20 years of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion"

In the Telegraph, Richard Dawkins tells us that it is 20 years today since his book "The God Delusion" was published.

The tenor of Dawkins' position then is the same as now, in this article. Those who believe that the ultimate explanation for reality is a personal, intelligent, living Creator, to whom we are morally responsible, are not so much wrong at an intellectual level (though he thinks it is), as in need of a pyschological diagnosis. We must try to understanding exactly how they got into their position. It's not that their arguments need refuting, because it's so irrational: we rather need to explain just what's wrong with them. 

Anyone reading this article to find out what Dawkins has learned about his opponents' arguments, and how to sharpen his own in response to those responses, will find that the answer is: essentially nothing. This is quite consistent with how Dawkins has always argued: his opponents are so obviously wrong, that it's absurd even to discuss with them. To lower oneself to the level where one reads things about what Christians actually believe and teach, would be like accepting the mythology of leprechauns. So why do people still believe in God, even now? His first answer:

Partly because it serves as a comfort blanket for those whose idea of logic takes the form, “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X must exist”.

i.e. A psychological diagnosis. C S Lewis called this fallacious way of doing things "Bulverism". (What is it based on?) His second?

Then there’s the Great Stalin Syllogism: “Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a horrible man. Therefore God exists.”

And swiftly onto the third:

Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859.

For Dawkins, no true Scotsman biologist does anything other than follow Darwin's philosophical reasonings from observation of natural selection to the conclusion that "there is no designer behind this system"; this fact cannot be modified by the observation that many biologists can and do precisely that, because their doing so ipso facto proves that they were not true biologists.

So, as in 2006, so in 2026: Richard Dawkins presents himself as the paradigm of the scientific method and Enlightenment reason. Given the opportunity to put his best case in a national newspaper, this is what he comes up with. Here is how he attacks the argument from design:

If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?

What are the premises of this argument? What logic is being used to move from them to the conclusion? It is some sort of moral reasoning about what a benevolent God could, or could not, happen in the animal kingdom, something which Dawkins finds to be contradicted by the co-existence of two animals in which there is a balanced contest between the predator (trying to kill the prey) and the prey (trying to escape). But Dawkins anticipates that some will not find his argument completely convincing:

I think it is sentences like the latter that earned my book’s reputation as “strident” and “shrill”. It even suffered, according to one critic (who presumably hadn’t actually read it) from a kind of Tourette’s syndrome. But it only sounds strident to ears trained to wrap religion in a uniquely privileged cocoon of immunity to criticism.

From  there, Dawkins goes on to quote Douglas Adams, as confirmation that religious ideas are uniquely privileged in being protected from scrutiny and criticism. The "God Delusion", then, was seen by Dawkins as a brave and novel thrust of scrutiny in an area where before, little debate had occurred. Philosophical and religious debate about reality barely existed up until 2002: claims about God got a free pass until the "New Atheist" authors came on the scene.

I take no pleasure in the fact that Dawkins has apparently made as little effort to locate, understand or respond to any criticism of his position in the intervening twenty years as he did in trying to understand the actual reasons why people believe in a loving and personal God up until 2002. As a Christian, I welcome serious scrutiny and interaction of my beliefs, because I believe that they can stand up to that scrutiny. Indeed, I think that Christianity explains reality better than competing explanations. I think that atheism has far larger problems in explaining the universe as we experience it than Christianity does. I am glad when someone takes Christian belief seriously enough to try to understand and interact with it.

Here is a specimen how much effort Dawkins and whoever he shared his pre-publication article with for feedback with have taken to understand Christian belief:

 “But Dawkins,” the critics cry. “If you’d only read your theology you’d know that God is not complex at all. It’s just Theology 101. God is profoundly simple.”

Ah yes, so simple that he’s capable of listening to a billion prayers simultaneously. So simple he has the bandwidth to judge each and every sin on its merits. So simple that “the very hairs of your head are numbered” and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. All this on top of knowing exactly how to fine-tune the laws and constants of physics to ensure our eventual existence. Ah me, theology. Is it actually a subject at all?

To avoid writing this, Dawkins only needed to ask Google or ChatGPT, "what does 'simple' mean in relation to Christian teaching about God's being"? He would then have learned that by the term, Christians (since the early centuries) did not mean what Dawkins assumes it to mean, that God is of limited capacities or potential, as opposed to being "complex", which would mean having advanced capacities (whether to hear many simultaneous prayers, or know how many hairs we have). Dawkins has invented this definition for himself, out of nothing. What it actually means is that, in distinction to created beings, God is not composed, not made up of, a composition of parts. He is not the result of putting together sub-components. That is what it means in theology to say that "God is simple". It means that he is of a different order of being to us. It is saying that it is a fundamental mistake to reason about God in terms of analogies in which God is essentially a bigger, more powerful version of us. His existence outside of and beyond time and matter, and his ability to create time and matter, is not predicated on him just possessing more power and intelligence than us; rather, in his being, he is all power and intelligence, being unlimited by the constraints of having to self-co-ordinate different faculties. i.e. It is saying something very relevant at the point in which Dawkins brings it into his argument - the point at which he posits the kind of God he rejects as if he were some sort of celestial very-strong-man, an object within the space-time continuum. It is precisely because God is (in the sense meant by the word in Christian teaching) simple that being able to hear and know all things at all times.

I do not recall ever hearing a Christian give an argument that resembled what Dawkins tries to refute:

I don’t understand the origin of the laws of physics, therefore God did it

In reality, many physicists who do understand the current state of their field do believe that the system they study does testify of an immense intelligence at many and various levels. Dawkins says that "Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote in The God Delusion". But the question remains now as then. Who did he write it for? If you already hold Christianity in such contempt that you don't think it necessary to not completely misrepresent it when talking about it, then this is merely the atheist form of "preaching to the choir". It will not be persuasive to anyone except those who think it beneath their contempt to consider an alternative. I am sorry for Richard Dawkins, that he has so little understanding even now, of the thing that he calls "tosh". But in the wider picture, I am glad that he is a spokesman for atheism. When he presents himself as an expert, and yet makes mistakes that would be impossible if you made even a beginner's efforts, he is helping to show us that atheism is, as the Bible says, irrational. 

Dawkins' article has several moral and aesthetic judgments. What standard are they based upon? In a universe that simply follows physical laws, what meaning do the deeds of the gazelle, Stalin or Hitler have? If Dawkins prefers Anglican Christianity to radical Islam, then is this based upon anything outside of Dawkins himself? If he believes it would be "better" to have X rather than Y, then how does that in any way rise to the level of a moral imperative? Moral imperatives cannot be within the capacity of either individual men or whole societies of men acting together to change: they are above us and binding on us, not subject to our creation, adjustment or abolition based upon our own preferences or individual or societal judgments. That is to say: Dawkins might respond to the question by saying "I prefer Anglican Christianity because it's less dangerous to the health and welfare of non-believers than radical Islam is". But the question remains: why is that the standard? If it's Dawkin's standard, or a whole continent's standard, then that does not mean it has any moral force. Or in other words, an "is" cannot be turned into an "ought". Radical Islam also has its moral and aesthetic judgments. You cannot refute it with the self-referential reasoning that "I know it's wrong because it's dangerous and I know it's dangerous because it's wrong". If radical Islam is actually right, then it is not dangerous, but good. That's what its adherents actually believe. Dawkins doesn't - but as I say, what is the imperative behind his preferences? 

Dawkins would likely respond "it must correspond with scientific reality". But science does not tell you if it is better that the gazelle escapes, or that he does not. There are no tests or measurements that you can take to resolve that question. It is outside of science's competence. It cannot tell you if Stalin's a-theology was morally good, or morally bad. If Dawkins makes that judgment either way, then he is relying upon things in the philosophical domain rather than the scientific. To admit this, though, would undermine Dawkins' whole approach. He would then have to study some philosophy and theology, in order to be able to interact with it, rather than just dismissing it out of hand.

As I say, Dawkins no more (judged by this article) understands the limits of his competence any more than  he did 20 years ago. May God have mercy upon him, and teach him some humility. May he stop being one of the blind who leads the blind into an aesthetic, moral, cultural and indeed ultimate ditch.

Sinful anger

Newly posted on the "resources" page of my website are the slides from a Bible study on the subject of sinful anger. What is it, where does it come from, and how do we get rid of it?

Free Don Carson e-books

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/?cat=carson&sort=newest&downloadable=true

19 Don Carson ebooks, for free. Don Carson was a proper scholar with a pastor's heart, taking seriously the duty to love God with one's mind (no short-cuts for easy popularity), whilst remembering and prioritising the fact that he was called to serve the people of God, the church of Christ. I look forward to benefiting from this collection.

The gospel story

In recent years, I've become more interested in understanding the structure of Biblical books, especially the gospels and Acts.

i.e. not just "what does it directly say", but "how is it structured, and why?". Why? Because that's also a part of what it says. The way we present something says something. As a trivial example, what is included and what is left out tells you something - evidently, the gospels focus upon Jesus' ministry, death and resurrection, with only minimal attention given to any other events of his life on earth before his ministry began after his birth.

I was reading the end of Matthew's gospel this morning, and reflecting on this. The gospel ends with the "Great Commission", which gives the church its marching orders. (The right way to understand the contents of the Great Commission is in terms of what is then recorded in Acts and the Epistles, by the way!).

One interesting factor is that at the end of the gospels, Jesus' Messiahship and kingdom are still "hidden", in terms of any open revelation to the world at large. He did not appear in the Sanhedrin, the Temple Courts, or anywhere else in Jerusalem to announce his assumption of all authority throughout the universe. He has conquered, and gained his kingdom: but it is for disciples. Without faith in Christ, one cannot enter it, or live within it. The question is whether we believe; and Matthew, like the other gospel writers, makes this question explicit in his narrative, including recording the initial unbelief of the apostles upon hearing the first reports of Christ's resurrection.

The story, too, is in an important sense unfinished, just as Acts is. It does not end with Christ's revelation to the world in glory, nor with the church having finished its mission. At the end of the gospel(s), the apostles have seen and believed - but now the whole question posed by the writing and reading of the gospel is "do you believe, and how will you respond if you do?" At the end of Acts, there's no glorious vindication for Paul - he's in prison - but, the story goes on, asking us "now that the gospel has come even to Rome, the empire's centre, how do you respond to it? It comes clothed in the garb of a prisoner, and there's no certainty offered as to the earthly outcomes - but you cannot ask to have all that resolved for you before you make your decision." In classic movies, the story-line's loose ends get tied up before the end.... but, in the gospels and Acts, we don't reach the end. That's still to come: Christ has not yet returned. We're still in the outworking of his resurrection and ascension. Following him and proclaiming him involve being disbelieved, suffering, and a call to faithfulness nevertheless, because Christ will be with us until the end of the age. Again - where will the story of Jesus go as you respond to what you've read? The story is unfinished, but every reader has a personal invitation to carry it on, to be a part of writing the next part of the story, and embracing what that might cost us as we interact with an unbelieving world, and a world that carries on with its own plans and power-plays.

"Why Evangelical Gender Discourse Is Unserious", and ongoing issues in Christian discourse

Here is a thought-provoking article on the Mere Orthodoxy website today: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-evangelical-gender-discourse-is-unserious

In my view, the problem which the author discusses is not limited to discourse around gender. The problems of double-standards and gate-keeping seem to be pervasive in online Christian discourse today.

This, of course, would "only" mean that Christian discourse online is infected with and following the ways of the world: we are reflecting trends in wider society. Issues are polarised, gate-keepers are appointed, required orthodoxy is quickly defined down to the smallest degree, and in a way that soon becomes divorced from historic orthodoxy, without people appearing to notice or be unduly troubled, and "heretics" are identified, tarred, brushed and feathered (or often, "cancelled").... but, as I say, with blatant double-standards in how that's being done.

What does this mean? To me, the best explanation I can find is that it is the subjugation of theology, brotherly discourse and practice to politics and the culture wars, and perhaps the desire to gain personal followers by positioning oneself as more faithful, more bold, less wobbly, than other potential rivals for people's attention. The driving dynamic often seems to be the feeling that allowing "our side"'s position to be anything other than crystal clear, down to the minutest details, without anything of significance up for debate, is dangerous.... dangerous to our chances of winning the culture war, building big-enough political alliances, and/or dangerous to our personal empire-building projects. And thus, areas of complexity must not be either acknowledged or discussed, because this risks handing "the other side" weapons with which to gain advantage over "our side". The energy expended in preventing this from happening, either by policing boundaries or dedication to not seeing any elephants in the room, betrays the role which politics has been given.

On the Internet in the 2020s, writing things like the above is likely to get responses along the lines of "so, what you're really saying is....", followed by some complete non-sequitor and flaming straw-man, which assumes the existence of only the two positions down those minute details; or the bold declaration that "anyone talking this way is on a slippery slope, and in a few years' time they'll be aggressively recruiting toddlers for sex changes and openly worshipping Baal", accompanied by examples of people who went on that journey.

This, though, ultimately represents a failure to love God with all our minds, a failure to love the people he made, and a failure to deal with the complexity of created-and-fallen reality. Some things, of course, are quite clear; the Bible has plenty of clear teaching about legitimate and illegitimate human sexual practices. It also has plenty of clear teaching about protecting the vulnerable and standing for them. In the above linked article, the author laments that it seems that increasingly the gate-keepers of discourse insist that we choose between these two options, and be treated as an enemy if we don't. But why? To what end? Subjugating the glory and honour of God to temporary political battles, or attempts to gain personal followers, is no part of genuine discipleship, but quite opposed to it.

There are some larger, "meta-issues" going on here, some of which are touched upon in this other article - https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-state-of-the-internet-2026 - which is framed around AI, but I don't want to focus on that aspect.  The particularly relevant larger issue is the place given to the Internet in modern life, which as a whole can't be avoided even if someone avoids many parts of it personally. The search and desire for instant feedback, the willingness to build primarily online communities and seek for virtual followers, the ease of switching between such communities compared to physical ones, the using of the state of things online as the basic framing for how we approach issues off-line, etc., are all part of this. It seems to me that we have to start asking ourselves at what point we don't simply try to "sit loose" to some of what's going on online, but be more active, deliberate and explicit in our resistance to it. Of course, in some things, that's been the case already for many years - to give an obvious example, men and women in churches need to have such things as online pornography directly and repeatedly addressed in teaching. But do we not also need to be warning more openly and directly about the unhelpful polarisation that online community has brought to us? Again, this is hardly a new observation, and it's been out there for many years. But, as per the above two articles, it does feel to me like there's some sort of tipping point around, and also a point at which many people are more open to considering a different way, and not just being passive about it. There is perhaps currently more openness, for example, to pointing out and agreeing what many online builders of personal platforms are doing, and that it's not good for us.

"Christian sexual ethics between the ages"

Good article here - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sexual-ethics-overlap-ages/ . It reminds us that the fact of living "in the overlap of the ages" has a bearing on all sorts of matters. Christianity is not an a-historical religion in which things are the same in every age. Christ's resurrection from the dead, yet his not yet having returned, has important effects upon the Christian doctrine of marriage.

 

Defining missions

https://confessional.org/mercy-ministry-is-not-missions

The above link is to an article in a genre I find a bit odd, because I find myself agreeing with all of it and none of it at the same time.

The summary given is a fair summary of the article, so I'll just discuss that, to keep things brief.

Mission work, as defined by Scripture, is the church sending ordained ministers to preach the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches through the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacraments, and prayer. While mercy ministries support gospel outreach, they must not be confused with missions itself, which addresses humanity’s deepest need through the proclamation of Christ.

"Mission work, as defined by Scripture". The point of the article is to distinguish between "missions" and "mercy ministry". The difficulty is that the work of the article is generally done by the article's own definitions. There isn't a definition of "mission work" in Scripture, unless we mean that the Scriptures define the ministry of preaching the gospel, making disciples and planting churches, and then we define *that* to be what we are choosing to call "missions work". The author of the article has followed a confusing line, of arguing both that the ministries of mercy and evangelism/church planting are in certain ways distinct, and also arguing, implicitly and without explaining what he's doing, that the English terminology of "mission/missions/missionary work" should be reserved only for evangelism/church planting. Church-planting is (he argues) disciple-making; mercy ministry is not, and the lexical cognates of "mission" belong only to the former.

Looked at this way, it is a strange article. What is it actually about? The English word-group of "missions" comes to us not directly from the New Testament, but from the Latin "mittere" (to send); and whilst sending (and equivalent Greek words) are in the New Testament, missiologists (at least, the ones I've read) don't build out a whole theory of missions based on the etymology. Christians have no particular theological commitment to requiring that the English words "mission, missions, missionary, etc." are used in one, and only one, particular way, much less that this one particular way must exclude "mercy ministries", and must only be tied to the set of concepts to do with evangelising and church-planting. Non-biblical vocabulary can be used in the ways that people see as best; and in practice, if we decide to use a particular word in a different way to other people generally, it'll make life confusing. The article says "The clearest passage that defines mission work is Matthew 28:19-20". If this is the definition of how we must use the English words "mission work", then fine - but as I say, it is unreasonable to insist that everybody else do the same, because Matthew 28 does tell us what the mandate which the church received is, but does not then require us to use a particular lexicography fetched from outside the passage for that in English.

In the article, the lines of clarification are very hard and fast. An example of a "missionary" is a church-planter; whereas examples of people in "mercy ministries" are teaching English in an Asian country (why simply that would be an act of "mercy" is not clarified), and digging wells and building houses in an African country. The impression given is that the twain shall not meet. Is the English teacher presenting the gospel - perhaps it is an English learning group openly advertised as Christian and including a Bible study? Why is the house-builder building houses when there are plenty of African house-builders? Presumably the well-digger is demonstrating Christ's love in action, as part of explaining who Christ is and how he came. Does this make him a "missionary" or a "mercy minister", or does he switch suddenly back-and-forth between the two roles, perhaps multiple times a day, depending upon the precise activity he is performing at any one point?

I agree with the author that if the church simply sends people to do "mercy ministry", meaning doing good to people in a way divorced from a witness to Jesus Christ, then it has indeed lost sight of the marching orders, the commission, which it received from the Saviour, and that would be spiritually disastrous. If the church is just doing the same as large secular charities (perhaps doing it slightly or significantly better), then this is not what Jesus told us to do. But, the article hasn't begun to engage with the challenges and opportunities of mission in much of the world. A simple binary of "is it mercy or evangelism?" does not cover plenty of real-world, flesh-and-blood Christian activity. Christians, rightly, speak today about "holistic" mission. This word can be abused, and can, like "mission", be given unhelpful definitions. But the word itself is an attempt to recognise that man is body and soul. Jesus' miracles were not simply proofs of spiritual power and his Messianic claims in general, but also enactments of personal divine compassion towards their recipients. And many Christians today are carrying out works because they understand that since "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us", so they too, in order to preach the gospel, must incarnate practical love as part of their Christian/gospel witness, and not deliver the message in verbal form only. It was part of the apostolic witness, Acts 10:38, that Jesus "went about doing good", and this same Jesus told us "let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:16).

From that point of view, a distinction between gospel-proclamation by word, and gospel-enactment by deed, can exist only as a technical, conceptual distinction, on paper. It helps us to understand what we are doing; but it is not a distinction between two different sets of activities, such that one set of Christians talks about Jesus Christ, and the other distinct set of Christians demonstrates the reality of Jesus Christ. Many missionaries should, and are, doing both, because the two can no more be separated in practice than Christ's manhood and deity can. Christ's manhood and deity are not the same thing, and the distinction is important theologically; but the actual Christ who saves us unifies them in a single person. In the same way, word-based missionary proclamation, and mercy ministry, may be separate conceptually, but are not actually separate in practice. And as such, though I agree with what the author seems to be aiming for, and the concerns he wants to guard against, as I understand them, I don't think the way he's gone about them, and the walls he's erected in doing so, ultimately help us.