Contemporary atheism, fighting against people who believe in God, the Catholic Church and Christian values, has its intellectual leaders. One of them is Richard Dawkins.
Many atheistic books have certainly contributed to the loss of faith of Christians who are poorly established in their faith. On the other hand, for the faith of people who think, deeply believe and know the teaching of the Catholic Church well, the argumentation in such books as The God Delusion by R. Dawkins is at such an embarrassing level that it will certainly not be a threat. However, such formed Christians are relatively few today. For this reason, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker wrote Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins Case Against God, in which they expose the fallacies of logic and fact in R. Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
The American philosopher Alvin Plantinga warns readers of The God Delusion that it lacks “even-handed and thoughtful commentary. In fact, the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding” (The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum, https://www. booksandculture.com/articles/2007/marapr/1.21.html).
A deep faith in chance
Atheist Dawkins is a man who believes deeply in chance. Dawkins attributes all the most miraculous events to chance. According to him, “the impossible, no matter how absurd, is possible. The moon, over which the cow really could jump, truly might — just for a few moments, due to random molecular restructuring — be made of green cheese.” (Answering the New Atheism, p. 13).
Dawkins implicitly believes in chance in order to be able to explain phenomena in a purely materialistic way, which for any normal thinking person indicates the existence of a supernatural cause. According to him, everything is possible except for a miracle. For Dawkins, a miracle is possible, just not a miracle. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is possible just as the random movement of molecules will make “of a marble statue waving its hand or a cow jumping over the moon” (ibid., pp. 20-21).
Dawkins claims that life on Earth arose accidentally, that something like DNA spontaneously arose first. He writes: “If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets”. (The God Delusion, pp. 165-166).
There is an obvious logical fallacy in Dawkins’s argument in that he assumed something that he wanted to prove. First, he should prove that such a possibility exists, not assume it in advance.
The fundamental problem is about possibilities and impossibilities, not more or less probabilities. “If tossing a perfect cardhouse in a hurricane is impossible because the cards would keep blowing away, then it wouldn’t become possible by adding into the calculation a billion billion available planets, or even a trillion trillion. If the spontaneous arising of DNA is simply impossible, then it wouldn’t matter how many billions or trillions of planets there were”. (Answering the New Atheism, p. 18).
Dawkins’ belief in the power of chance is stronger than many people’s belief in the existence of God.
Dawkins should first prove that it is possible for DNA to be formed by chance, and then assess the chances of it happening. The complete denial of the existence of God led Dawkins to the absurd belief that anything but a miracle could happen.
“It would be harder to imagine a more fervent faith in the powers of chance than someone who can, with a straight face, speak of the actual possibility of a marble statue waving its hand or a cow jumping over the moon” (ibid., p. 20).
If something that is impossible really happens, for example the resurrection of Christ, we call this fact a miracle, that is, an event that is the work of God. Dawkins, on the other hand, assumes in advance that God does not exist, therefore he wants to authenticate his belief in the non-existence of God by believing that everything can happen by chance. Thus, in Dawkins’ reasoning, chance replaces God the Creator, and thus rises to the rank of a deity who can do everything. And chance is, after all, a complete lack of intelligence, conscious choice and causative power.
The origin of life
Scientific data says that the entire Universe has been fine-tuned so precisely that the conditions for life on our planet were created. Physicist Michael Turner states: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimetre in diameter on the other side.” (ibid., p. 34).
Conversely, physicist Fred Hoyle states: ” “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” (ibid., p. 33).
Dawkins, defending his atheistic “belief” in the chance occurrence of life, writes: “However improbable the birth of life may be, such an event must have occurred on earth, for our presence here proves it.” Such an argument discredits Dawkins, because it assumes the existence of something that should first be proved.
Amazing harmony, extraordinary precision and the current state of the entire Universe and the miracle of life testify to the existence of the absolute intelligence of God the Creator, and not some accident or lucky chance.
The universe “is so fine-tuned, that the probability of it happening by chance is astronomically small. The fine-tuning is the focus of the anthropic principle; the calculations of probability only serve to illustrate how fine-tuned. If you witnessed the “fine-tuned” arrangement of stone, wood, glass, and open space in a cathedral you could calculate the odds of it happening by chance, but that would be to illuminate how precisely calibrated the cathedral was, not that it in fact came about by chance.” (ibid., p. 35). Dawkins avoids such reasoning and claims the opposite – that it is chance that is the ultimate cause of life on Earth and the entire Universe.
This is a ridiculous statement, because even the simplest cell of a living organism is infinitely more complicated than a car. Even if all the parts of a car were in one room, they would not create a functioning car by themselves. There must be an intelligent man who puts them all together.
In order for the first living cell to be created, its extremely complicated parts would have to have existed earlier – so the question arises where and how they could have arisen. The parts of the cell, like the parts of the car, are built with the whole in mind, so there must be an intelligence that has planned it all and carries out the design. Coincidence, for obvious reasons, cannot become the causative cause of the creation of a car, let alone a complicated living cell.
Everything that lives is made of cells, and each cell functions like a miniature city. The human body is made up of trillions of cells that work as one organism. This fact amazes every thinking person, because it indicates the perfect wisdom and greatness of God the Creator.
Human life begins with a single dot-sized cell at the end of a sentence. This cell contains the information (DNA code) that makes it possible to create a body consisting of 100 trillion different types of cells, and each of them has an extremely complicated mechanism of chemical functioning. Logic points to the fact that it was God the creator who encoded information in each cell – instructions for action. Thanks to this, there is a harmonious development of the entire organism, made of 100 trillion cells, each of which, thanks to the DNA code, “knows” how it should function. This code contains very precise information. Dawkins’ claim that the DNA code and life arose spontaneously from matter through millions of years of mutation and natural selection is a great naiveté. Since the DNA code contains creative information, this indicates the fact of its origin from the highest intelligence of God the Creator. It is common sense that tells us that the accidental origin of life is simply impossible. The belief in the accidental occurrence of life is as absurd as Dawkins’ belief that a million monkeys in a million years, accidentally hitting a million typewriters, will write all of Shakespeare’s works.
“They cannot excuse themselves” (Romans 1:20)
Every man can discover the truth about the existence of God by the effort of his own mind.
This is the official teaching of the Catholic Church. In the Constitution Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council we read: ” God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certainty from created reality by the light of human reason ” (DV 6). In the Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul states that every human being can know the truth of God’s existence by observing the harmony and beauty of creation: ” what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19-20).
The almighty, invisible God makes himself known to every man, he reveals his existence “through his works”. Therefore, St. Paul states that there is no excuse for people who do not believe in the existence of God, even though God has revealed Himself to them in the beauty and harmony of all creation. It is knowingly and wilfully committed sins that so obscure the mind of man that they are the main cause of questioning the existence of God. Sinful people ” by their wickedness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). “If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their sinfulness place an impediment in the way,” explains St. John Paul II (Fides et ratio, 19).
In the Book of Wisdom, the Lord God addresses very strong words to us: “For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if men were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is he who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Yet these men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For as they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things?” (Wis 13:1-9).
Cardinal Karol Wojtyła commented on this text in a conference delivered at a retreat in the Vatican: “When the author of the book of Wisdom calls those who do not know God “fools,” the knowledge he has in mind is much more than empirical. It is the sort of knowledge that is nothing less than wisdom. Wisdom always seeks the fundamental reasons why, asserts the philosopher, who sees in metaphysics the purest expression of wisdom. The Psalmist sang: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111:10). The Apostle in his turn wrote: “This ‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). These are different aspects of the same thing which is not only intellectual but also moral. (Sign of Contradiction, pp. 20-21).
In the encyclical Fides et Ratio, Saint John Paul II specifies: “For the Bible, in this foolishness there lies a threat to life. The fool thinks that he knows many things, but really he is incapable of fixing his gaze on the things that truly matter. Therefore he can neither order his mind (Prov 1:7) nor assume a correct attitude to himself or to the world around him. And so when he claims that “God does not exist” (cf. Ps 14:1), he shows with absolute clarity just how deficient his knowledge is and just how far he is from the full truth of things, their origin and their destiny” (Fides et ratio, 18).
The invisible God, the Creator of the entire Universe, in his selfless love, invites all people to the community of life with himself. Each person should respond to this invitation with love through faith, that is, through the complete surrender of his mind and will to God.
“Beyond the path of philosophical knowledge is the path of faith,” writes St. Edith Stein. “It brings a very special closeness to the loving and merciful God and gives us a certainty that no natural knowledge can give us. However, it should be remembered that the path of faith is also a dark path. God adjusts his words to the measure of man, so that we may comprehend the Incomprehensible”. ◼
Source: Scott Hahn, Benjamin Wiker, Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins Case Against God, Emmaus Road Publishing, 2008
28/05/2023
