The Illogic of a Popular Atheist

Richard Dawkins is, without doubt, one of the most popular atheists writing today.

At the end of 2006 he released his The God Delusion, a best-selling book and tantrum against God.

Dawkins describes God as follows: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal…."

That Dawkins steps well outside his area of expertise and sinks is well documented. For some short critiques see:

1. Alvin Plantinga: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/marapr/1.21.html

2. William Lane Craig: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5493

3. James Anderson: http://proginosko.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/fallacy-files-1-dawkins-on-the-argument-from-beauty/ and http://proginosko.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/fallacy-files-2-dawkins-on-religion-and-evil/

The point I want to make is different, though. Dawkins is a naturalist. For him, only physical entities exist. And to the extent that anything happens, it is not because it ought or should happen but because of blind impersonal mechanism. There are no ends or goals the blind impersonal universe is trying to achieve.

In this article, Dawkins writes:

"But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

"Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing?"

Two points can be made:

1. There is no such thing as moral responsibility (or even morality) in an atheist universe. So Dawkins' own view pulls his objections to God's character and His followers from underneath him. On one hand he wants to have a whinge but, on the other, he denies the very foundation on which his objections would have to depend to make sense. Dawkins' position is explosively contradictory.

2. In this passage, Dawkins makes use of a teleological concept. If something is faulty, then it is not properly functioning. If something has a proper function, then it has a design plan or a purpose at which it is aimed. But Dawkin's world does not allow for purpose/ends/design plans. There is no such thing as a faulty person (or anything, for that matter) in his worldview. His worldview denies teleology, he relies on teleology: another contradiction.