New Atheist icon and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins recently asked a surprising query on X. Referring to his most famous book published 18 years ago, Dawkins wrote: “What do religious people think I got mistaken in The God Delusion?”
The replies were insightful. One person identified that Dawkins trusted methodological naturalism, the idea that only material explanations are valid, but which is, itself, a belief that cannot be proven by material explanations. Another identified: “[You] spent nearly all of the book making an ethical case against religion; [but] you state in other works that there’s not objective morality.”
In fact, Dawkins’ “moral case against religion” is central to The God Delusion. He wrote:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably essentially the most unpleasant 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 strange words from a person who wrote elsewhere that:
The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we must always expect if there’s, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
So, which is it? Is the God of the Bible not price believing in because He’s evil, or is evil an illusion? Dawkins seems to have desired to have his moral indignation and eat it too.
Still, a more fundamental mistake in his bestselling book is one which virtually every outstanding New Atheist copied. As Susannah Roberts identified in her reply to Dawkins, the essential thing he got mistaken was the meaning of the word “God.” Dawkins wrote as if God is just a much bigger and stronger human, a being like the remainder of us who merely happens to be very powerful. 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 famous line from the book: “We are all atheists about many of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Years ago, I met a lady on a plane who challenged me to prove that God exists. I asked, “Well, what do you mean by ‘God?'”
She replied, “A grumpy old man with a beard within the sky who cannot wait so that you can do something mistaken so he can strike you with a lightning bolt.”
“I don’t think in that god, either,” I said. Her definition of God was much 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 selfish being just like the pagan gods, nor even like a very powerful angel. God is a category by Himself. He is the bottom of being, the “unmoved mover,” timeless, spaceless, omniscient, unchangeable, not subject to passions or tantrums, and never fully describable with human language. His character just isn’t answerable to the next moral law, but is itself the source of that moral law. He is, as James put it, “the Father of lights, with whom there is no such thing as a variation or shadow because of change,” and as Daniel wrote, “none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you ever done?'”
When Dawkins condemned God as a “petty, unjust, unforgiving” bully, he was suggesting God doesn’t live as much as an ethical standard of fairness and mercy. But where did he get that standard to start with, if not from God?
As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity:
[T]here is an issue about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all of your reasoning power comes: you might not be right and He mistaken any greater than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you might be arguing against Him you might be arguing against the very power that makes you in a position to argue in any respect: it’s like cutting off the branch you might be sitting on.
It’s refreshing and inspiring to see Richard Dawkins ask an issue like this, with this much apparent humility. After all, within the last yr or so, he has called himself a “cultural Christian,” rebuked unscientific gender ideology, admitted he really likes Christmas carols, and showed real curiosity about why his friend and former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity. Perhaps, God willing, Dawkins, is on the verge of an identical change. We can and will pray as much.
Still, it’s price noting that the straw-man god that Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists spent twenty years denying and denouncing looks nothing just like the God of the Christian worldview. Atheist authors could and will realize this, but like philosopher Thomas Nagle famously admitted, a significant motivation is the hope that there is no such thing as a God. So much so, the truth is, that Nagle also admitted how unsettling it was that among the most well-informed and intelligent people he knew believed in God.
For each atheists and believers, it is important to make sure that our understanding of God is correct. Thank God for those willing to correct their bad theology.
Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
