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New Atheist icon and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins not too long ago requested a stunning query on X. Referring to his most well-known e-book printed 18 years in the past, Dawkins wrote: “What do spiritual folks suppose I acquired fallacious in The God Delusion?”
The replies have been insightful. One particular person identified that Dawkins trusted methodological naturalism, the assumption that solely materials explanations are legitimate, however which is, itself, a perception that may’t be confirmed by materials explanations. Another identified: “[You] spent the vast majority of the e-book making an ethical case in opposition to faith; [but] you state in different works that there is not goal morality.”
In truth, Dawkins’ “ethical case in opposition to faith” is central to The God Delusion. He wrote:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably essentially the most disagreeable character in all fiction: jealous and happy with it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a … capriciously malevolent bully.
These are unusual phrases from a person who wrote elsewhere that:
The universe that we observe has exactly the properties we must always anticipate if there may be, at backside, no design, no objective, no evil, no good, nothing however pitiless indifference.
So, which is it? Is the God of the Bible not value believing in as a result of He’s evil, or is evil an phantasm? Dawkins appears to have wished to have his ethical indignation and eat it too.
Still, a extra basic mistake in his bestselling e-book is one which just about each distinguished New Atheist copied. As Susannah Roberts identified in her reply to Dawkins, the primary factor he acquired fallacious was the that means of the phrase “God.” Dawkins wrote as if God is only a larger and stronger human, a being like the remainder of us who merely occurs to be very highly effective. The god he described was just like the polytheistic gods worshipped by the Greeks, Norse, and Egyptians. Dawkins confirmed this was his view in a well-known line from the e-book: “We are all atheists about a lot of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us simply go one god additional.”
Years in the past, I met a lady on a airplane who challenged me to show that God exists. I requested, “Well, what do you imply by ‘God?'”
She replied, “A grumpy previous man with a beard within the sky who cannot wait so that you can do one thing fallacious so he can strike you with a lightning bolt.”
“I do not imagine in that god, both,” I stated. Her definition of God was way more like Zeus than the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth and Father of Jesus Christ.
The God of Scripture is not a much bigger and stronger human, a petty and egocentric being just like the pagan gods, nor even like a extremely highly effective angel. God is a class by Himself. He is the bottom of being, the “unmoved mover,” timeless, spaceless, omniscient, unchangeable, not topic to passions or tantrums, and never absolutely describable with human language. His character shouldn’t be answerable to the next ethical regulation, however is itself the supply of that ethical regulation. He is, as James put it, “the Father of lights, with whom there is no such thing as a variation or shadow as a consequence of change,” and as Daniel wrote, “none can keep his hand or say to him, ‘What have you ever completed?'”
When Dawkins condemned God as a “petty, unjust, unforgiving” bully, he was suggesting God would not reside as much as an ethical commonplace of equity and mercy. But the place did he get that commonplace to start with, if not from God?
As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity:
[T]here’s a issue about disagreeing with God. He is the supply from which all of your reasoning energy comes: you might not be proper and He fallacious any greater than a stream can rise larger than its personal supply. When you might be arguing in opposition to Him you might be arguing in opposition to the very energy that makes you capable of argue in any respect: it’s like slicing off the department you might be sitting on.
It’s refreshing and inspiring to see Richard Dawkins ask a query like this, with this a lot obvious humility. After all, within the final yr or so, he has referred to as himself a “cultural Christian,” rebuked unscientific gender ideology, admitted he actually likes Christmas carols, and confirmed real curiosity about why his buddy and former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali transformed to Christianity. Perhaps, God prepared, Dawkins, is on the verge of the same change. We can and will pray as a lot.
Still, it is value noting that the straw-man god that Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists spent twenty years denying and denouncing appears nothing just like the God of the Christian worldview. Atheist authors may and will notice this, however like thinker Thomas Nagle famously admitted, a significant motivation is the hope that there is no such thing as a God. So a lot so, actually, that Nagle additionally admitted how unsettling it was that a few of the most well-informed and clever folks he knew believed in God.
For each atheists and believers, it is vital to ensure our understanding of God is right. Thank God for these prepared to right their unhealthy theology.
Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
