Richard Dawkins and “The God Delusion”: Dawkins on the Bible (Part 11)

NOTE: Ten years ago I did this book analysis on “The God Delusion” on my old blog. Then four years ago I revised it and put it up on this blog, resurrecting orthodoxy. Somehow in the process, I failed to put up Part 11–Only today, a good 4 years later did someone notice! And so, here is the long missing Part 11 to that book analysis of “The God Delusion.”

Dawkins then turns his attention to the arguments taken from scripture. He begins by ridiculing C.S. Lewis for his famous “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” argument: a person who said what Jesus said would not be considered just a “great man,” because in addition to all the “good things” Jesus said, he also said, right along those things, that he shared a unique relationship with God and that he was, at some level, one with God Himself. Therefore, Jesus was either a liar, a crazy man, or just what he said, one with God. Lewis’ argument is very logical.

Dawkins responds, though, by saying, “The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal” (117). This is quite problematic, given the fact the entire New Testament, let alone the gospels, is quite clear in its testimony that Jesus claimed this very thing. Apparently, even Dawkins senses this, so he puts forth a fourth possibility: “…almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken” (117). But that’s just the point of Lewis’ argument, isn’t it? Jesus couldn’t have just “been honestly mistaken.” Any person who “honestly” but “mistakenly” believes that he is God simply is not sane. Being “honestly mistaken” in this instance is simply not an option.

Looking at the Gospels

Moving on to the gospels themselves, Dawkins critiques them as follows: “Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus’ life. All were then copied and recopied, through many different ‘Chinese Whispers generations’ by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas” (118).

Just about everything Dawkins says here is either misleading or just plain wrong. First, the gospels were not written long after the death of Jesus and the epistles of Paul. Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written around 70 AD, roughly only 35 years after the death of Jesus and less than 10 years after some of Paul’s letters. In addition, the sheer number of manuscripts we have prove that the gospels were preserved accurately. The whole “Chinese Whispers generations” comparison is simply bogus.

Dawkins then makes another historically ignorant claim regarding the gospels: “The four gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew , and Mary Magdalen” (121). The reason this is historically ignorant is that it is just a fact that many of these works were not even written by the time of the Council of Nicaea. Furthermore, many were written by fringe Gnostic groups that were never considered part of the traditional, orthodox Christian faith. They also were not chosen arbitrarily. They were chosen because they were the ones that the churches held as inspired Scripture from the very beginning of Christianity.

So, when Dawkins says, “The gospels that didn’t make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones” (121), he is mischaracterizing the process. Granted, the Gnostic gospels do in fact have some crazy stories in them, but that’s not why they weren’t chosen at the Council of Nicaea. They weren’t chosen at Nicaea because they had never been considered Scripture by the churches in the first place. Why? Because, among other things, they simply were not historically reliable.

This leads us to Dawkins’ final mischaracterization of the gospels: “Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history but was simply rehashed from the Old Testament, because the gospel-makers were devoutly convinced that the life of Jesus must fulfill Old Testament prophecies. It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all…” (122).

The fact is we do have an idea who the four evangelists were. Can we be 100% certain? No. But Church tradition has always claimed that Mark worked with Peter, that Matthew was the tax-collector, that Luke worked with Paul and had contact with the other Apostles, and that John was the beloved disciple. Now granted, if you simply dismiss out of hand these historical testimonies, it’s quite easy to then jump to a “no one knows who the evangelists were” argument, but then that would just be silly.

Secondly, Dawkins’ comments about the New Testament simply being a “rehashing” of Old Testament prophecies reveals just how little Dawkins truly understands about biblical prophecy and the New Testament use of Old Testament prophecy. The New Testament writers didn’t treat the Old Testament like the History Channel treats the writings of Nostradamus.

Finally, we need to be crystal clear: the only people who do not think there was a historical Jesus are those in the current “Jesus mythicist” movement, of whom Richard Carrier perhaps is the most well-known. Mythicism is to history what flat-eartherism is to science. Anyone who suggests either one has serious credibility issues.

How Can Any Respectable Scientist?

Not surprisingly, Dawkins simply cannot understand how respected scientists like Isaac Newton, or modern ones like John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins, could actual be sincere believing Christians. He writes: “After amicable discussions with all of them, both in public and in private, I remain baffled, not so much by their belief in a cosmic lawgiver of some kind, as by their belief in the details of the Christian religion: resurrection, forgiveness of sins and all” (125). This fact simply baffles Dawkins, because according to him, “The higher one’s intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold ‘beliefs’ of any kind” (129).

But if that is the case, then how does Dawkins account for Christian men like Newton, Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus?  Simple, he speculates and makes things up: Dawkins says they only claimed to be religious either because that was the only option around, they had to feign belief out of fear of the Church, or they would have been proud atheists if they would have lived today. In Dawkins own words: “Newton did indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until—significantly I think—the nineteenth century, when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it” (124).

Talk about an argument from silence.

Let’s Talk About Faith

Finally, when discussing Pascal’s wager and Bayesian arguments, Dawkins seems to focus on the very concept of faith. Not surprisingly, he gets this concept wrong as well. Consider this definition: “Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will” (130).

Dawkins’ “definition” of faith is essentially this: thinking or hoping something to be true without any evidence. Given that definition, Dawkins concludes that belief is not something one can just “decide” to do, an “act of the will” if you will. Given this definition, it is easy to see why Dawkins equates religious faith with mental illness. Of course, such a definition, and the subsequent conclusions are completely wrong.

Biblically speaking, faith is not “mental assertion without evidence.” Faith is putting one’s trust in someone, namely God. It isn’t just thinking God exists; it is living your life in a trusting relationship with the God who exists. Let’s put it another way: there are a whole lot of unthinking people who have a mental assertion that a God exists “without any evidence,” but whose “faith” goes no further, many of these people are church-going people. This type of “faith” is the mark of lazy intellects and shallow lives. Because this type of “faith” requires no real thinking, one can argue that it never really was “chosen”—it is nothing more than a baseless assumption of soft minds.

Real faith requires an act of the will. Anyone who has read the story of Abraham, the prophets, the gospels, or Paul should clearly see this. Real faith requires a choice to walk with God, to enter into a covenant relationship with Him. Abraham wasn’t considered righteous simply because he said, “Yeah, I think God exists!” This is what Dawkins doesn’t understand. His very basis on which he builds his case against the Christian faith is a distorted understanding of what the Christian faith actually is in the first place. He thinks that the Christian religion is nothing more than a set of scientific propositions. Since he rejects out of hand even the possibility that there is a God, it doesn’t occur to him to consider “faith” as a life-long relationship journey with that God.

This is evidenced in the following quote: “But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is ‘believe’ in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist?” (131)

For the record, Christian faith is a life that displays characteristics like kindness, generosity, and humility. Any reading of anything in the New Testament, as well as major portions of the Old Testament, should make this obvious. And yes, God does regard “honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue.” That is what characterizes biblical faith. But an arrogant, ignorant, intellectually dishonest diatribe is something that no one, not God and not honest and sincere people, has any time for.

Dawkins’ final point is one more example of convoluted thinking: “There is a much more powerful argument, which does not depend on subjective judgment, and it is the argument from improbability. …The whole argument turns on the familiar question ‘Who made God?’, which most thinking people discover for themselves. A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument…demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed.” (136)

“Who made God?” Any man-made god is not truly God—this is one of the major points of the Old Testament prophets. And let’s look at Dawkins’ logic here: any being who created the universe would have had to have been created himself. What is Dawkins’ presuppositional base here? None other than the belief (i.e. assumption with no evidence!) that Darwinian evolution MUST account for all life, for all time, throughout all the universe, throughout all other universes, as well as any other possible reality that might possibly exist.

Now, I’m no scientist, but I think, no matter how well Darwinian evolution might explain the natural life processes here on earth, and no matter how well the latest astronomical discoveries have helped us understand the make-up of our universe, to assume that Darwinian evolution is the only possible way to account for all life, for all time, throughout all known universes, and any kind of reality that might exist—well, that is biting off quite a lot, isn’t it? Couple a fanatical presupposition that materialistic evolution is the only means of ascertaining reality with a woefully ignorant understanding of traditional Christianity and biblical history/theology, and what do you get? You get The God Delusion.