Jesus and Richard Dawkins, Part 3 Christ’s Resurrection and Continuing Impact

Author: Stan Guthrie
September 25, 2025

In the first two installments of this series, we answered atheist Richard Dawkins’s charge that the universe “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.” First, we looked at physics, which shows that the universe was created and is finely tuned for life on earth. In other words, purpose.

In Part 2, we considered the evidence that God visited this planet in the Person of Jesus Christ. His existence and divine claims point to a cosmos brimming with meaning. His death on the cross indicates that we do not face our suffering alone and that God both understands and cares.

But Jesus didn’t stay dead. The unanimous conviction of the early Christians was that he rose.

There’s more. After the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty. His disciples, initially crushed by his death, were not expecting the empty tomb and were slow to believe their Lord’s promise that he would rise. Thomas, for example, refused to believe until the risen Jesus (perhaps with a smile on his face?) told him to touch his wounds (John 20:24-29). The disciples then became as bold as lions in proclaiming the resurrection, many enduring death or exile.

“You have a guy who objectively lived, He objectively died, and then individuals close to His inner circle claim that they see Him not dead,” Canadian scholar Wesley Huff says. “How do you explain it going from eleven scared disciples in an upper room to [them] being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that …  Jesus rose from the dead, and you saw Him, and you touched Him, and you ate with Him?”¹

History has shown us many men who will gladly kill for what they believe to be the truth—but none who will willingly die for what they know to be a lie.

Tom Holland got into history as a fan of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Now he is a fan of Western culture insofar as it has been influenced by Christ. 

“Today, even as belief in God fades across the West,” Holland says, “the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”²

As the renowned Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, “Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?”³

Not much. Christianity was the wellspring from which the world’s great universities appeared, first in Bologna, then in Paris. Peter Abelard (1079-1142) sought to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Augustine to, in the words of Holland in his magisterial book, Dominion, promote the idea that “God’s order was rational and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend.”⁴

And while some pundits today, including Dawkins, attempt to paint Christianity as anti-science, many if not most of the early scientists were Christians, including Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Pascal, and Kepler.⁵ As historian Rodney Stark has argued, “The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.”⁶

Then there are the innumerable soup kitchens, churches, hospitals, and orphanages founded to the glory of Christ. We could explore the impact of Jesus in everything from philosophy, civil rights, literacy, democratic government, respect for women and children, capitalism, and even in the movements that have emerged to combat the Christian faith, including secularism, communism, and atheism.⁷

But, to complete this answer to Dawkins, we must acknowledge that Jesus is not merely a limitless fountainhead of social change—though He is that. He is a living and resurrected Lord for millions upon millions of people, past and present, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, known and unknown—including me.⁸ What other figure of history has turned so many sinners into world-changing saints, such as Chuck Colson, John Newton, Florence Nightingale, Martin Luther, and William Wilberforce? Jesus is without peer in his influence, in ways large and small. Even Dawkins, the proud atheist, readily admits the positive influence of Christianity on his native country, Great Britain. And he wishes for that influence to continue.

“I do think we are culturally a Christian country,” he admits. “I call myself a cultural Christian. … I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian…. I  love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”⁹

With all due respect to Richard Dawkins, that doesn’t sound like a universe of “blind, pitiless indifference” to me! Something may indeed be blind, but it isn’t the universe.

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Stan Guthrie is Minister of Communications for New Covenant Church of Naperville. For the earlier installments in this series, go to the NCC Blog.

¹ https://www.christianity.com/newsletters/evangelism-weekly/joe-rogan-explores-the-evidence-for-jesus-
resurrection-with-apologist-wesley-huff.html.
² https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity/.
³ https://www.azquotes.com/quote/763728.
⁴ Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 242-243.
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology.
⁶ https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/rodney-stark-attracting-attention-with-his-revisio.
⁷ https://www.newcovenantnaperville.org/the-incomparable-impact-of-jesus.
⁸ Guthrie, Stan. “Relationship and Meaning.” New Covenant Church of Naperville. http://nccop.faithnetwork.com/relationship-and-meaning.
⁹ https://www.breakpoint.org/richard-dawkins-a-cultural-christian/.

 

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