Catholic) apologetics, here is a treat! Here is an article by William Craig refuting Dawkins. I think Craig is the best defender of the Christian faith today. I think once you read this, I think you will understand why Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him.

 

 

You can find this on:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=popular_articles_main

 

Dawkins' Delusion

William Lane Craig

 

 

From Contending with Christianity's Critics, pp. 2-5. Ed. Paul Copan and Wm. L. Craig. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman. Used by permission.

 

Richard Dawkins has emerged as the enfant terrible of the movement known as the New Atheism. His best-selling book The God Delusion has become the literary centerpiece of that movement. In it Dawkins aims to show that belief in God is a delusion, that is to say, "a false belief or impression," or worse, "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence."1 On pages 157-8 of his book, Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." Note it well. If this argument fails, then Dawkins' book is hollow at its core. And, in fact, the argument is embarrassingly weak.

It goes as follows:

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 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 Darwinian 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.

This argument is jarring because the atheistic conclusion that "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist" seems to come suddenly out of left field. You don't need to be a philosopher to realize that that conclusion doesn't follow from the six previous statements.

Indeed, if we take these six statements as premises of an argument intended to logically imply the conclusion "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist," then the argument is patently invalid. No logical rules of inference would permit you to draw this conclusion from the six premises.

A more charitable interpretation would be to take these six statements, not as premises, but as summary statements of six steps in Dawkins' cumulative argument for his conclusion that God does not exist. But even on this charitable construal, the conclusion "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist" simply doesn't follow from these six steps, even if we concede that each of them is true and justified. The only delusion demonstrated here is Dawkins' conviction that this is "a very serious argument against God's existence."2

So what does follow from the six steps of Dawkins' argument? At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism.

So Dawkins' argument for atheism is a failure even if we concede, for the sake of argument, all its steps. But, in fact, several of these steps are plausibly false in any case. Take just step (3), for example. Dawkins' claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: Who designed the designer?

This objection is flawed on at least two counts.

First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there.

In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.

Second, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe, the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations—for example, how simplicity is to be weighted in comparison with other criteria like explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth. If a less simple hypothesis exceeds its rivals in explanatory scope and power, for example, then it may well be the preferred explanation, despite the sacrifice in simplicity.

But leave those questions aside. Dawkins' fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is an entity comparable in complexity to the universe. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable physical quantities and constants (mentioned in the fifth step of Dawkins' argument),3 a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas (it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus), but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind's ideas, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity.4 Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that's worth.

Other steps in Dawkins' argument are also problematic; but I think enough has been said to show that his argument does nothing to undermine a design inference based on the universe's complexity, not to speak of its serving as a justification of atheism.

Several years ago my atheist colleague Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking's argument against God in A Brief History of Time as "the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought."5 With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins' accession to the throne.

 

Endnotes

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

2 Ibid., 157. Indeed, he fancies himself to have offered a "devastating" and "unrebuttable refutation" of God's existence.

3 Otherwise known as the fine-tuning of the universe for life. The optimism expressed in step (6) of Dawkins' argument with respect to finding a physical explanation for the cosmic fine-tuning is really quite baseless and represents little more than the faith of a naturalist. For discussion of the design argument from the fine-tuning of nature's constants and quantities, see William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 157-79.

4 His confusion is evident when he complains, "A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. . . . Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God's giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being—and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies" (God Delusion, 149). This conflates God with what God is thinking about. To say that God, as an immaterial entity, is extraordinarily simple is not to endorse Aquinas' doctrine that God is logically simple (rejected by Dawkins on 150). God may have diverse properties without having the sort of complexity Dawkins is talking about, namely "heterogeneity of parts" (ibid., 150).

5 Quentin Smith, "The Wave Function of a Godless Universe," in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 322.