Dawkins, Dennett, and Darwin

by David A. Noebel

          With the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, the atheists are putting their collective foot down, saying “Enough is enough.” Enough of this foolish talk about God! Enough about believing in the existence of God. God is a myth, a figment of the imagination that only the ignorant and foolish believe, and it’s about time that God-believers grow up and smell the coffee. 

And because the very idea of God is itself contemptible, to conceal one’s contempt is dishonest. Dawkins and Dennett do not conceal their contempt for God, Christianity, or for that matter all religions except the religion of Secular Humanism. Both would undoubtedly proudly display the Darwinian fish on their bumpers.

Indeed, Dawkins and Dennett remind me of V.I. Lenin, who insists that “every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness—vileness of the most dangerous kind” (1913 letter to Maxim Gorky). Lenin also exhorts that “we must combat religion, that is the ABC of all materialism.” Lenin advised his followers to distribute the atheistic literature of the French Encyclopaedists.  They did, and the results can be read in Harvard University’s publication The Black Book of Communism.  Every reader toying with atheism or thinking that Dawkins and Dennett are clever and smart needs to read this 850-page book before proceeding to the abyss. 

The fact that over 90 percent of Americans claim some belief in God simply staggers Dawkins and Dennett, who describe this state of affairs as “the surrounding gloom of America’s obsession with religion.” They wonder how so many can be so ignorant, especially when they are products of an atheistically saturated educational system, when 94 percent of the hierarchy of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists, and when even mentioning God or His creation is disallowed in professional scientific journals. As a matter of fact, when one professional journal (related to the Smithsonian) challenged Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the neo-Darwinian mutations spoof the whole roof fell in and the editor (with two PhDs in science) was dismissed posthaste. This is an example of atheistic liberalism at its darkest hour, shattering the shibboleth of tolerance, academic freedom, and fair-mindedness once and for all.

            Both Dawkins and Dennett insist that Darwin’s theory of natural selection makes belief in God unnecessary, irrelevant, and perhaps dangerous although Dennett does admit there is some kind of relationship between religion and health (it seems that those who practice religion are healthier than those who don’t). 

Both see Darwinism as a firm foundation for morality. However, Dennett seems troubled knowing that Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin (to say nothing of Hitler) believed essentially what he believes regarding God and Darwin, and they represent the moral monsters of the twentieth century.

            While those who claim belief in God have indeed committed some horrendous acts (the St. Bartholomew massacre, for example) those who shout their disbelief in God have committed literally millions more. Jung Chang and her husband, in a recent book on Mao, estimate his tortures and killings at 70 million. And Mao believed in Darwin’s evolution and Dawkins’ atheism. Most Americans have forgotten that after the 1949 Communist takeover of China, Darwinism preceded Marx and Lenin in the classroom. Most have forgotten that those Americans in the U.S. State Department, Treasury Department, Agricultural Department, and the White House itself who betrayed China into the hands of Mao were also steeped in atheism and evolution.

            Ann Coulter wonders why throughout her 12 years of grade school and high school, 4 years of college (Cornell University), and three years of law school (University of Michigan) she never learned about the relationship between Darwin and Hitler. Unfortunately, we won’t learn of that relationship from the works of Dawkins and Dennett either since it may be too embarrassing for these intellectual elites to contemplate. 

We can hope that the ethical argument (whether it is necessary to believe in God to be moral) may well sound the death rattle for atheism and Darwinism. In the February/March 2006 issue of Free Inquiry magazine, a humanist publication to which Dawkins contributes, two writers (Mario Bunge and Stuart Jordan) argue that the solution to the world’s multitude of problems is an “atheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, evolutionary worldview of science.”  This is Dawkins’ and Dennett’s position as well.

            But in this same issue of Free Inquiry Bill Cooke reviews Jung Chang’s work on Mao Zedong in an article entitled “The Madness of Mao.” What Cooke, Dawkins, and Dennett don’t tell their readers, however, is that Mao (responsible for the slaughter of 70 million human beings) put into practice everything that atheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, evolutionistic science represents! Mao was an atheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, evolutionistic practicing Marxist/Leninist.

            Let’s admit that the twentieth century was a century of putting into practice “atheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, evolutionistic science.” The Communist and Nazi movements operated with such “science” at the top of their “to do” lists. The “science” of eugenics, for example, had connections with humanism (Margaret Sanger), Nazism (Rudin), and Communism (Lewontin).  Indeed, the Journal of Eugenics became the Journal of Social Biology (see Pamela R. Winnick, A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion and Edwin Black’s War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create A Master Race).

            What Dawkins, Dennett, and Secular Humanists in general will not admit publicly is that the original scientific method was actually founded upon a Christian worldview, not an atheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, evolutionistic worldview. Sir Francis Bacon possessed a Christian worldview, not an atheistic worldview. None of the early founding fathers of the sciences was an atheist; all believed that the heavens declared the glory of God.

            Rather than portraying believers in God as the ignorant of the world, living beyond the black stump, we should instead acknowledge that the very foundations of science reflect the Christian worldview and that the scientific method is not a weapon of mass destruction against the very existence of God (see Stanley L. Jaki’s works on Pierre Duhem for some enlightenment on the subject). 

            What intrigues me is Richard Dawkins’ ridiculing Antony Flew for relinquishing his atheism for some type of deism (a form of theism).  Speaking before a body of students and faculty in Lynchburg, Virginia, (not Liberty University) Dawkins asserted that Flew was foolish to rest his deism on Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe’s work on the cell. Dawkins claims Flew would have been better served to rest his case for deism on the constants of nature (e.g., if the strength of gravity, the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere, the length of the rotation of the earth, the centrifugal force of planetary movement, the charge of an electron, or the mass of a proton were the tiniest bit different, none of us would be here to discuss atheism or evolution) rather than the teleology of the cell. In truth, both sources make a powerful case for the existence of God!

(Incidentally, Flew says his conversion to deism from atheism resulted from reason and science, not revelation or irrationalism. It must surely strike rational human beings as rather strange that as an atheist, Flew was considered one of the brightest stars in the universe, but once he left his atheism, he suddenly became one of the dwarf stars in a far off galaxy if not in some black hole.) 

            The love fest between Dawkins and Dennett, however, may be short lived because neither they nor atheism can explain the origin of life from inorganic matter, nor can they find the fossils before the Cambrian period to prove their evolutionary scenario—something Darwin believed essential to prove that his theory was true.

Nor can Dawkins and Dennett explain away the slaughter of the twentieth century (the bloodiest in all recorded human history—170 million deaths, according to R. J. Rummel). No Christian idea was responsible for this terrible slaughter. All the ideas responsible are found in the camp of Dawkins’ and Dennett’s atheism, naturalism, humanism, socialism, and evolutionism. No human being was shot, drowned, starved, quartered, hanged, poisoned, or otherwise dispatched in the twentieth century because of  the ideas of theism, supernaturalism, or creationism in the public square!

Who in Colorado can ever forget the names Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? They were responsible for the murders of 12 of their fellow students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. “You know what I love?” asked Harris. “Natural Selection. It’s the best thing that ever happened on this earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and ignorant organisms.”  On the day he killed his fellow students (deliberately seeking out Christians) and wounded 24 others, he was wearing a T-shirt bearing Darwin’s motto:  “Natural Selection.” Again, is there any rational human being who believes that if his T-shirt had said “Jesus Loves You” he would have committed such horrendous crimes? I don’t think so! 

Dennett admits at the end of his book that he is somewhat motivated by a political agenda. No doubt his political agenda mirrors the agenda of the culture of death—promoters of abortion, partial birth abortion, embryonic stem cell laboratory experimentation, death education, sex education, radical feminism, euthanasia, dead-end gay marriage, etc.

The testimony of Scripture, of course, speaks directly against Dawkins and Dennett: “The fool says in his heart, God does not exist” (Psalm 14: 1). “The wicked arrogantly thinks: there is no accountability, since God does not exist” (Psalm 10:4). “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the works of His hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge [power and wisdom]” (Psalm 19:1-2). “From the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what He has made” (Romans 1:20). “Where is the philosopher? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish?” (I Corinthians 1:20).   

Logic, too, counters Dawkins and Dennett, in that everything that comes into existence must have a sufficient cause. Even the skeptic David Hume says, “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” Only God fills this model of cause and effect. Belief in chance or accident is simply not logical. As Paul Amos Moody explains, “The more I study science the more I am impressed with the thought that this world and universe have a definite design—and a design suggests a designer.”

Not only do Scripture and logic defy atheism, the hard sciences also challenge it (especially physics and astronomy), forcing some to reconsider their atheistic premises. The existence of mathematical principles and order in the physical universe cannot be ignored. These mathematical representations turn out to be “elegant, surprisingly simple, and even beautiful.” E=MC2 is simple, yet beautiful.  Einstein notes, “The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

            May our loving, wise, powerful and patient God, who created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) and who laughs at the Dawkins, Dennetts and Darwins of the world (Psalm 2), convict all of us about the seriousness of these matters and help us be fit evangelists to the high and mighty as well as to the poor and miserable. Amen!

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Any reader interested in this type of discussion please read Noebel's new and revised edition of Understanding The Times in which he contrasts theism and atheism in more depth as he analyzes the Christian worldview and other atheistic worldviews.  With atheism on the march once again Christians can't be too well armed for the collision of ideas, beliefs, convictions and values. Click Here to order:

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By David Noebel Email: Noebel@Summit.org Click here for bio and archived articles