Dawkins' religious fervor leaves scientific reason behind

Richard Dawkins is perhaps one of the most prolific writers about science in our time. Unfortunately, his writing and dialogue is distinctly flavored by anti-Christian rhetoric that makes his stance, his scientific reasoning questionable.

Richard Dawkins is perhaps one of the most prolific writers about science in our time. Unfortunately, his writing and dialogue is distinctly flavored by anti-Christian rhetoric that makes his stance, his scientific reasoning questionable.
It isn’t that he doesn’t provide plenty of scientific information in most of his books; it’s that his passion to attack Christians and others who may believe in things that contradict his beliefs is a step beyond rational. He says that God is separate from science and that those who believe in science and religion cannot be objective in how they view things like Darwin, the survival of the fittest, natural selection, etc.

If Dawkins has the answers, if his reasoning is more plausible, why not let them stand on their own? Why the appeal to ignoring God, or attempting to dissuade people from believing in a creator or personal God?
In a sense, he becomes the opposite of what he appeals to. He wants people to become rational beings, depending only on material, mathematical reality. Yet, anyone would be hard pressed to describe Richard Dawkins as completely dispassionate and objective when it comes to belief in God, evolution, Charles Darwin or God.
There are many examples of this. One is an interview that he did with Ben Stein for the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” released in 2008, where Stein asks Dawkins about his negative remarks about the God of the Bible, which is mostly what he refers to.
So Dawkins reads his God slam from his book, “The God Delusion”:
“The God of the old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it. A petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak. A vindictive unjust ethnic cleaner. A misogynistic, homophobic, racist infanticidal, genocidal philocidal pestilencial, malagonical, sadomasochistic, capriciosly malevolent bully.”
Stein, half in jest and half seriously, asks why Dawkins is so bent on characterizing the God of the Bible in a negative light:
Stein: So that’s what you think of God?”
Dawkins: Yes.
Stein: How about if people believe in a God of infinite lovingness and kindness and forgiveness and generosity, sort of like the modern day God? Why spoil it for them? Why not just let them have their fun and enjoy it?
What Stein is asking again is, why all the effort to diminish people’s belief in God?
“I believe it is a liberating thing to free yourself from primitive superstition,” he responds. “I think a lot of people, when they give up God feel a great sense of release and freedom.”
Stein then asks Dawkins how the heavens and the earth came to be.

Dawkins: By a very slow process. Nobody knows how it started. We know the kind of event it must have been; we know the sort of event that must have been to happen for the origin of life.
Stein: And what was that?
Dawkins: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
Stein: Right and how did that happen?
Dawkins: I’ve told you, I don’t know.
Stein: So you have no idea how it started.
Dawkins: No. Nor has anybody.
Stein: What do think the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some of the issues in genetics or Darwinian evolution?

Dawkins then offers the following explanation for how life began:
“It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time in some part of the universe a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that is seeded onto perhaps this planet. That is a possibility and an intriguing possibility. I suppose you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of our molecular biology, you might find a similar nature of some sort of designer. And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence itself would have had to come about by some explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously.”

One could describe this explanation as a theory or faith. Dawkins has trouble objectively looking at how tied he is to Darwinism and how his dislike of God affects his ability to be objective. He injects something that is very personal for him, Darwin, into something that should be very impartial and objective, the beginning of life on the planet earth or the universe.
Why? Perhaps because he is competing with scientific reality, and that Darwin’s theories do not explain how life began. Lacking this, he must create something, even if it out of a void; it turns out that it is an entertaining answer for Stein (who wisely let’s him go on).

The empirical question is whether or not he so attempts to discourage people to believe in God because he thinks that it dissuades people from believing in Darwinism.
Here are some quotes from readers of “The God Delusion,” that he includes in the paperback edition of the book.
“I’m a atheist, but I want to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language,” says one entry.
Dawkins then compares his tone with that of restaurant criticism in leading London newspapers. He could probably well compare his wording with the highly discouraging Simon Cowell, who regularly rips apart contestants like they are pieces of meat waiting to be skewered. But Cowell is on TV and talking about something that is subjective; Dawkins is writing a book about science.

There are many other examples in his book of how his view is skewed when it comes to considering God.
Dawkins likes “Imagine,” by John Lennon, a song that describes “a world with no religion.”
He adds to this:
“Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ’killers,’ no Northern Ireland ‘troubles,’ no ‘honor killings,’ no shin-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.”
He also laments that “and no religion too” is removed from some versions of Lennon’s song. The problem with this summation, again, is that it lacks balance. What about the Salvation Army (started in England) the majority of hospitals in the United States that were founded by Christians and Jews?
In general, he believes the popularity of Christianity in the U.S. is something of an anomaly, a phenomena or disease that is to be diagnosed, and given the right amount of reason, will fade when Americans come to their senses. He also claims that to be a truly great scientist, one must remove all traces of faith in God, religion, Christianity.

“Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply.”
The problem with this claim is that perhaps the greatest scientific experimenter the world has known, Michael Faraday, was a devout Christian.
Faraday is credited with making a discovery in 1821 that led to the development of the electric motor. Not long afterwards, he discovered the chemical benzene.
His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of the modern electric motor and making it viable for use in technology. Other discoveries include the magnetic field, electromagnetic induction, and diamagnetism and electrolysis.
Though he did not begin Royal Institution, a scientific organization in London, he is perhaps its most famous lecturer and participant, since he made many of his discoveries in the Mayfair section of the RI building.
In 1825, he began two traditions: Friday evening discourses and the Christmas lectures, which are lectures on science during Christmas time.
But Dawkins may be more interested in the fact that Faraday was an elder in the Sandemanian church and even delivered sermons to his congregation.
A brief description of Faraday’s character can be bound in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 43 (June 1993): 92-95, by Phillip Eichman, Ball State University.
“The Christian Character of Michael Faraday as Revealed in His Personal Life and Recorded Sermons.”

He trots out Albert Einstein as someone without belief in God. Ironically it is said that Einstein was so inspired by Faraday that he kept a photo of him on his desk.
Nonetheless, Einstein claimed that he did not believe in a personal God. He may have simply been behind on his New or Old Testament reading. Or he may have had trouble describing what he believes exactly, and as a brilliant mind, was required to be a spokesperson for organized religion. And he was not.
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

Dawkins uses a quote from Carl Sagan who uses the physical laws that govern the universe to attempt to describe God.
“. . . then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
It may not be emotionally satisfying. But it must be fun to live on planet earth with the law of gravity and not fly off into outer space. Seeking to describe or use the law of gravity, he sees nothing beyond it. But if not God, then what? Wouldn’t it make sense to pray to a God who created the law of gravity?

Dawkins also quotes the last paragraph in “The Origin of the Species.”
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally breathed (by the Creator) into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
The fact that in one of the editions, Darwin mentions breathed by the Creator, is telling. Also is the fact that Dawkins does not mention it in his book at all.

© 2012 Larry Ingram