Co-sponsored by the eminent Professor Richard Dawkins (author of the God Delusion), this headline was audaciously splashed across the sides of around 800 London buses, back in 2009.
Cringe as we might, and reel from the acute pain of offense. Notwithstanding the advertising campaign supported by Atheists from all over the UK, was borne of genuine concern. From their perspective, (ie no God) people should not suffer anxiety, when they fail to act morally (guilt is bad). After all, no punishment will await us, when we exit this life. Just the deafening sound of silence, so they say.
Here We Encounter the Unholy Union of Science and Atheism
Surprisingly, modern science was not conceived in the womb of Atheism, but in that of the Christian faith. Kepler, Newton, Galileo & company were all believers in the Christian God. When they measured the natural world and space, they saw mathematical regularity, which in turn lead to the laws of nature (gravity and alike). For them the mathematical description of the world pointed to a ‘divine mind’, who ordered it thus, and was contingent upon God.
Today, we have the complete reverse. Dawkins and his fellow Atheists insist that belief in God is thoroughly unscientific. He contends that when we know the mechanism, then the childish notion of a god, in completely unnecessary.
After watching the famous ‘Dawkins vs Lennox debate. Has Science Buried God?’ (Thrice, I know I need to get out more). I was impressed by Dawkins’ sincerity, he genuinely believes that removing God from our world, is doing humanity a great service. He earnestly reasons that we’d all be happier and better off without the Christian God.
Does the Mechanism Remove the Need For God, or Does It Evince His Existence?
On the one hand, as Lennox so clearly contends, knowing the mechanism of how something works, (in Dawkins’ case “Natural Selection”) doesn’t prove there is no God, but rather shows us there is a ‘divine mind’ behind the mechanism and design that we see all around us.
While on the other hand, Dawkins attributes the origin of the species (ie the diverse range of life forms on the planet, but not life itself) to ‘Natural Selection’. He contends that ‘Natural Selection’ is a blind, mechanical and automatic force, which creates the illusion of design.
But when it comes to the origin of life itself, he and his peers have no answers. They can’t explain how matter (atoms and molecules) became living cells, which can reproduce, generate energy and perform hundreds of other diverse functions.
We are left empty handed for an explanation, when it comes to explain, how life came from non-life (atoms), how everything came from nothing, how from the chaos of disorder, we find order, in a ‘finely tuned universe’. And whence came the infinitely complex genetic coding of DNA, which causes cells to repair and to diversify into various organs. There is an embarrassing silence from the scientific community on these questions, so I guess they want us to believe that by faith these stupendous marvels occurred by some process that we don’t understand yet, but we can be sure they aren’t the result of the activity of an omnipotent God (pardon my sarcasm).
An Amoral Universe Removes Justice and Hope
The evangelical fervor with which Dawkins promoted his case for Evolution was touching. He’s affection for ‘Natural Selection’ (the mechanism which removes God from the origin of life) was palpable.
But his joy quickly turned to confusion, when Lennox exposed a fatal flaw in his Atheist belief system, which doesn’t address the existential issue of injustice and human suffering. Suffering and injustice are real. Just because they lie outside the limits of science’s ability to measure, doesn’t prove that they don’t exist.
Human history is littered with carnage of unspeakable suffering and injustice. In the last century alone, 6 million innocent Jews slaughtered, 2 million Cambodians murdered at the hands of tyrants. Child slavery, child sexual abuse, murder, starvation and torture, to name but a few of our present-day iniquities’. What of these?
Dawkins reply to these veritable horrors was and I quote ‘So What’. Cold comfort for a mother, whose son was killed in a street fight or a father whose daughter was gang raped. ‘So What’ is screamingly inadequate, in fact it’s pathetic.
This is a Moral Universe
God said to Cain ‘Your brother’s blood cries out to me, from the ground’. Showing there’s a transcendent aspect to Sin, it is tantamount to an assault on the throne of God. Sin and injustice are not petty as Dawkins believes, they matter to us and supremely to God.
That’s why he sacrificed his Son to deal with it. Anything less than a Holy (moral) God is unbecoming of the creator of this limitless cosmos, of life in all its glorious array. If God were not Holy, then he’s reduced to a type grand architect, or engineering genius, but also a monster, because he’d be incapable of dealing with the injustice of sin.
Vic Matthews, has three degrees B.Optom, B.Arts & B. Christian Studies. He is a kiteboard tragic, who now works as a Christian Copywriter. He can be found at http://trustworthycopywriter.com/writing-services/christian-copywriter/
Vic Matthews' previous articles may be viewed http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/vic-matthews.html