Atheistic Folly

Richard Dawkins is among the most pre-eminent atheists in the world today, akin to the famous atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. The quotation below is from an article written by Rod Liddle, originally appearing in The Spectator, and referenced below from the Catholic Educators Resource Center (CERC).



A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

Which brings me to the difficult stuff — and Darwinism. It is a creed to which Dawkins cleaves with the fervour of the fundamentalist, the true believer. And it is the real chink in his armour. For example, because Darwin showed us that life forms progress from the simple to the complex over hundreds of thousands of years of gradual modification, it therefore follows (according to Dawkins) that there cannot have been a divine being present before the amoebae swam in those soupy oceans at Earth’s toddler stage — because he would have had to be more complex than those organisms which followed him. And that doesn’t fit with the theory. But what if the theory, in its entirety, doesn’t hold — as Dawkins concedes might be possible? Even now, a century and a half after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged (most recently by the evo-devo school, which believes that sudden change can occur within species within a single generation). Like all scientific theories, Darwinism will be amended — perhaps beyond recognition. Perhaps it will be discarded entirely. Either way, disavowing a divine being because it doesn’t quite fit in with another here-today-gone-tomorrow theory seems a tad peremptory. The question Dawkins can never satisfactorily answer is: what if Darwin was wrong? And yet, as a scientist, he must be aware that the likelihood is that Darwin was wrong here or there. In which case, where does that leave his philosophical argument?

While Liddle presents a valid and important counterpoint to Dawkins' idea, there is a more obvious response that is not mentioned. Dawkins proclaims that the existence of God is impossible because biological life began from simple organisms and developed into complex organisms. God would have to be more complex than the ameoba, so He could not exist before the ameoba. He doesn't fit the progression. What Dawkins overlooks is the fact that God, by definition, transcends Creation. First of all, God is not biological. Secondly, in the Judeo/Christian conceptualization, God did not use Himself as the raw material of Creation - He created ex nihilo - out of nothing. These points seem fairly obvious.

Dawkins' claim would be tantamount to a claim that a human being cannot bake a cake because the progression of baking a cake is from simple ingredients, to combined ingredients, to cake. Since a person is not a simple ingredient, he does not fit the progression. A person can therefore not be the creator of cakes. I acknowledge this is not a perfect analogy - the changes involved in baking a cake are not as fundamental as the supposed changes due to evolution. However, the logic is the same. The baker transcends his creation. The cake does not flow from the essence of the baker. He exists outside of the cake, yet he is the cause of the cake's creation.

I hesitate to match wits against a supposed intellecual genious such as Dawkins, but I have to betray surprise that such a genious would concoct such a ridiculous argument in the first place.

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