Atheist Richard Dawkins' refreshing question, with humility

New Atheist icon and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins recently asked a surprising question on X. Referring to his most famous book published 18 years ago, Dawkins wrote: “What do religious people think I got wrong in The God Delusion?” 

The replies were insightful. One person pointed out that Dawkins depended on methodological naturalism, the belief that only material explanations are valid, but which is, itself, a belief that can’t be proven by material explanations. Another pointed out: “[You] spent the majority of the book making a moral case against religion; [but] you state in other works that there isn’t objective morality.” 

In fact, Dawkins’ “moral case against religion” is central to The God Delusion. He wrote: 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a … capriciously malevolent bully. 

These are strange words from a man who wrote elsewhere that: 

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. 

So, which is it? Is the God of the Bible not worth believing in because He’s evil, or is evil an illusion? Dawkins seems to have wanted to have his moral indignation and eat it too. 

Still, a more fundamental mistake in his bestselling book is one which virtually every prominent New Atheist copied. As Susannah Roberts pointed out in her reply to Dawkins, the main thing he got wrong was the meaning of the word “God.” Dawkins wrote as if God is just a bigger and stronger human, a being like the rest of us who merely happens to be very powerful. The god he described was like the polytheistic gods worshipped by the Greeks, Norse, and Egyptians. Dawkins confirmed this was his view in a famous line from the book: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”  

Years ago, I met a woman on a plane who challenged me to prove that God exists. I asked, “Well, what do you mean by ‘God?’”  

She replied, “A grumpy old man with a beard in the sky who can’t wait for you to do something wrong so he can strike you with a lightning bolt.”  

“I don’t believe in that god, either” I said. Her definition of God was far more like Zeus than the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth and Father of Jesus Christ.  

The God of Scripture isn’t a bigger and stronger human, a petty and selfish being like the pagan gods, nor even like a really powerful angel. God is a category by Himself. He is the ground of being, the “unmoved mover,” timeless, spaceless, omniscient, unchangeable, not subject to passions or tantrums, and not fully describable with human language. His character is not answerable to a higher moral law, but is itself the source of that moral law. He is, as James put it, “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change,” and as Daniel wrote, “none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” 

When Dawkins condemned God as a “petty, unjust, unforgiving” bully, he was suggesting God doesn’t live up to a moral standard of fairness and mercy. But where did he get that standard to begin with, if not from God?   

As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity:  

[T]here is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. 

It’s refreshing and encouraging to see Richard Dawkins ask a question like this, with this much apparent humility. After all, in the last year or so, he has called himself a “cultural Christian,” rebuked unscientific gender ideology, admitted he really likes Christmas carols, and showed genuine curiosity about why his friend and former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity. Perhaps, God willing, Dawkins, is on the verge of a similar change. We can and should pray as much.  

Still, it’s worth noting that the straw-man god that Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists spent two decades denying and denouncing looks nothing like the God of the Christian worldview. Atheist authors could and should realize this, but like philosopher Thomas Nagle famously admitted, a major motivation is the hope that there is no God. So much so, in fact, that Nagle also admitted how unsettling it was that some of the most well-informed and intelligent people he knew believed in God.  

For both atheists and believers, it’s important to make sure our understanding of God is correct. Thank God for those willing to correct their bad theology.

Originally published at BreakPoint.