Atheism, Miracles, and Richard Dawkins
Author: Stan Guthrie
March 07, 2024
Famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has spent much of his public career attacking, mocking, and refuting the Christian faith. A leader in the small but influential group of “New Atheists" who gained notoriety after the 9/11 attacks, Dawkins is proud of his atheism.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Dawkins boasted in his best-selling book, The God Delusion. “Some of us just go one god further.” Dawkins believed that a commitment to rational thought and scientific naturalism would eventually prevail over the old monotheistic superstition.
I’m not sure Dawkins believes that now. The New Atheism has been overtaken by the New Irrationality—illustrated by a trans movement asserting that sex is “assigned at birth,” men can become women and compete without shame in female sporting events, and the highest good is radical individual autonomy. With God removed from the equation, these and other previously unthinkable thoughts have become very thinkable indeed.
For example, according to a recent article in Scientific American, “Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary.” Such unscientific pronouncements from those who Dawkins would say ought to know better drive the Oxford scholar crazy. On X (formerly Twitter), Dawkins acidly remarked that the magazine article was “ridiculous,” adding in another post, “The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes … amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws, while they drown in their own postmodern effluent.”
Tell us how you really feel. Dawkins’s verbal venom against his erstwhile allies reminds me of the scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when the dictator, while being assassinated, turns to his supposedly close friend with the shocked recognition of betrayal: Et tu, Brute? But having kicked away the moral and philosophical supports for a rational civilization, can Dawkins and his New Atheist comrades really be surprised when a pagan worldview sneaks in through the rubble? Man is, after all, incurably religious
And the bad news for Dawkins just keeps getting worse. It’s one thing to swat away some obsessing, mostly nameless “non-binary faithful.” It’s quite another when one of the world’s leading atheists decides to become a Christian.
That’s what happened last November, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born, Dutch-American author and critic of Islam wrote an essay entitled “Why I Am Now a Christian.” The article was playing off the famous 1927 lecture of Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” during which the famous author asserted that the Christian religion is based on fear.
Ali, author of the new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, gave two main reasons for her decision. The first is global. Pointing to authoritarian governments such as China and Russia, Islamism, and “the viral spread of woke ideology,” Ali said that secular answers—such as a strong military, and economic, technological, and diplomatic responses—are doomed to fail. The reason: our challenges are ultimately spiritual in nature, not secular. Ali noted:
The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.
The second reason Ali, a former Muslim, gave was personal.
Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
Dawkins was not pleased, to put it mildly. In an open letter to Ali, he attempted to mock her: “As you know, you are one of my absolutely favourite people but . . . seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more a Christian than I am. …
Christians are theists. They believe in a divine father figure who designed the universe, listens to our prayers, is privy to our every thought. You surely don’t believe that? Do you believe Jesus rose from the grave three days after being placed there? Of course you don’t. Do you believe Jesus was born to a virgin? Certainly not. Someone of your intelligence does not believe you have an immortal soul, which will survive the decay of your brain. Christians believe in a frightful place called Hell, where the souls of the wicked go after they are dead. Do you believe that? Hell no!
Then Dawkins attacked Ali’s desire for meaning as a sign of weakness. “Intelligent people don’t believe something because it comforts them,” he said. “They believe it because, and only because, they have seen evidence that supports it.”
Dawkins has invited Ali to discuss the issue with him at his spring conference, “Dissident Dialogues,” and it looks as if she has taken him up on his offer. Perhaps acknowledging that atheism may not have all the answers after all, Dawkins appears somewhat more open to the truth of Christianity than he has been in the past.
In 2018, Dawkins warned of celebrating too quickly over the expected demise of the Christian faith “for fear of finding something worse.” And in January of this year he posted, “Maybe there is still something for me to learn when it comes to religion.”
Dawkins open to learning from religion? Let’s pray so! If this happens, then it would be extremely hard to deny the existence of miracles.
Stan Guthrie is minister of communications for New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois.
Photo by Keenan Barber on Unsplash.
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