RICHARD DAWKINS, THE STATE, AND MILITANT INDOCTRINATION

The renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently stated something that is increasingly resonating with others:

·       “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents,” he said. “Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”

Well, what’s wrong with such a statement? Much! For one thing, religious liberty has enabled Western Civilization to thrive. It has given every family a sincere welcome, but now it is being taken away, and many are beginning to feel marginalized, even victimized. The nation that had once been their friend is now regarded as a deadly enemy – a threat to their family.

However, there is another problem with this statement. It fails to acknowledge a couple of crucial realities:

1.    There is no alternative to the indoctrination of children. It will either be the parents or it will be the State. However, the State has a poor track record in caring for our children. State control also reduces choice and diversity.

2.    The State also has its religion and values that it is militantly determined to inculcate, even around the backs of the parents.

State control is nothing short of oppression and disdain for the welfare of the children.

IF IT LOOKS DESIGNED, PERHAPS IT IS DESIGNED

Kyle Butt has written:

·       Richard Dawkins stated: “Living things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to understanding the heart if we assume that it is designed to pump blood” (2006, p. 182, emp. added). Did you catch that? He said that things weren’t designed by any intelligence, but we can understand them more readily if we assume they were. http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=1691

·       University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne, in his book Why Evolution is True, wrote:  “If anything is true about nature, it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives” (2009, p. 1, emp. added).  He further stated, “Nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear” (p. 1). On page three of the same book, he wrote: “The more one learns about plants and animals, the more one marvels at how well their designs fit their ways of life.” Atheist Michael Shermer, in his book Why Darwin Matters, stated: “The design inference comes naturally. The reason people think that a Designer created the world is because it looks designed” (2006, p. 65, ital. in orig.).

What are the implications of the appearances of design? Well, it suggests that these things might have actually been designed.

And why shouldn’t we believe what our senses tell us? Is it more reasonable to put our faith in the findings of an experiment? In this case, we are compelled to place our faith in the experimenter. However, in order to do this, we also have to also place our faith in our senses to read or hear about this “finding.” Doesn’t it make more sense just to believe in what our senses tell us directly?

Besides, have evolutionists or naturalists ever performed an experiment excluding God from the picture? No! Well, why then do we exclude Him? Perhaps we want to!

A RESPONSE TO A SEEKER

I am glad that you are seeking, because a true seeker will find. I am also confident that you will see through Dawkin’s claim that science has made God irrelevant. Why?

For one thing, science has never demonstrated that anything ever happens naturally and without Divine guidance. To do this, science would have to demonstrate that our causal laws/forces of science are of natural derivation and continuation. However, science is ill-equipped for such a task.

More to the point, these laws or causal agents give every indication that they are designed and divinely pieced together (fine-tuned) to promote life. Science cannot disprove the divine origin of these laws but, instead, depends upon them for each of its findings. If these laws were simply a part of this universe, they would be changing as the universe changes, automatically voiding the possibility of any coherent scientific proclamation. Indeed, if it had been possible for our laws to have been created by an explosion (the “Big Bang”), there is no reason to expect them to be immutable and universal, making science possible.

We should not expect these laws to be elegant (simple), enabling scientific discovery and understanding. Instead, we should expect what explosions usually produce – Chaos!

But please continue your exploration. If you want the truth, you will find the truth.

DO THE BENEFITS OF FAITH IN GOD OFFER ANY EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD?

If Christian beliefs enable the Christian to live longer and more joyfully, does it say anything about the existence of the Christian God? The atheist Richard Dawkins dismisses any connection between the existence of God the benefits derived from a faith in God.

Nevertheless, most will acknowledge the benefits. Dag Hammarskjold, a late Secretary General of the UN, observed:

• God does not die in the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond reason. (Markings)

We are sustained by those things that can only come from God. The late novelist, George Elliot, confessed:

• God is “inconceivable” and immortality “unbelievable” but duty is nonetheless “peremptory and absolute.” (Os Guinness, The Journey, 132)

We need duty and purpose, but these can only be grasped in any absolute sense if God exists. Otherwise, these are merely the accidental and arbitrary products of evolution, social whim, or merely just a bio-chemical reaction.

According to the Deist Ben Franklin, we even need God for a moral society:

• If men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it? (119)

The benefits even extend to our most intimate relationships, as former atheist, Patrick Glynn, reports:

• A 1978 study found that church attendance predicted marital satisfaction better than any other single variable. Couples in long-lasting marriages who were surveyed in another study listed religion as one of the most important “prescriptions” of a happy marriage. (God: The Evidence, 64)

Glynn also relates religious belief to better physical and emotional payoffs:

• “Religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, depression, even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage, on the other” (61).

In contrast to this, the atheist experience is admittedly dismal, although it might commence with a sense of freedom from constraints. Jean-Paul Satre confessed that, “Atheism is a cruel, long-term business.” Bertrand Russell described his atheistic religion in this manner:

• The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain… Brief and powerless is mean’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. (Why I am not a Christian)

H.J. Blackham, a former director of the British Humanist Association, wrote:

• The most drastic objection to humanism is that it is too bad to be true. The world is one vast tomb if humans are ephemeral and human life itself is doomed to ultimate extinction… There is no end to hiding from the ultimate end of life, which is death. But it does not avail. On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. (106)

However, does any of this offer any objective evidence for the existence of God? I would say so. The things that creatures desire and choose tend to bring objective benefits. Even grazing animals tend to eat nutritious greens and to reject the poisonous ones. They know to drink when they get thirsty, to find shade when they get hot, and to rest when they get tired. They are able to make positive adjustments to an objective reality that surrounds them, and they derive benefits from this.

Why then choose to believe that Christians are deluded and yet are deriving unmistakable benefits from their delusion?

BUT ARE WE WIRED TO FLOURISH THROUGH DISTORTED THINKING? Atheists claim that a belief in God represents gross self-delusion. They have many pejorative phrases to describe faith in God: “imaginary friend,” “big-daddy in the sky,”  “complete nonsense,” or “self-delusion.”

However, here is what is incomprehensible about these charges. Delusions put us out-of-touch with reality, especially a “delusion” that lies at the basis of our entire lives. Instead, of assisting us to constructively manage our jobs, relationships, home, and even driving a car – and all of these endeavors require accurate feedback in order to derive positive benefits – delusion about a God who guides our lives and infuses them with a whole range of “illusory” doctrines should interfere with any prospect of a positive adjustment to any of life’s endeavors. Instead, we flourish.

Why? Just consider riding your bicycle blindfolded. You would soon crash incurring great costs. Close to home, consider someone who navigated life with rose colored glasses. He might think that all women secretly love him. Consequently, he would not take “no” for an answer. I knew such a man who was arrested repeatedly for harassment because of his cognitive distortion.

Or consider a woman who was confident that she was performing better on the job than she really was. Consequently, she saw no need for improvement and was eventually fired.

Or just consider the people who are unable to understand others but are confident that they were treating them appropriately, when they really aren’t. Eventually, they lose their friends.

Generally speaking, distorted think causes distorted behavior with negative outcomes. In All in the Playing, Shirley MacLaine had explained her distorted worldview:

• I went on to express my feeling of total responsibility and power for all events that occur in the world because the world is happening only in my reality. And human beings feeling pain, terror, depression, panic, and so forth, were really only aspects of pain, terror, depression, panic, and so on, in me!

How would such distorted thinking affect her relationships? Wikipedia concluded its posting on her this way:

• In 2015, she sparked criticism for her comments on Jews, Christians, and Stephen Hawking. In particular she claimed that victims of the Nazi Holocaust were experiencing the results of their own karma, and suggested that Hawking subconsciously caused himself to develop ALS as a means to focus better on physics.

Her thinking understandably created relational problems, among other things. Why then is it that those who believe in a “heavenly Christian sky-daddy” – an all-encompassing “delusion” – make positive adjustments, while others do not? From an atheistic perspective, this is impossible to understand.

ARE ORGANS IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX, THEREBY DEFYING DARWINIAN GRADUALISM?

Irreducible complexity is a theory that argues in favor of an intelligent Designer by showing that random mutation and natural selection are unable to account for new organs or structures. Evolution must take place step-by-step and each step must confer a survival advantage. However, to confer this advantage, many new genes must be simultaneously in place to produce any beneficial structure. Richard Kleiss provides the example of blood clotting as an irreducibly complex process:

• Bleeding must be stopped. While the scab is forming…the blood below is making a completely different kind of clot out of blood platelets and protein…Your body increases the flow of blood enriched with white blood cells. These cells not only search out and kill germs, but clean the wound of damaged cellular tissues. Skins cells start to increase the rate at which they make new cells in order to bridge the cut with new skin. Underneath…cells called fibroblasts fill the wound to strengthen the tender new tissue, and then contract to pull the wound closed. Finally, blood vessels and nerves complete their repairs as the fibroblasts position themselves along the lines of stress to prevent further damage.” (A Closer Look at the Evidence)

Without any one of these processes, any cut could cause death. In fact, any structure is irreducibly complex. Atheist Richard Dawkins admits that:

• The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. (The God Delusion, 125)

Darwin himself said as much:

• “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

Is there any evidence that new organs arise through “slight modifications?” Casey Luskin cites the late biologist, Lynn Margulis, member of the National Academy of Sciences: "new mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.” She further explained in a 2011 interview:

• [N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Is there any evidence? Apparently none! John C. Lennox quotes several evolutionists to this effect:

• John Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary: “There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.” (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, 107)

• Siegfried Scherer: “In the whole experimentally accessible domain of microevolution (including research in artificial breeding and in species formation), all variations have certainly remained within the confines of basic types.” ()

• Cell biologist E.J. Ambrose of the University of London argued that it is unlikely that fewer than five genes could ever be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously unknown in the organism. He then points out that only one in 1,000 mutations is non-deleterious, so that the chance of five non-deleterious mutations [the minimum necessary for any new function] occurring is 1 in a million billion replications.

This means that every organism will probably die before it adds a new organ! But evolutionists assure us that, eventually, they will come up with a solution.