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Atheist author and biologist/philosopher Richard Dawkins was recently famous for his bestsellers The God Delusion and The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. In his introduction to The God Delusion, he expresses the hope that the reader, upon finishing his book, will have become an atheist like himself.
Dawkins seems to love the “straw man” tactic of either misrepresenting the other side’s arguments in such a way as to make them easy to refute, or selecting an authentic but weak argument— again one he can easily knock down. An example of the latter is his use of Fred Hoyle’s supposed argument that the chances of life originating spontaneously on earth are no greater than that of a hurricane blowing through a scrap heap and accidentally assembling a fully functional Boeing 747 jet plane. (Dawkins noticeably fails to disprove Hoyle’s assertion, by the way.)
Hoyle’s real contribution to the issue of spontaneous generation of life on earth is his calculation of the odds against such a thing: one in 1040,000 power, or 500 times the number of atoms in the known universe (see Chapter Four)! We’re not talking “improbable” here. We’re talking IMPOSSIBLE! Dawkins has conveniently ignored this quotation from Fred Hoyle.
In Chapter Four of The God Delusion, entitled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” Dawkins cites mostly weak arguments for God’s existence, such as Hoyle’s “747 argument” (which he refers to later as if he had disproved it, when in fact he had not). He devotes considerable space to arguments in The Watchtower for design of one species after another. He surely knows that arguments from religious tracts are not the most convincing ones for a God, by any means.
What Dawkins seems to studiously avoid dealing with (except to ridicule or dismiss them as “religiously motivated”) are the discoveries of scientists such as those we’ve cited in previous chapters, which leave little room—to a truly open mind—for rejection of a higher creative power.
Dawkins cites another of his books, entitled Climbing Mount Improbable, to explain how evolution supposedly occurred “step by step” through a series of small changes (mutations) and natural selection, which supposedly account for all macroevolutionary development from the imagined primal single-celled creature to humanity. But he either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that almost no mutations actually improve a species, much less send it in an upward evolutionary direction. His “Mount Improbable,” where we see a steep cliff in front, but where in back small steps ascend a mild gradient, could not possibly have enough steps to get us even to the first multi-celled creature.
To get to the higher forms—if such a thing were possible at all—would require the climbing of WHOLE RANGES of Mount Improbables on multiple planets! Instead of a few billions of years, we’d be talking quadrillions or quintillions of years. “Natural selection” has almost no opportunity to work when almost no positive mutations ever occur. As pointed out in Chapter Nine, mutations do not add information to the genome, but either lose or distort it.
Dawkins repeatedly refers to what he has not yet proved as if he had. He admits the occurrence of DNA is a “staggeringly improbable event,” but he reasons, “It must have happened, because here we are”! Now there’s real convincing proof.
spontaneously generated, Dawkins reasons thus: “Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets … even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets—of which Earth, of course, is one.” 41 Where is the problem with this reasoning?
Dawkins is either dishonest or conveniently ignorant of Wickramasinghe and Hoyle’s mathematical calculation of the REAL odds against even a protein spontaneously generating as being higher than—not the supposed number of planets in the universe— but the number of atoms! They have shown that spontaneous generation is not “improbable”—it is IMPOSSIBLE!
To be fair, in other chapters of The God Delusion Dawkins makes many valid points regarding the evils perpetrated in the name of religion. No thinking person even superficially acquainted with either history or current events could argue the contrary. However, he pretends no good ever came from people acting on their religious beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth, as any honest survey would quickly show.
In pointing out all the “evil” of religion, he is begging the question: Given the fact that most belief in a God or gods turns out to be false, does that prove any and all belief in God is false, “delusional,” and leads only to evil?
Not remotely. On the contrary, in the face of all that science has uncovered about the realities of the material universe, to refuse even to acknowledge the possibility of the existence of God is the REAL DELUSION.
Jonathan Sarfati does a commendable job of answering Dawkins’s latest attempt to dupe the gullible. Dawkins titles his volume appropriately, The Greatest Show On Earth. Sarfati answers with The Greatest Hoax On Earth? Refuting Dawkins On Evolution.
Countering all the false reasoning and misrepresentations in Dawkins’s writings would require this booklet to become excessively long. Hopefully we’ve included enough here to help you realize that the real delusion is the belief in no God, and that Darwinian macroevolution is the real “failed hypothesis.”
