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Divinity and Dawkins Debating Delusions
‘THE DAWKINS LETTERS’
 A minister, a Presbyterian minister to boot, with a broad Scottish accent isn’t supposed to take on Richard Dawkins’ ideas in a bookshop like Borders. But this is what happened on January 21st when David Robertson, from Dundee, spoke to an attentive audience of well over a hundred at the Cambridge branch of the shop.
It had such a good response partly of course because Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, has been a best seller but also because David with his non-religious appearance and style is able to give a credible rebuttal of Dawkins’ rather crude
polemic. 
David was there for a book signing of his own book, The Dawkins Letters, published by Focus, and he explained how originally he had written a critique of Dawkins for his church website which had found its way to Dawkins’ website and had then generated a huge response. This had made him expand his critique into a book. The delight of the evening was to see the confident, articulate and entertaining way David made his case. He answered the mostly critical questions and at the same time challenged us all, Christian and non-Christian alike, to think about the issues.
 If more Christian leaders got themselves intellectually up to speed and engaged with secular culture on its own terms and exposed it as David did, it would have a transformative effect. But that would require hard work and the conviction that demonstrating the truth of the gospel is the priority in a culture that justifies its unbelief on the grounds that the gospel is no longer credible.
You can hear David’s talk and Q & A on the Audio page of our website:
www.christianheritageuk.org.uk/Home/Audio Video
By Ian Cooper
AGREEING AND DISAGREEING WITH
DAWKINS Part 1
Ranald Macaulay
 Even humanists are having problems with Richard Dawkins. He rages against faith but fails to see that faith is no more or less than a set of overarching beliefs with which people make sense of the world’. (1) In this sense humanism is a ‘faith’ like any religion – as humanists themselves are pointing out. Clearly, too, his tirades against religion are excessive and ungracious. Humanists tend to feel as uncomfortable as believers when he appears on the box and their conclusion the same, ‘This man clearly has a chip on his shoulder’. Eminent fellow-scientists find it expedient to distance themselves from his philosophical and ethical meanderings because they realise that amongst philosophers the least said about Dawkins the better. (2) As Christians, therefore, we can allow ourselves a measure of relief as we lament Dawkins’ astronomical book sales. They have made him rich and done harm but a more discerning reaction is at hand even amongst those who share his naturalistic world-view. But we need to go further.
Photo by James UK
First we need to agree that much of his critique of religion is in fact correct. Scripture is if anything more outraged than Dawkins by religious irrationalism and wickedness - something even Christians are in danger of forgetting these days surrounded as we are by political correctness. So we readily echo Sam Harris’ expression: ‘religion poisons everything’. (3) Precisely! That’s just what the Bible says.
The second thing we need to do is to insist that Christianity is not a religion as commonly understood. Theoretically at least and unlike almost all other religious world-views, Christianity claims to be dealing with reality not fantasy. The very territory atheists like Dawkins lay claim to, namely the sphere of science or what we call ‘the real world’, the Bible asserts is declaring the glory of God from day to day.
 That religion is the universal problem of all human experience is the common assumption of the whole Bible. Genesis, for example, teaches that all human distress began with a seemingly attractive and plausible religious construct. What appeared to be a move towards a better reality proved to be a move towards un-reality. True religion in short was replaced by false religion. So from Genesis on we trace the history of how all religious myths and inventions emanated from this initial disaster and became increasingly perverse and harmful, even amongst the chosen people of God as they repeatedly turned to idolatry. Jesus shares this repudiation of religion. ‘I am the good shepherd’ he says. ‘All who came before me Photo by Matti Á [from the context clearly meaning religious teachers] are thieves and robbers’. Hence his fierce protest against the religious traditions of the Pharisees. He also says, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except by me’. To follow other religious leaders is to surrender oneself to the blind being led by the blind.
So we agree with Dawkins that religion does in fact stand at the centre of human depravity and distress, but for different reasons. He protests against religion because he is contemptuous of the supernatural. Only matter exists – period! To him religions are framed by delusion. The Christian views them as a deceipt rather than a delusion because they are false to reality. God’s nature and his attitude towards human beings - his mercy, his justice, his longsuffering – are not accurately represented by other religions. Only that view of reality which he himself has revealed, including his merciful intervention on our behalf in Jesus, adequately represents the way things actually are. So to accept the teaching and worldview of the Bible is to step closer to reality not away from it.
Revealed and directed by the living God the Bible accurately, though not exhaustively, describes the way things really are. It first tells us the truth about how reality is structured and then with equal accuracy explains our need for a divine saviour in history. The structure is true, the history and meaning are true. Human religion, by comparison, is none of these. Therefore it is destructive since human beings, ipso facto, have to live in reality. Only God’s revealed truth sets us free, Jesus says.
Paradoxically such agreement with Dawkins far from simplifying things produces greater and almost overwhelming difficulties for us. Making the assertion that Christianity is in fact ‘reality’ rather than ‘religion’ brings us into conflict not merely with Dawkins and the consensus of our own society, but with the cultural consensus which increasingly spans the globe. What now supplants the absolutes of 20th century tyranny - and ironically western relativism also - is the absolute toleration now demanded of all multi-cultural and multi-faith societies. To assert any single view of reality to be true is to subvert civilised society.
Only one thing compels us to disagree: that the Bible teaches it unequivocally. This brings us to the relevance of Christian heritage, for if Christianity is indeed related to reality its benefits should be identifiable in human history. We believe this to be the case, initially within the history of the Old and New testaments but also within Christian heritage subsequently, good and bad alike, and this we hope to clarify in the next newsletter. Dawkins is right to condemn religion, but he is wrong to overlook Christianity’s uniqueness and truth. He may and must be challenged philosophically and historically.
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(1) The New Humanist Nov/Dec 2007 p 16ff.
(2) ‘Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.’
Alvin Plantinga.
(3) The subtitle of Sam Harris’ book ‘Letter To A Christian Nation’
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Ian Cooper and Ranald Macaulay, 01/02/2008 |
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| | Matthew Taylor (Guest) | 02/02/2008, 16:30 | | Ranald,
Your article gives this age of systematic doubt the medicine it most needs, a steadfast devotion to truth. Nevertheless I think you have thrown out too lightly this word religion, and thus given Dawkins more deference than he deserves. If this is no more than a rhetorical ploy, you have lost a larger audience than you have gained: agnosticism in return for all those religions which you call "fantasy". If you mean it sincerely, you help to pillage three millenia of rich cultivation of the word. You deconstruct thousands of past treatises, poems, and novels, tens of thousands of sermons, in order to court the interest of contemporary cynics. Furthermore, in stripping out the word you have not replaced it with an adequate alternative. You use 'reality' and 'faith', but these do not mean something essential that religion has always meant.
The OED informs me that 'religion' is generally believed to be derived from the latin 'religare', 'to bind'. This suggests this essential part of religion. It is, as the humanists assert, "a set of overarching beliefs with which people make sense of the world", it is also a binding of oneself and one's community to that order. Thus it is to live according to the moral order, to celebrate the order, and to worship the god of that order. The Apostle James tells us that "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world" (James 1:27). And what is this but a practical restatement of Micah's famous injunction: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8)
There are plenty of decent words a Christian man can use to describe the things that Dawkins rightfully loathes: falsehood, corruption, stupidity, arrogance, tyranny, deceit, paganism, and twaddle, to name a few. Don't abandon such a well-fortified position as 'religion'.
My fond regards
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| | | Hugh Manning (Guest) | 18/01/2010, 17:15 | | Hi Ranald
I find it sad but not surprising that you feel the need to try and belittle Dawkins with comments like "tirades" and "chip on the shoulder. This is way far from the truth;all the TV programes and U-tube recordings show him with a mild mannered, though seriously concerned, approach. You cite David Robertson but I went to both his talks and read ghis blogs . As a result I have come to the conclusion that although he comes over as a very smooth, amusing and superficially amiable person, he is not a very nice person at all, in fact a homophobic (ref is railing against his church for allowing gay ministers to practice sex and remain in the church) religious fundamentalist (always quoting the bible to support his position ). I have also attended the STAG Arena course. I have a very simple philosophy - you cannot have an all powerful, all knowing God on the one hand and an all benevolent one on the other - they are just not compatible because of the suffering question. This is what motivates most atheists to take the view that the God of all three almost certainly (not absolutely - we could be wrong but it's very unlikely) does not exist. And if he(or it) is not all three it's not worth supporting. Much better to promote Humanism (not Atheism)
Best wishes
Hugh
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