Richard Dawkins

Ransom Poythress

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781629952222
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

Dawkins has popularized the gene-centered approach to evolution yet is better known for his rejection of a supernatural creator. Poythress presents and critiques Dawkins' ideas with a Reformed theological apologetic.

1

DAWKINS REVEALED

To learn the specifics of Dawkins’s colorful life, you can read his weighty and detailed memoirs. He chronicles his early years in his first memoir, An Appetite for Wonder (2013). His second memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark (2015), focuses on the later years, including his books and public influence.

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya in 1941. Although he was raised with a sense of religious duty by Anglican parents,¹ he claims to have emphatically rejected religion fairly early, due to discomfort with doctrines like original sin and supernatural claims.² For Dawkins, learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection hammered the final nail in God’s coffin.³

Dawkins studied at Balliol College (Oxford, UK) and received a doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1966.⁴ He researched ethology (animal behavior) and evolutionary biology under Nobel Prize winner Niko Tinbergen. He focused on ways to mathematically model the pecking decisions of chickens.⁵ After a brief stint of teaching at the University of California–Berkeley, he returned to Oxford as a lecturer in zoology, a position he held for twenty years.

During his time as a professor at Oxford, he published his first book, The Selfish Gene (1976). In that book, he posits that evolution is not driven by what is best for a group of organisms, but rather by what is best for individual genes. He argues that “we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”⁶ A scientific reader may see the direct correlation between this reasoning and Dawkins’s study of chicken pecking. The thinking goes something like this: “If we can program a computer to accurately predict a chicken’s behavior, then what is the difference between a chicken and a complex computer? By extension, what is the difference between a human and a very complex computer? Therefore, humans are nothing more than gene machines, doing what they need to survive.” Although we may not agree with this extrapolation and the assumptions contained within it, we can at least develop a plausible understanding of where these ideas came from.

The Selfish Gene changed the way people thought about evolution, and Dawkins has since capitalized a great deal on the success and renown of that book. It still impacts biology more than forty years later,⁷ even being voted recently as more inspiringthan Darwin’s Origin of Species.⁸ Dawkins followed with roughly one book every four years, expanding on the ideas in The Selfish Gene. What began as an effort to solidify evolutionary biology gradually morphed into an anti-theist ideology. Dawkins argues that if evolution is true, then certain consequences naturally follow. Not only is a Creator unnecessary for ultimate explanations, but evolution actually provides evidence against a personal God. He argues in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) that “evolution reveals a universe without design.”⁹

In the volumes that followed The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins vehemently contends that evolution “solves” religious questions that were unanswerable until now. For example, he is convinced that the beauty he sees and the wonder he feels in the world are more magnificently attributable to natural causes than to a personal God. Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) is an ode to this very sentiment.

The slow march from atheism toward anti-theism reached its culmination in 2006 with the printing of Dawkins’s The God Delusion and the dawn of the New Atheist movement. The God Delusion was published at about the same time as several other anti-theist books by other authors:

• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris (2004)
• Atheist Manifesto: The Case against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, by Michel Onfray (2005)
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Dennett (2006)
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (2007)
• God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, by Victor Stenger (2007)

Since then, Dawkins has spent a good deal of his time campaigning for his reasoning in The God Delusion, including speaking tours, interviews, and public debates. New Atheism landed cover stories in Time magazine¹⁰ and Wired.¹¹ At this point, the reader may want to pause and ask: “We know that atheism has been around for a long time, so what is really new about New Atheism? And what has made it so attractive now?” I will try to address the first question here, and tackle the second question in the next chapter.

At its core, there may not be anything new about New Atheism. One critic contends that, while Dawkins’s “book is written with rhetorical passion and power, the stridency of its assertions merely masks tired, weak and recycled arguments.”¹² So why the “New” moniker? One possibility is that the title “New Atheism” helps fix it as a particular movement at a particular time in history. However, I believe there is more to it than that.

There are at least three new aspects of New Atheism. First, Dawkins has been mostly a popularizer, gaining at least temporary cultural sway by influencing the masses. He does this by being clear, concise, and simple—to the point of being simplistic. He has not restricted himself to technical treatises for niche communities. He has been active with op-ed articles, Twitter,¹³ and a number of other popular forums, employing wit, sarcasm, and withering criticism to draw a clear line in the sand. He understands the importance of imagery, analogy, storytelling, and linguistic clarity. These all appeal to the public consciousness and imagination. Followers are not always won by making the best argument, but by making the argument in the best way. Throughout history, the people who have amassed devoted adherents have been those with charisma, passion, zeal, and vision. Dawkins and the New Atheists have a story to tell, and even though their story may be flawed, it paints a convenient and alluring picture.

Second, Dawkins uses new tools to support old arguments, including a mass of new data from biology that substantiates, he believes, a purely evolutionary story of life. The last few decades have brought tremendous advances in our understanding of genetics and of molecular and cell biology. Dawkins, in particular, with his training as a biologist, seeks to interpret this data to his advantage through storytelling. Later, we shall examine whether this storytelling is complete and coherent, or if Dawkins selectively ignores and distorts evidence to fit a preconceived mold.

Finally, Dawkins is “new” in his tone and goals. He is novel “in the intensity of [his] ridicule of religion, not the substance of [his] criticism.”¹⁴ His followers are stridently evangelistic. Dawkins says in his preface, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”¹⁵ Dawkins has an almost sweeping intolerance of religious tolerance,¹⁶ including agnostic positions. “Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them.”¹⁷ The unambiguous goal is the abolition of religion from the planet.During a symposium in La Jolla, California, in November 2006, physicist Steven Weinberg said, “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”¹⁸ Dawkins pursues this goal, writing with a passion, zeal, and certainty that would be labeled proselytizing if it came from any other religious tradition.

So after all the podium preaching, letter writing, tweeting, arguing, blogging, and publishing, where do we stand more than a decade after this resurgence of atheism?

In many respects, nothing has changed. There are still atheists, and there are still Christians. Scientists still wrestle with the intersection of science and religion. Questions remain unanswered. There is no majority consensus. Secular biologists possess no testable scenarios for the origin of life;¹⁹ secular physicists possess no testable scenarios for the origin of a complex universe; and secular philosophers possess no explanation for the origin of complexity itself.

Yet the landscape has altered in some ways. The militant crusade against religion has relaxed somewhat when met with public resistance and the growing realization that its claims don’t reflect reality. Opposition from within the ranks of atheists has contributed to a more tolerant stance. Passion and eloquence may initially stir up zealous followers, but in order to sustain the movement, Dawkins has found it necessary to court favor using opinions more in line with public sentiment.

The seeds of discontent were visible in 2006 during the initial burst onto the scene. At the Cali...