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The New Atheists are know for publicly and loudly scoffing at people of faith. Richard Dawkins famously urged his followers to mock people of faith. The Dawkins of the world champion themselves as bastions of logic who dispel the blind faith of the masses.

Dawkins is sweeping in his statements. He comes off brash, bold and supremely confident in his logic, but his definition of faith is a strawman and is loaded with assumptions. He glosses over and ignores evidence – even evidence right in front of him – to rush to the conclusions he “preaches” with an air of affected omniscience. This the conclusion I reach as I consider his first debate with John Lennox.

I find that Dawkins is guilty of the very same charge he levels against Christians and other people of faith. He has his own faith which he holds “in the teeth of the evidence”, as Dawkins, himself says of Christians. Let me explain.

First, Dawkins’ definition of faith is loaded. His definition may be a good fit the militant extremist who doesn’t care a whit about facts, but it is front-loaded with assumptions.

Dawkins defines faith as “belief without evidence” or belief “in the teeth of the evidence” (holding stubbornly onto faith despite evidence to the contrary). Dawkins presumes that all faith is what we might call blind faith; that faith by definition is belief without evidence.

Ironically, Dawkins (who is not omniscient by the way) seems not to have a clue that his ultimate suppositions are also a product of faith. No human being knows all there is to know, and so we don’t know what we don’t know – even the brightest among us. Because of this limitation that all finite beings such as humans possess, we must take our most basic assumptions on faith – meaning that we can’t prove them to any degree of certainty, so we must trust them without all the evidence (and maybe even in the teeth of the evidence sometimes).

The world is often different than we assume. We once thought the Earth is flat, and then we thought planets revolve around the Earth. Until the 20th Century, we thought the universe is past eternal, and until quite recently we didn’t realize that junk DNA has function. Most of the universe we can see (95% of it!) consists of dark matter and dark energy that remains a mystery to us, and we don’t even know what we can’t see.

Dawkins fails to appreciate that we all have faith in our fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality – even when those assumptions are informed by knowledge, logic, and reason. We all must have faith to trust our conclusions because we don’t know what we don’t know.

Christian faith that is based on evidence, logic, and reason is no exception. In fact, the Judeo-Christian scriptures was fertile ground for the advancement of science because they emphasize evidence and reason. (For instance, the exhortation of the Prophet, Isaiah: “Come let us reason together.” Isaiah 1:18)

Dawkins’ flawed logic was called out in a debate with John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, embedded as the end of this article. Lennox put forth a different definition of faith: putting trust in conclusions that are reached based on evidence. Lennox is exemplary on that point. himself.

Of course, Dawkins does this exact same thing: he puts trust in the conclusions that he has reached that this natural world is all there is, that no super natural reality exists and no God exists. But, let’s see how hard we can push Dawkins’ definition of faith for now and the assumption that he and other Darwinists do not have such blind faith.

Stephen Meyer wrote a book called Darwin’s Doubt. The book is a play on Darwin’s admitted doubt about his own “inward convictions”. According to Darwin, his “inward conviction” suggested to him “that the Universe is not the result of chance” and has purpose.[i]

This is not the doubt to which Stephen Meyer refers, however. Meyer turns Darwin’s doubt about his inward conviction on its head.

The book, Darwin’s Doubt, explores modern knowledge of the Cambrian Explosion, which Darwin conceded was a potential problem for his theory of evolution. The Cambrian Explosion refers to the period of time in which most of the major phyla appeared in the fossil record “suddenly”, over a relatively short time span. That’s why it’s called an “explosion”.

The theory of evolution depends on gradual mutations and changes caused by natural selection over a very long period of time. The Cambrian Explosion poses an obvious problem for evolution because most of the major phyla appeared in the fossil record “suddenly” during the Cambrian Period without evident precursors leading up to them.

Where is the evolution? Darwin expressed concern about the the evidence of the apparent “explosion” of new life forms in the Cambrian era, but he was confidence that subsequent discoveries would reveal the evolutionary forms that led to the myriad life-forms evident in the Cambrian time period.

Stephen Meyer begins his book by updating the fossil finds since Darwin’s time. Far from revealing the evolutionary precursors predating the Cambrian period, the fossil finds from Darwin’s time to the present time have accentuated the problem. The modern discoveries do not bridge the gap that Darwin predicted would be closed by future finds.

The book title cleverly suggests that Darwin doubted the wrong thing. History suggests that Darwin should have had more doubt in his belief that future fossil finds would explain the lack of precursor life forms in the phyla that appear in the Cambrian strata. People like Dawkins express the same confidence today that future discoveries will increasingly squeeze out any reason to believe in a transcendent creator. (How do they know that?)

Though Darwin had confidence that future discoveries would vindicate his evolutionary theory from the apparent contraindicator of the Cambrian explosion, Darwin did have doubts. He didn’t have doubts about evolutionary; rather, he had doubts about metaphysical matters. I will explain the significance of those doubts, and the irony of the things Darwin took for granted, and then I will bring this article back to the present to conclude my thoughts on Richard Dawkins.

Darwin explained in a letter to his colleague, William Graham, that he could not trust his “inward conviction” because “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”. Then, Darwin adds the rhetorical question: “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”[ii]

Some people have called this expression of doubt, “Darwin’s blind spot”.[iii] Darwin’s blind spot arises from the fact that, while he doubted his inward convictions, he implicitly trusted his intellectual capacities. He implicitly trusted his capacity to observe, analyze and reason to the conclusion that life evolved slowly over a very long period of time by “natural selection” operating on random mutations, but he doubted his inward conviction that life is not random, and life has purpose.

Darwin ultimately placed all his trust (faith) in his intellect, and he abandoned his inward convictions that he struggled with earlier in his life (to which he alluded in his letter). He placed his trust (faith) increasingly in the theory of evolution, which was the product of his own observation and his capacity to analyze and reason, and he discounted and dismissed everything else.

To put it more bluntly, Darwin’s blind spot was a willingness to trust (put faith in) his ability to reason in spite of the fact that his intellect also derived from lower life-forms. He didn’t trust his convictions, but he trusted his reasoning ability. His blind spot is that he didn’t ask himself: “Would any one trust in the reasoning of a monkey’s mind, if there is any reasoning in a monkey’s mind?”

Perhaps we should not be talking about Darwin’s doubt. We should be talking about Darwin’s faith, because he put his faith implicitly, even blindly, in his own logic and ability to reason. This, of course, brings us back to Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins also puts his faith implicitly in his own ability to reason. He may have doubt about God, doubt about religious faith, doubt about anything metaphysical at all, but Dawkins and the New Atheists (like Darwin) have implicit faith in the human capacity to reason. (More specifically, they have faith in their own capacities to reason.)

The more I listen to Dawkins, however, it isn’t that he has doubt about the existence of God. Though he might protest to the contrary, he appears to have supreme faith in his supposition that God doesn’t exist. So much, that he scoffs at faith in God and has urged other to mock believers in God.

Dawkins is woefully wrong, of course, that all faith is blind. Very few people believe in God or anything else without any evidence, but his definition of faith as belief in the teeth of the evidence has some application here to the theory of evolution.

The problem that Darwin acknowledged, the sudden appearance of life forms in the Cambrian Period, has not been solved by future discoveries, which was his confident assertion. The problem has only become accentuated over time.

Today, there is still no fossil record of any explanatory scope to suggest that the Cambrian Explosion is a product of the evolutionary process. Yet, Neo-Darwinists continue to trust that Evolution explains all the phyla that appear in the Cambrian explosion without any physical evidence of evolutionary progress up to that point.

Scientists have proposed evolution at the atomic (unseen) level to explain the lack of physical evidence. They could be right, but this adherence to the evolutionary paradigm despite a lack of evidence that we can see might also be characterized as “faith in the teeth of the evidence”.

I am not saying we have no evidence of evolution, though we need to be more exact in our definition of evolution. There seems to be little doubt about micro-evolution. We have some evidence of macro-evolution, but we have virtually no evidence of any significant degree of explanatory scope that explains the origin of life. We must take that on faith, at this point, and there are some gaping holes in the evidence for macro-evolution (the Cambrian Explosion being one of them).

Dawkins and others call evolution fact, scoffing at any other notion, yet evolution is far from explained the origin of life, and the traditional evolutionary paradigm is increasingly being questioned in the scientific literature. That doesn’t mean that most scientists are gravitating toward supernatural explanations, but traditional evolution theory isn’t currently cutting it. Too many gaps persist, and many people are looking for a new “synthesis” to rework the theory.

This, too, is a kind of faith. There is a faith in the consensus of the scientific community that natural explanations will be found, that evolutionary theory will always be vindicated, that it’s only a matter of time before we see how evolution alone led to the origin of life on this planet. People like Dawkins trust that this is true, so much so that they scoff at any other notion.

If this isn’t faith – believing in a proposition without ultimate proof for that proposition – I am not sure what is.

No one would say that Dawkins has faith in evolution without any evidence. Darwin has evidence, as do the Neo-Darwinists, and they put their faith in that evidence even where that evidence has gaps and fails to explain with corroborating evidence such things as the origin of life.

The same must be said of men of faith, like John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician. He and many other people like him are no slouches when it comes to science, math, reason, and evidence. Their faith is informed by evidence, just like Dawkins and Darwin before him. The fact that they come to different conclusions based on virtually the same evidence does not mean that one group has faith and the other doesn’t.

What it does mean is that they all trust (have faith in) their conclusions. We all do. In fact, we can’t do anything other than have faith in our human conclusions because humans are not all-knowing. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we have to trust our fundamental assumptions that we can’t prove on faith.

Though Dawkins and others like him would not call their confidence faith, it’s a matter of semantics. They do have faith (trust) in their ultimate conclusions. They trust (have faith) in their own ability to reason. They trust (have faith) in the human intellect – even though the human intellect descends from a monkey’s mind (to give the evolutionary paradigm its full due).

More to the point, perhaps, people like Dawkins have put their faith in themselves and their own ability to think, rather than put their faith in God. This is the faith of New Atheism. It is no less faith than belief in the God of the Bible. For many reasons I don’t have space to get into here, Christian faith provides us more reason for confidence in our own minds and ability to reason, but I can sum it up in the statement that we don’t have to trust in the mere reasoning of a monkey’s mind!

 

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[i] Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13230,” accessed on 10 September 2017, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-13230

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] See for instance, Darwin’s Blind Spot, by Gerard M. Verschuuren published online at www.strangenotions.com