Challenging Richard Dawkins

Leading figures in “The New Atheism” movement include Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and especially Richard Dawkins. What makes this atheism “new” is its aggressive approach lambasting religion, and its ramped-up, provocative and attention-getting rhetoric (e.g., saying things like “religion poisons everything”). The best-known book coming from this circle of authors is, no doubt, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006).

In 2006 David Robertson, pastor of St. Peter’s Free Church, Dundee, Scotland, began posting comments about The God Delusion at the Dawkins website, going chapter by chapter and issuing numerous trench­ant critiques. In the end, Robertson compiled his posts in book form: The Dawkins Letters (2007). I want to note a few of Robertson’s key ideas, especially ways he challenges Dawkins and the New Atheism.

• -Dawkins’s naïve vision of peace on earth through atheism does not account for Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot: “The 20th century can truly be called the Failed Atheist Century” (p. 20).
• -“It takes a great deal of faith to be an atheist” (26).
• -Addressing Dawkins: “I am becoming more and more convinced that your position is primarily a philosophical and religious posi­tion, rather than one you are driven to by science” (33).
• -“It is your attack on a distorted and perverted ver­sion of Christian teaching about God which provides you with the most entertaining smokescreen for your lack of substantial argument on whether God exists in the first place or not” (48; see also 59).
• -A key objection of Dawkins against theism is: “Who designed the designer?” Robertson retorts, “‘Who made God?’ is a ques­tion I would expect from a six-year-old” (66). The Dawkins view is that, since all things evolve from more simple to more complex forms, and since any designer of the universe would have to be incredibly complex, God cannot exist (67). But this is to knock down a straw man: no Christian argues that the God of the uni­verse is somehow the product of evolutionary processes.
• -Robertson concedes, of course, that “some aspects of religion and some religious people have caused a great deal of harm in the world…” (79-80). But to lump all religions together with the sweeping verdict that they’re harmful and evil (like a “virus”) is to fail to look closely and make reasonable distinctions. “Take the question of Christianity and Islam. It suits you to lump them both together (including the extremists)” (85).
• -To Dawkins: “You define faith as believing something without evidence—a definition which is something you have just made up in your own head and has nothing to do with Christianity” (85).
• -Dawkins needs to learn basic principles of reading the Bible—like understanding a passage within its context, and distinguishing between what’s descriptive and prescriptive (103).
• -While Dawkins wants to portray Hitler as a Christian (after all, Hitler grew up Catholic, and Catholic and Lutheran churches were signifi­cant forces in German society), Hitler’s own writings and prac­tices locate him decidedly outside of the Christian faith (110-12).
• -Robertson takes Dawkins to task for the “extraordinary state­ment that ‘horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place’” (114—cf. p. 356 in The God Delusion). Such a view would justify the shocking conclusion that raising children in the Christian faith is inherently abusive, and that stance, in turn, would justify the state removing children from such homes (115). This is how reckless and chilling the Dawkins trajectory can be.
• -Robertson concludes with a lengthy bibliography and comments on all kinds of key players and writings in the atheism debate.

Let me also recommend Alister McGrath’s writings and lectures in response to Dawkins and other new atheists, including his book, The Dawkins Delusion (2010), and especially his June 27, 2011, lecture given at Regent College in Vancouver, “Why God Won’t Go Away: Reflections on the ‘New Atheism’” (download at regentaudio.com for free). Another thoughtful Christian who interacts with Dawkins and company is Oxford math professor John Lennox (his debates with various atheists are on YouTube—and see johnlennox.org).

[ originally posted at www.forthejourney.blogspot.com ]

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