Jesus and Richard Dawkins

Author: Stan Guthrie
September 11, 2025

Atheist provocateur Richard Dawkins famously has said, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”¹ On the one hand, it’s hard not to agree with him, at least on a gut level.

Anyone who has faced cancer, or seen the innocent slaughtered in war, or grappled with the Holocaust, or seen a tsunami wreak havoc on a coastal city, or watched in horror as shooters stalk our schools cannot but pause and concede the point that sometimes—indeed, often—bad things happen to good people, frequently for no apparent reason. As I have written elsewhere,² in my own life, I have grappled with the seeming injustice of physical disability from birth, doubting God’s goodness and power until I learned better.

And as the Psalmist cried out when seeing the wicked prosper,³ sometimes life doesn’t seem fair. But do painful or tragic incidents and circumstances point only toward the nihilism of Dawkins and his “blind, pitiless indifference”? I think not. While there are other reasons, we cannot ignore the amazing properties of the universe in which we find ourselves. They reveal not a blind randomness at the heart of things but a very delibrate, unmistakable purpose⁴.

Despite longstanding resistance within most members of the scientific community, who wanted to believe in an eternal, uncreated cosmos, the evidence now overwhelmingly points to a startling truth: the universe had a definitive beginning. Matter, energy, space, time—and even the physical laws that describe them—are not eternal features of reality. They came into existence with the cosmos itself, at a specific time.

This means that whatever caused the universe to come into being—the Creator, if you will— must itself be found beyond these physical dimensions. It cannot be confined by space or time, nor composed of matter or energy. This origin must be transcendent—spiritual, immaterial, and t imeless.5 In essence, it bears a striking resemblance to classical conceptions of God.

Viewed through this lens, then Genesis 1:1 reads not merely as an audacious theological claim, but as a profound declaration of scientific reality: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Not only did the universe have a definite beginning that reminds the unbiased of a God behind it all, its continuation tells another tale of purpose. Far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, the cosmos appears to be finely tuned to support life on this planet, as most scientists now concede. The physical constants and conditions of the universe appear to be precisely calibrated to allow for the existence of life—especially complex, carbon-based life such as ours.

Among them:

• Physical constants: The gravitational constant, the strength of the electromagnetic force, and the mass of subatomic particles are finely balanced. Even slight changes would make life impossible.⁶
•  Cosmic conditions: The rate of cosmic expansion, the balance of matter and antimatter, and the distribution of elements all contribute to a universe with life.⁷
• Galactic and planetary factors: The structure of the Milky Way, the position of the Sun in our galaxy, Earth’s distance from the Sun, its axial tilt, magnetic field, and the presence of the Moon all help stabilize the climate and enable life. The outer planet Jupiter, with its massive gravity, protects us from dangerous objects that would otherwise crash into Earth regularly.⁸

Fred Hoyle, the British astrophysicist known for coining the term “Big Bang,” was a reluctant convert to the idea that there was more going on in the cosmos than chance and the random operation of physical laws. Hoyle said, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”⁹

While it is not known if Hoyle ever became a believer in God, his posited “superintellect” sounds a lot like the God of Scripture.

For his part, the late theoretical physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson remarked, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”¹⁰

So we have established that the creation and continuing existence of the cosmos refute the Ecclesiastes-type claim of Dawkins that all is meaningless. But such facts of general revelation can take us only so far. We know from them that the universe is pregnant with meaning. But we need more specific information from other realms of knowledge to know what that meaning is. 

In our next article in the series, we will turn to history and philosophy to demonstrate that there is a higher purpose in the cosmos and contradict Dawkins’s postulate that the universe is blind, pitiless, and indifferent. The compelling evidence of these two fields of inquiry can be summed up in two words: Jesus Christ. 

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Stan Guthrie is Minister of Communications for New Covenant Church of Naperville. 

1. https://www.richarddawkins.com/books/book/river-out-of-eden.
2. https://stanguthrie.blogspot.com/2006/04/work-of-god-displayed.html.
3. See Psalm 73:3, Psalm 37:1-2, Psalm 10:5, Psalm 94:5, Psalm 49:16.
4. Or teleology, the branch of philosophy that studies purpose or design in natural phenomena.
5. See Stephen C. Meyer, “Scientific Evidence for a Creator,” Center for Science and Culture, © 2021 by Stephen C. Meyer, 25-26.
6. https://intelligentdesign.org/articles/list-of-fine-tuning-parameters/. Also see: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 125, where he notes the remarkable fine-tuning of these constants
7. https://www.sciencealert.com/we-could-have-a-new-way-to-explain-why-our-universe-is-as-finely-tuned-for-lifeas-it-is.
8. https://ourplnt.com/life-on-earth-possible/.
9. Sir Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Astrophysics and Relativity (1981), 70, 26.
10. http://www.hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/dyson.html. 

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