---

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.

Continue reading →