Jesus and Richard Dawkins Part 2: Christ’s Life and Death
Author: Stan Guthrie
September 18, 2025
In Part 1, we began to answer the famous atheist Richard Dawkins’s statement that “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.”
Is it true? Hardly.
We looked at the creation and fine tuning of the universe, which virtually all scientists now acknowledge, as powerful evidence in the other direction and quoted renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who said, “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.”
It’s hard not to see this powerful evidence as anything but a rebuke to Dawkins’s skepticism and as a signpost pointing to God. As the Apostle Paul boldly stated in the Book of Romans:
"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”1
But we have even better evidence of a meaningful universe and a caring God. That evidence is a Person and goes by the name of Jesus Christ. As John 1:14 states, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” We know the cosmos has purpose and meaning because its Creator has come down and dwelt among us.
Some skeptics contend that we don’t even know whether Jesus even existed. Balderdash. No ancient historical figure’s existence is better attested than that of Jesus Christ. The scholarly consensus overwhelmingly affirms his existence.2 Here are three non-Christian ancient witnesses:
- Flavius Josephus (Jewish historian, c. AD 93): Mentions Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews, referring to him as a wise man and noting his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.3
- Tacitus (Roman historian, c. AD 116): In Annals, he writes about “Christus” who suffered under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.4,5
- Suetonius and Pliny the Younger also reference early Christians and their worship of Christ.6,7,8
We have as much or more evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ as we have for any of the Caesars.9,10 Yet Jesus was a common laborer among a despised people in a conquered, out-of-the-way Roman province who died as a criminal. And yet it is his name that divides time.11
What can account for this?
The simplest answer is that Jesus was more than a man—much more. As Napoleon Bonaparte reportedly said, “I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity.”12
Stranger still, Jesus, a monotheistic Jew, claimed to be God—a blasphemous claim if it were not true, and his contemporaries responded accordingly.13 It would be impossible to claim Jesus as a great teacher of religious principles if he got this all-important fact wrong. Or worse, he would be exposed as a liar of cosmic proportions.
C.S. Lewis, commenting on Christ’s claim to divinity, said, “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”14
While some critics of Lewis’s famous “trilemma” attempt to dismiss its colossal implications by asserting that Jesus’s claims to divinity were later theological inventions, both biblical texts and historical scholarship affirm that Christ’s earliest followers believed that he had explicitly claimed divine status. As Brant Pitre notes, “It is possible to understand the Gospel only if both Jesus and the Jews around him held to a high Christology whereby the claim to Messiahship was also a claim to being a divine man.”15
As if in response to the claim of Dawkins about suffering in a meaningless universe, Jesus didn’t give us a philosophy explaining suffering. He took suffering on directly, and freely, dying on the cross for our sins. Cicero called crucifixion “a most cruel and ignominious punishment.”16 Yet the earliest Christians proclaimed it, saying, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:22-24).
Whatever inscrutable heartache or pain we face in a sin-scarred world, Christians know that God understands and has dignified it through his own suffering.
And it is striking that Christ’s influence only grew after he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Atheist historian Tom Holland agrees, stating, “To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution.”17
We will examine the truth and impact of the Resurrection of Christ in the third and final part of this series.
Stan Guthrie is Minister of Communications for New Covenant Church of Naperville.
1 Romans 1:20a.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus.
3 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3.3 (commonly known as the Testimonium Flavianum).
4 Tacitus, Annals 15.44, describes Nero’s persecution of Christians and affirms that “Christus… suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.”
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Jesus.
6 Pliny the Younger, in Epistles 10.96 (c. AD 112), reports Christians singing hymns “to Christ as to a god” and
refusing to worship Roman deities. Suetonius, in Lives of the Caesars (Claudius 25.4), mentions disturbances
caused by “Chrestus,” likely a misspelling of Christ, leading to the expulsion of Jews from Rome.
7 https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1846/pliny-the-younger-on-christianity/.
8 https://christianapologeticsalliance.com/2015/12/13/did-jesus-exist-part-2-pliny-the-younger-and-suetonius/.
9 https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/the-historical-evidence-for-jesus-is-greater-than-for-caesar.
10 https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/7-key-pieces-of-evidence-supporting-the-existence-of-jesus-christ.
11 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/christiancrier/2015/06/22/what-is-the-meaning-of-a-d-and-b-c-how-does-it-connect-to-christianity/.
12 https://reasonabletheology.org/napoleon-bonapartes-view-of-jesus/.
13 https://www.cjfm.org/blog/2019/05/22/why-was-jesus-accused-blasphemy.
14 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6979-i-am-trying-here-to-prevent-anyone-saying-the-really.
15 https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/jesuss-divinity-and-the-quest-for-the-historical-jesus/.
16 https://st-eutychus.com/2015/snippet-cicero-on-crucifixion-floggings-and-roman-citizenship/.
17 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/68279026-dominion-how-the-christian-revolution-remade-the-
world.
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