Dr on Dawkins

Comments by Dr Frank Stootman on the book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Some minor edits.

[Frank is the host of the Sydney L'Abri Fellowship resource centre, and lectures at Western Sydney University in computer science. His PhD is in physics.]

In his latest best seller, Richard Dawkins is passionately flying the flag of atheist pride, moving beyond naturalistic science into an attack on all religion and particularly Christianity. He sees himself as the spokesperson to rid the world of the scourge that religion has brought to humanity and in his passion to prove his point there is a distinct lack of scholarly balance. To Dawkins, evolutionary development to intelligence is a process in the universe, therefore any God needs to come after, not before. Dawkins discounts revelation from a creator God and thus the idea of self is ultimately a biochemical illusion.

From a Christian perspective the revelation form God resonates so deeply with our humanity. God answers our real human wonder at the universe, making sense of the symmetries, categories and logical laws. The revelation from God addresses our real desire for meaning and values, and deals with our fundamental problem of sin. We learn from his non-exhaustive revelation that God has a solution, in Jesus, to re-establish relationship with himself.

Organised religions and their less than ideal cultural and historical outworkings cause in Dawkins deep disillusionment. I share his frustration at the pain caused by so many believers who act contrary to the Bible. Sin, however, is the common factor in the promotion of self in humankind, whether expressed in religion or atheism. Evolution which requires self-centredness, cannot provide a basis for morality. Only something outside of ourselves: God, satisfies our need for final justice. While followers may be imperfect we should evaluate any ideology, whether religious or atheistic, by examining its founder. Unlike Mohammed or Marx, Jesus cannot be discounted at any level of his being.

Dawkins cannot accept the miraculous in the record of biblical history. Physics without metaphysics precludes such things (1). However, I am prepared to look more carefully at these stories and no not set them aside as fiction even if they seem at odds with the normal form of the universe (2). I live in an open universe as Dr Francis Schaeffer would say, in which God is sovereign and able to do things outside of my normal experience (3).
(copyright not asserted, April 2007)

Comments
1. Physics, like all enquiry of the creation, proceeds on the basis of a metaphysics, indeed, on the basis of axiomatic beliefs. As it happens, Dawkins metaphysics is the fatally flawed positivism admixed with dogmatic naturalism. Together these fail as Frank has sketched, and as further explored in reviews of Dawkins' book by Alvin Plantinga (check the Christianity Today website) and Philip Bell (check the Creationontheweb.org website)
2. Interestingly miracles are in radical contradiction of the fallen universe, they demonstrate God’s being external to the flow of created causality. Similarly, his action to create must be, by definition, external to this flow.
3. Our experience is very limited, of course, and often leads to the use of inductive reasoning. This is hopeless to arrive at real understanding (as Locke says). A lot of evolutionary boosting is pure induction, and induction on the basis of a prior commitment to naturalism, with a failure to meet the challenge of contradicting results except by special pleading. I like Popper's challenge to inductivism with the testing of hypothesis by attempts to fail them.