Rebutting the World’s Most Famous Atheist

Author: Mark Cadwallader

Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist and evolutionary biologist, said in an interview with Salon Magazine: “For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. ”

We say in response, it still is prima facie evidence, so that Dawkins is “without excuse”. Romans 1:18 “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

Dawkins continued: “But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.”

Christian apologists and theologians going back at least as far as Augustine have had the answer to this elementary (yet crucial to their case) objection of atheists to the clear implication from the Creation. You don’t need to posit an “infinite regression” for designers of designers, creators of creators, etc, because the God of the Bible is infinite, transcending time and space per the Biblical presentation of Him. He thus subsumes the infinite regression within His being. He is the “First Cause” for all effects we can observe. Furthermore, all our experience in the universe of all our observations requires designers for high level complexity. The complexity of a plane or a car needs a designer, and so does the complexity of an amoeba let alone a human being. In this universe of one time dimension and three spatial dimensions, things do not spontaneously organize and every effect has a cause. But in God’s multidimensional existence the same constraints do not apply, and his infinity and eternity can indeed be logical. We’re not there. We can only speak about our universe. Thus the atheist’s objection to the prima facie evidence from Creation voiced by David Hume and rested upon by Richard Dawkins falls apart when it is pointed out that in our existence a First Cause is indeed required, while in God’s existence it is not. Logic only demands a creator/designer of our existence, but not a creator/designer of God’s existence.

Richard Dawkins’ false god (false creator) is natural selection. But natural selection works only to distribute pre-existing genes within species kinds, just as animal breeding (planned selection) does. Beyond that the creative power of natural selection is completely unsubstantiated by scientific method. It is a “cunningly devised fable” (2 Peter 1:16) and “science falsely so-called” (1Timothy 6:20); a half-truth put forth to establish a huge deception, just like Satan’s lies to Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1-5) and his lies to Jesus Christ during the temptation in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-13).

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