The Dawkins delusion: Why atheism can't explain the one thing that matters



Consciousness is the ultimate wonder and the deepest mystery — even for the devout. Not dark matter or quantum mechanics, but the fact that you are reading these words, that there is something it feels like to be you.

Believers may affirm that God made man in His image, and I agree, yet the question remains: Why should dust, shaped by divine hands, open its eyes and know itself? Why breathe into us not only life, but the inner life — the hidden sanctuary where thought, memory, and prayer rise and take flight?

The mystery matter can't master

Scientists can catalogue every neuron. They can trace every chemical cascade and chart every flicker of electricity racing through the brain. They can build diagrams so precise you could almost mistake them for the thing itself.

Yet none of it explains the one detail that matters most — that there is an inside.

That matter, when shaped in a certain way, suddenly gazes back at the universe and says, “I am.” Perception isn’t just the processing of inputs. It’s the lived immediacy of them: the taste of coffee, the ache of loss, the terror before a fall. These are realities experienced, not merely computed.

Some argue this is a puzzle that can be solved. All we need is more funding, more computational power, and more time, the argument goes.

What nonsense.

Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

The answer, it turns out, has been staring at us all along. Consciousness isn’t an accident of biology. It’s a fundamental part of reality, present before the first atom came to be. Matter doesn’t simply wake up by chance. It’s animated by something older, deeper, and impossible to quantify.

Call it spirit. Call it soul. Call it God.

The Dawkins delusion

For the Richard Dawkinses of this world — those allergic to religion — “God” sounds like a convenient escape hatch, a quick patch over the gaps in our understanding.

Yet the theological view is anything but a shortcut. It doesn’t merely declare, “God made man and switched on the lights.” It suggests that the light itself — the act of knowing — is the purpose. Awareness is the link between dust and divinity, binding the created to the Creator.

In other words, consciousness is no evolutionary afterthought but the central drama of existence, the stage on which heaven and earth meet within the human soul.

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This changes everything.

If awareness is fundamental, then the mind is not just an observer of the universe. It is a participant in it, a co-creator. The inner life becomes more than a collection of survival tricks honed by natural selection. It becomes the very arena in which the material and the divine meet.

Every moment of thought, every flicker of self-recognition, is a point of contact with something infinite.

That idea unsettles people because it shifts responsibility onto each conscious being. If awareness is a sacred link — which it is — then how we use it carries weight beyond anything science can quantify. The ethics of thought, intention, and attention move to the center. A life squandered in distraction or cruelty becomes much more than a personal failure.

In this view, it becomes the misuse of something unimaginably rare.

The sacred spark

Even our most advanced machines make the contrast clear.

They can mimic conversation, create art, and solve problems at rapid speeds, yet they remain completely vacant. There is no inner witness, no “I” behind the code. Their outputs may dazzle, but no one is there to be moved, to care, to suffer, or to rejoice. Set beside a single conscious breath, a single human glance, the difference is profound. And perhaps that’s the point. Consciousness is not about speed or efficiency. It is about relationship — between mind and world, self and other, creature and Creator.

For centuries, Christian mystics have spoken of the soul as a mirror made to catch and reflect the light of God.

Teresa of Ávila wrote of the “interior castle” with its deepest chamber reserved for union with Christ. John of the Cross spoke of stripping away every lesser light until only God’s radiance remained. The German theologian Meister Eckhart called it the “spark of the soul,” a place untouched by sin where God’s presence burns brightest.

In their eyes, consciousness isn’t a random flicker of awareness. It's the faculty by which the creature knows the Creator, the meeting place of heaven and earth within the human heart.

We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Modern science has given us remarkable tools to study the mechanisms of the mind, but the mechanism is not the mystery. The circuitry is not the song. You can dismantle a radio and never hear the music that once flowed through it. Likewise, you can map the brain and never touch the consciousness that animates it.

That gap — the chasm between matter in motion and the breath of being — is where the divine dwells.

Conscious by creation

We live in an age that prefers to compress the mystery into whatever measurements our tools can take. It's the spirit of 2025, an era when meaning is traded for metrics and a culture drifting toward nihilism mistakes data for doctrine.

But we must let the mystery magnify us and let it widen our grasp of what it means to be alive. Consciousness is a bridge between two eternities — the dust God shaped us from and the divinity that calls us home. To stand in the middle is to bear the weight of the world and feel the pull of the world that awaits.

Atheists will no doubt roll their eyes, but the reality remains: Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

We are not bystanders in God’s creation. We move through it as participants, shaping its story as it shapes us. We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Every thought, every act of attention, every choice is a line in the ongoing dialogue between Creator and created, a conversation that will echo into eternity.

Dawkins is wrong: Why you should still believe in miracles



Philosophers and sociologists have observed that in the wake of the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, we now live in a disenchanted age.

Many modern people believe the universe is governed exclusively by impersonal physical laws and that the sacred and transcendent are illusory ideas belonging to a bygone era.

Given the impossibility of demonstrating God’s nonexistence, skeptics ultimately have no grounds for denying that miracles are possible.

According to Richard Dawkins, for example: “The nineteenth century is the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know that it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked.”

Some who propose to speak for Christianity adopt the same viewpoint.

Lutheran theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann declared, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.”

Against the backdrop of our modern naturalistic worldview, it’s unsurprising that many people today reject miracles out of hand.

Yet there are good reasons to spurn this skepticism and to believe that miracles can and do happen. Christianity is founded on miracles (chiefly, the incarnation and resurrection), and if miracles were refuted, Christianity would crumble (1 Corinthians 15:13–14).

What is a miracle?

Before discussing whether miracles are possible, we should first establish what we mean by a miracle.

Christian philosopher Robert Larmer’s definition is helpful: “A miracle [is] an unusual and religiously significant event which reveals and furthers God’s purposes, is beyond the power of physical nature to produce in the circumstances in which it occurs, and is caused by an agent who transcends physical nature.”

A couple of things about this definition are worth highlighting. First, if nature is left to itself, a miracle will not occur. Miracles are brought about by transcendent agents — either God or angels. Several biblical passages refer to angels performing miracles (Matthew 28:2-4; Luke 1:19-20; Acts 5:19-20). Satan can also generate supernatural phenomena (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10), but such actions do not qualify as miracles in this definition.

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Second, in addition to being an extraordinary event, a miracle must also, in Larmer’s words, be “an event that has religious significance in the sense that it can reasonably be viewed as furthering God’s purposes.” Jesus’ resurrection, for example, provided evidence of His divine status and authority (John 2:19-22; Acts 17:31).

It’s not always immediately clear whether an extraordinary event will further God’s purposes; it sometimes takes time to see what the fruit of the occurrence will be and whether it should ultimately be viewed as a miracle from God.

Are miracles possible?

We now turn to the question of whether miracles, as defined above, are possible.

We begin by conceding this: If one accepts a naturalistic view of the world, then miracles are extremely improbable. The universe appears to follow physical laws, and we rarely observe phenomena that look like exceptions to the rules. Further, if we did observe something that looked like an exception, that would be evidence that we haven’t yet grasped whatever physical mechanism produced it.

On the other hand, if God exists, He is perfectly capable of acting within His creation, and we have good reason to believe that He would do so to interact with his creatures. The one who claims miracles are impossible would have to show that it is impossible that God exists, which is an insurmountably high burden of proof.

Thus, our background assumptions play a decisive role in how we view the question of miracles. If our worldview forbids a transcendent agent from intervening in the world, then we will deny miracles are possible. If, however, we grant that God exists, or may exist, miracles become possible and, perhaps, likely.

Allowing the possibility of miracles seems to bring up a worry: If we do so, the universe would suddenly become chaotic and unpredictable. Among other things, this would negate scientific study. But as philosopher Richard Purtill points out, we encounter exceptions to general rules all the time, yet these exceptions don’t nullify what we ordinarily expect.

For example, children sometimes skip grades in school, but this doesn’t disrupt the education system. We sometimes have holidays and vacations, but this doesn’t interfere with our ability to otherwise work normally. Governors of states can issue occasional pardons, but this doesn’t lead to the collapse of the justice system.

Similarly, a miracle can occur without obliterating all that we know and expect about the natural world. Thus, writes Purtill, “Scientists, as such, have no concern with miracles, for they cannot predict them, bring them about, or draw from them any conclusions about the future course of nature. A miracle is supernatural and therefore of no scientific interest.”

C.S. Lewis makes the even stronger point that the best guarantor of the uniformity of nature is God himself. (We can’t pursue this point here, but historians of science have argued that this is the very reason modern science arose only in Christian Europe — because of its belief in a rational God who created a law-abiding world.)

Lewis writes in his book “Miracles”:

Theology says to you in effect, “Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.” ... The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. ... Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.

Contrary to Richard Dawkins’ assertion above, Christians should feel no embarrassment in affirming the miracles of Scripture or other bona fide miracles. Given the impossibility of demonstrating God’s nonexistence, skeptics ultimately have no grounds for denying that miracles are possible.

A related question naturally arises, whether we have any evidence that miracles have, in fact, happened.

Christian scholars have made very strong cases for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Interested readers should consult books on the topic by William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona. For a defense of biblical miracles, along with scores of documented cases of modern-day miracles, two excellent resources are “Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts” and “Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World,” both by Craig S. Keener.

This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Substack.

Club Misery: How the godless elite let the truth slip about atheism



What do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Ricky Gervais have in common?

If you’re the sort of person who reads HuffPost, sips oat milk lattes, and thinks everything wrong with the world boils down to white men with opinions, you probably already have your answer: privileged patriarchal monsters.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction.

But if you’re a little more honest — and a little more curious — you’ll notice something different.

These aren’t just successful men. They’re atheists — and they’re also, quite clearly, miserable.

Bill Maher

Maher is a comedian by trade, but rarely funny any more — at least not in the way that feels joyful or generous.

On "Club Random," his podcast that masquerades as freewheeling conversation, Maher talks over his guests so relentlessly that it’s become the most consistent punch line in his YouTube comments.

  • “Stop cutting them off, Bill.”
  • “Let them speak, for once.”
  • “Do you invite guests just to hear yourself talk?”

He lectures, sneers, and plays the same greatest hits week after week. He’s not sharing ideas — he’s performing superiority. You can practically feel the clenched teeth through your screen.

Richard Dawkins

Then there’s Richard Dawkins, the patron saint of Darwinian superiority, the man who turned religious skepticism into a career of scowling, condescension, and book tours.

Dawkins hasn’t smiled in public since the Cambrian explosion. He scolds believers like a substitute teacher who can’t believe anyone is still talking about God after he’s assigned the fossil chart. Every public appearance is an exercise in barely contained frustration — at creationists, at the Bible, at people who pray for the sick instead of shrugging their shoulders.

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Dawkins doesn’t merely disbelieve. He resents belief, and nothing is more exhausting than a man perpetually outraged that billions of people don’t think exactly like him.

Ricky Gervais

Some will point to Ricky Gervais as the exception.

An atheist, a comedian, a master of satire, and they’d be right — at least partly. Gervais is funny. Incredibly so. But happy? That’s another story.

Gervais has never struck me as someone content. Even in interviews, there’s a fog of irritation that never quite lifts. He’s always complaining, always nagging, always rolling his eyes at something. And while he packages the whole thing in charm and wit, the engine underneath doesn’t sound like joy. It sounds like frustration dressed up for a Netflix special.

His entire career — brilliant as it may be — has been a decades-long monologue of gripes. Yes, he makes people laugh. But the deeper source of it all feels like a man quietly suffocating on his own disbelief. If in doubt, feel free to watch his recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, a practicing Catholic, where he spent minutes rambling about everything wrong with himself and the world — his body, his brain, society, death.

Funny? Sure, but also bleak. The laughter lands, but the undertow is pure despair.

And then there’s "After Life," his hit Netflix show. Lauded for its honesty, praised for its emotion. But look closely, and what you see isn’t fiction; it’s confession. A man mourning his wife’s passing, clinging to sarcasm like a flotation device in a sea of grief. It’s gulag humor without the bars — just a soulless bloke with a dog and a sharp tongue, cracking jokes to keep the walls from closing in.

Gervais is playing himself. "After Life" isn’t just a comedy — it’s an atheist’s eulogy.

Sam Harris

Gervais' close friend Sam Harris is no better.

Before he was consumed by Trump derangement syndrome, he was a sharp mind who took a blowtorch to radical Islam. Harris positioned himself as the cold, rational surgeon cutting through sacred narratives full of hate and delusion.

But even then, the man radiated pessimism. There was always an oddness to him — like he was describing humanity from orbit, distant and curiously detached.

These days, it’s worse. His permanent frown, his stilted delivery, his fixation on Trump supporters as if they’re some primitive tribe to be studied under glass — it all screams anxiety, not authority. He doesn’t project clarity. He projects burden. Every podcast, every essay, every panel feels like another brick in a bunker of airtight, joyless "reasoning" — sealed off from awe, from beauty, from anything resembling peace.

No comfort. No transcendence. No light. Just a man methodically dismantling meaning while sounding more drained with each attempt. Harris whispers meditations and mouths moral truths, all while insisting there’s no divine author behind any of it.

Christopher Hitchens

Even the great Christopher Hitchens — brilliant in so many ways — died with a cigarette in one hand, a scotch in the other, and a rage against the God he claimed didn’t exist.

Hitchens was a man of genuine intellect and rhetorical firepower. He could dazzle a room into silence. He could devastate an opponent with a single line. Joy, however, was never part of the package. The Brit burned hot, but never warm. His wit wasn’t rooted in love. It was weaponized. He didn’t laugh with you; he laughed at the absurdity of the world and often at the people trying to find meaning in it.

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His takedowns of Mother Teresa, of Henry Kissinger, of religion itself — they were theater, yes. But they were also therapy. They came from a place of deep unrest. His war wasn’t just with belief systems but with the very structure of consolation. The human need for mercy, for absolution, for something sacred. He couldn’t tolerate it, maybe because he wanted it too much.

Atheism didn’t bring him peace. It gave him license to rage: to reject sentiment, spit on tradition, and scorn the spiritual longings of billions.

He could speak for hours. But when it came to rest — to true stillness — he had none.

The problem with atheism

The problem with modern atheism isn’t just lack of belief. It’s that it builds identity around lack itself, around the removal of things. Strip away God, strip away the soul, strip away metaphysics, strip away teleology, and what’s left isn’t freedom — it’s vacancy.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction. And subtraction, no matter how eloquently defended, is not a place from which joy can grow.

It is, however, a place from which misery flourishes. Consciousness gets recast as a glitch, morality as adaptive behavior. Love? A chemical bribe from nature. Everything that once lifted the human soul now gets filed under "illusion."

And illusions, we’re told, are best destroyed.

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But here’s the truth atheists ignore: You cannot build a life — let alone a civilization — on negation. You cannot inspire the heart with “there is no God,” no matter how clever the phrasing. You can’t raise a child on “nothing matters” and expect the child to thrive. You can’t look into the eyes of someone dying and offer neurons as comfort.

This public face of atheism — the podcast hosts, the viral thinkers, the smug Substack intellectuals — don’t sell joy. They sell despair dressed up as clarity. They tell you that meaning is a delusion, that your suffering has no higher context, that the love you feel is just your DNA playing dress-up. They perform autopsies on transcendence, then wonder why their audiences walk away spiritually numb.

Humans don’t just crave truth. They crave belonging, direction, awe, and something to serve that isn’t themselves.

Atheism offers none of that. It hands you a mirror and tells you it’s a map — and then it dares you to walk in circles and calls it freedom.

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Charlie Kirk exposes the moral rot at Cambridge in a devastating exchange



Charlie Kirk has done something few public figures attempt: For the past decade, he has toured American university campuses and taken unscripted questions from students. In the process, he has exposed the intellectual rot at the heart of the modern academy. Most students come prepared not with arguments but with slogans — recycled from gender studies lectures and Ibram X. Kendi reading groups. What’s missing is actual critical thinking, the very trait these institutions pretend to cultivate.

Kirk recently brought his project to the United Kingdom, with similarly revealing results. At the storied Cambridge Union on May 19, he debated students and fielded questions from the audience. The encounter didn’t showcase the vitality of one of Christendom’s oldest universities. It exposed its decline. What stood out wasn’t the strength of Cambridge’s intellectual tradition but its weakness — the spectacle of a self-assured student, brimming with elite self-regard, being outmatched by an American who never earned a degree.

Kirk delivered the mortal blow: A child has more wisdom than a Cambridge student.

Once upon a time, the Cambridge student who wanted to “challenge the system” or “speak truth to power” might have supported William Tyndale in translating the Bible into English — an act that cost him his life. Or perhaps he would have taken pride in the legacy of John Eliot, a fellow Cambridge alumnus who crossed the Atlantic, entered the wilderness, and ministered to the Algonquin. Eliot invented a written form of their language, translated the Bible into it, and sent a copy back to Cambridge — confident the university would take pride in such a feat. His was the first Bible printed in the American colonies.

Those days are gone.

No God, no goodness

In the recent debate, former Cambridge Union President Sammy McDonald didn’t use his platform to pursue truth. He used it to mock the Christian faith. While Kirk’s Christianity is no secret, McDonald’s contempt was likely aimed at specific claims Kirk made during the event — that life begins at conception and that monogamous, heterosexual marriage benefits society. In today’s academic climate, such positions qualify as heresy. The punishment is no longer martyrdom (not yet) but smug derision.

In that context, Kirk performed a public service for Cambridge and the world. McDonald stands as a warning of what students too often become when shaped by today’s academic regime: clever but foolish, hostile to God, Christ, and Christianity, and armed with a brittle moral confidence unsupported by any coherent view of good and evil.

One of the most painful moments of the debate came when McDonald revealed he didn’t know what “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” meant. His tactic was simple and dishonest: accuse Charlie Kirk of endorsing atrocities without a shred of evidence, then use the rest of his time to condemn those atrocities as evil. It’s a lazy maneuver — a rhetorical sleight of hand — and emblematic of the intellectual decay at the Cambridge Union.

Worse, McDonald offered no coherent explanation for why anything is evil. His only moral compass seemed to be a vague intuition that suffering is bad. But where did that intuition come from? He professed concern for innocent children killed in Gaza, yet never acknowledged the mass slaughter of unborn children in his own country. That’s not moral reasoning. That’s hypocrisy. And one wonders why a Cambridge education failed to help him see it.

The problem of abundance

Kirk, by contrast, praised Great Britain for its civilizational legacy and urged students to reclaim it. When asked why wealthy societies tend to abandon monogamous marriage, Kirk’s answer cut to the heart of the issue: Once a society stops needing to delay gratification — once comfort becomes the norm and abundance replaces sacrifice — moral decay follows. Without a transcendent order grounded in the creator, collapse becomes not just possible but likely. Even before collapse, citizens lose their footing. Anxiety and misery take hold.

It was an odd question, really, since the dominant theme among leftist students is that wealth corrupts and the rich are inherently evil. And yet they seem eager to imitate the decadence of affluent societies rather than return to the moral clarity of more modest times.

McDonald’s moral confidence boils down to a single assertion: Suffering is bad. He has hollowed out anything transcendent. When Kirk affirmed that there are good guys and there are bad guys, McDonald scoffed, accusing him of holding childish morality.

Then, Kirk delivered the mortal blow: A child has more wisdom than a Cambridge student. And that’s what Kirk puts on display time and again: University students do not know what is clear.

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When Kirk spoke of truth, beauty, and goodness, the students stared blankly, as if they had heard ancient words but had forgotten what they meant. To borrow from Johnny Cash, “They say they want the kingdom, but they don’t want God in it.” Like Richard Dawkins, such students want the benefits of Christian culture but without Christ.

That tells us nearly everything. Students like McDonald study among the crumbling stones of a university built on Christian foundations — a place that once trained minds in piety, theology and the Great Commission. The Physics Department at Cambridge still bears the words of Psalm 111:2 above its door: “The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.” But reverence has given way to signaling, posturing, and progressive clichés. Today’s mission is not to spread the gospel but to promote the sexual politics of Alfred Kinsey — and to call that “progress.”

In his final moments, McDonald grasped for a rhetorical flourish and accused Kirk of having betrayed America — a country McDonald, bizarrely, claimed to admire. After the applause, Kirk delivered the final blow: “The difference is, when we get our way, we’ll still have a country. You’ll be living in a third-world hellhole.”

It was a moment of historical symmetry: the smug redcoat realizing, too late, that the ragtag colonials had just won.

A call to return

If “loving America” means gutting its Christian foundation and moral clarity, young Mr. McDonald can keep his affection to himself. No means no.

Cambridge should reclaim its former glory. As Kirk rightly observed, the United Kingdom has become a husk of what it once was. This was once the land of Bible translators, of scholars who believed every reader deserved Scripture in their own language — and the education to understand it and live by it. On that foundation, England abolished slavery and carried Christian morality across the globe in pursuit of the Great Commission.

Short of revival, Kirk has performed a necessary service. Just as he has done for American families, he has now done for English ones: exposed the ignorance of the modern university. He’s held up a mirror so that every parent might ask, honestly and urgently, whether a diploma is worth the price of their child’s soul.

Richard Dawkins' atheism collides with reality — then it crumbles



Is there a God-shaped hole in every human heart?

The metaphor refers to the sense of longing that humans feel outside the Garden of Eden, the place where humans freely dwelt with God, and it asserts that only God the Creator — as opposed to anything God created — can fill this hole.

Enter prominent atheist Richard Dawkins, who recently felt it necessary to declare the God-shaped hole to be a myth.

Dawkins' assertion is not surprising. He is, after all, one of the most prominent figures of the New Atheism movement, and he never hides his disdain for religion. But what is surprising is why Dawkins decided to reassert his rejection of Christianity and the God-shaped hole.

Dawkins' stand

In December, Dawkins resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in protest of the FFRF's decision to remove an essay titled "Biology Is Not Bigotry" from its blog. In that essay, biologist Jerry Coyne, another member of the New Atheism movement, had rebuked another blog essay that promoted trans ideology and asserted that "a woman is whoever she says she is."

In his resignation letter, Dawkins accused the FFRF of having "caved" to the "hysterical squeals" of the far left, referring to backlash from the LGBTQ community.

That Dawkins would object to the promotion of trans ideology is itself not surprising. Despite his commitment to atheism, Dakwins affirms the truth of biological sex.

Irony abounds

Dawkins' resignation from the FFRF provoked responses that highlight the irony of his supposed principled stand against trans ideology.

Irony 1: Debbie Hayton, a biological man who identifies as transgender, argued that Dawkins' God-less worldview constructs the scaffolding that helps trans ideology seem plausible.

Hayton observed:

[M]aybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a god-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.

In other words, atheism creates a vacuum — for morality, ethics, and all of life's biggest questions — that can and will be filled by "something else," such as trans ideology.

Dawkins later responded to Hayton's claim in an essay titled, "The myth of the God-shaped hole."

"Christianity provides reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Therefore Christianity provides the only reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Some syllogism!" he mocked.

Dawkins called it "patronizing" and "insulting" to "imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational."

Irony 2: But as writer Sarah Haider, herself an atheist, observed, "Except in this case, that may be exactly what has happened!"

Her point? While she also rejects the God-shaped hole, it's clear to her that religion creates a "floor" that, by and large, doesn't make it vulnerable to ideas, like trans ideology, that clearly run afoul of common sense. On the other hand, atheism and the supposed "reason" on which it is built contain inherent "vulnerabilities."

Clearly, one such vulnerability is that it provides a petri dish for trans ideology to flourish.

What Dawkins misses

While it is ironic that a trans-identifying person and an atheist can recognize the pitfalls of Dawkins' worldview, the real problem is that he seems to misunderstand Christian anthropology.

Christianity doesn't simply provide "reasons for rejecting trans nonsense" on the basis of biological sex. Rather, Christians reject trans ideology on the basis of human teleology. Trans ideology not only rejects biological reality, but it rejects, from the Christian perspective, why and for what purpose God created humans in the first place.

The Bible is clear: God created humans, and our bodies, for a purpose — and that purpose, or telos, is key to understanding what humans, and our bodies, are ultimately for.

This is where Dawkins' atheism and his rejection of Christian teleology contradict his crusade against trans ideology.

Theologian Carl Trueman even believes that Dawkins' worldview forces "a dramatic reduction in the importance of biology" because we live in a world that has made biology "a problem or a challenge to be overcome," and Dawkins does not explain why chromosomes, for example, should be granted "decisive authority" when such authority is not given to biological challenges, like cancer and sickness.

"Why should we not treat the difference in biological makeup and functions between men and women as just another set of problems for technology to dispatch to the dustbin of history?" Trueman asks. "Gender theory may seem far-fetched, but if the body has no intrinsic telos and evolution grants authority only to efficient causality, it is hard to understand why an evolutionary scientist would necessarily regard it as problematic."

The question, then, for Dawkins is: What are humans for? What is our purpose?

Christianity provides an answer: God created humanity as male and female in God's image with a specific vocation to multiply and steward creation in partnership with Him. The Bible teaches that humans were created for relationship with God and each other, and humanity's purpose in creation has eternal significance.

Reality strikes

Dawkins can mock the idea of the God-shaped hole, but the cracks in his worldview tell the real story.

If human beings do not have a divine telos, then why should biology (and evolutionary theory built on efficient causality) hold any more authority than feelings and, say, trans ideology? Dawkins' argument against trans ideology — and his worldview in general — is built on sand, making it vulnerable to the crushing waves of whatever philosophy is most fashionable at the moment.

Trans ideology has flourished precisely because Western culture rejects the divine telos.

Rather than accepting a God-given purpose, our culture believes that authentic purpose is found in self-actualization. In such an environment, it makes sense why self-identity — being your "most authentic self" — can override biology.

But Christianity provides a coherent teleology. Christianity not only teaches that humans were created with a purpose, but it tells us what that purpose is. Christianity, therefore, denies that humans are mere biological machines. We are not cosmic accidents.

In the end, Dawkins' rejection of the God-shaped hole only leaves it deeper and emptier than he found it — yet the hole still longs to be filled.

Richard Dawkins wants the goods, but refuses to accept God's truth



The notorious atheist Richard Dawkins has been making the rounds recently with his comment that he is a cultural Christian.

By this, Dawkins means that he would rather live in a culture that is grounded in Christian beliefs than one that is not. He feels “at home” in such a culture. He finds attractive the kinds of cultural practices, including the Christian holidays, that have become part of the cultural heritage gifted to us by Christianity.

Christianity is good and good for the world because it is true.

But Dawkins quickly reminds us that he doesn’t believe Christianity is true. To believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection of the dead is nonsense, obviously false gibberish that could not be the case. Miracles are impossible. So what we have then is a kind of religious atheism. Richard Dawkins wants the benefit of Christianity without believing in Christianity itself.

How are we to think about such claims?

I see at least one good thing and one bad thing in such comments. Let’s break this down.

First, there are two basic objections to Christianity.

Some argue that Christianity is unreasonable. Some argue that Christianity is undesirable. And some argue that Christianity is both unreasonable and undesirable. I would have thought Dawkins is in the third category, arguing that Christianity is both unreasonable and undesirable, especially given things he said in his 2006 book, "The God Delusion." There he argued that religion is both irrational and harmful, and Christianity seemed to be lumped in with all the other religions.

Now, it seems that Dawkins thinks differently, at least concerning Christianity. Christianity is good, even if unreasonable! This, I think, is an advance. He believes Christianity is good and beautiful, but not true.

I’m reminded of Blaise Pascal’s famous prescription on how to go about making the case for Christianity. He writes in "Pensees":

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.

Pascal suggests that in making the case for Christianity, we first show that Christianity is reasonable, then desirable, and then true.

I think, especially today, in an age driven more by felt needs, emotion, desire, and the aesthetic dimensions of life, Pascal’s tight ordering can and should be loosened. We need to show that Christianity is both reasonable and desirable. But for many, seeing the goodness and beauty of Christianity might be a helpful entry point into taking seriously the Christian faith.

In this way, I see it as a positive development that Richard Dawkins, the archnemesis of religion in general and Christianity in particular, is now saying that Christianity is good and beautiful. If he sees the good of Christianity, perhaps others, including the many who have read his screeds against religion, will be willing to consider afresh the claims of Jesus and the gospel.

Second, it is important to remember that we cannot separate goodness and truth.

In the end, goodness and truth are tightly allied. Dawkins thinks Christianity is good and good for the world. At some point, we might hope, he might ask himself how it can be the case that something he thinks so obviously false can be so good for the world. To say of some religion or worldview that it is good is to say it is objectively valuable.

If we removed Christianity from our world, something of value would be lost (according to Dawkins). But, as I’m sure others have pointed out, this idea — the idea of objective value — is inconsistent with Dawkins’ naturalism. He is on record in many places saying, in effect, that given naturalism (his particular version of naturalism is reductive materialism), there is no such thing as objective goodness.

So what we have, then, is an inconsistency in Dawkins’ position. It is unstable. He wants the goodness of Christianity and the truth of naturalism. But that position cannot be consistently held.

This is a problem, of course, but also an opportunity.

We need to press Dawkins and others who think that cultural Christianity is a viable “destination.” It is not. C.S. Lewis reminds us that we must always keep before others the question of truth.

Speaking to a group of Anglican priests and lay leaders in 1945, Lewis argued:

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True — or False’ into stuff about good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland — or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine [their] belief that a certain amount of "religion" is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and if true of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Lewis is right, of course.

Belief in the goodness or desirability of Christianity is not enough. We have to force others back, and back again, to the question of reasonableness and ultimately truth. Christianity is good and good for the world because it is true.

If it were not true, it wouldn’t be good for anyone since being rightly related to reality — truth — and being good are tightly connected.

Thus, if cultural Christianity is viewed as a kind of destination or stopping point on the journey of discovery, then it represents a dead end. It is another false re-enchantment.

But if we think of cultural Christianity in terms of a possible “way station,” a temporary stopping place for many on the way to faith, then I see it as a positive development.

Like many things in culture, there is something good and something bad about the idea of cultural Christianity. It is bad if someone takes this as a settled and coherent position. It is good, of course, if it stirs others to consider afresh the question of Christianity and its relation to truth. We can only hope that the latter is the case.

In our case-making, may we redouble our efforts to show others both the desirability and reasonability of the Christian faith.

This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Substack.

'Junk DNA' is bunk! Why the human genome argues for intelligent design



In my quest to learn the ins and outs of the orthodoxy of evolutionary theory (and therefore bring to light its deficiencies), I discovered geologist and lawyer Dr. Casey Luskin, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.

A proponent, researcher, and advocate for intelligent design, Dr. Luskin has been defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for ID for nearly 20 years.

Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy. How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

I’ve written about it here before, but I shared with Dr. Luskin my personal skepticism concerning the religion of evolution. As a layman (relative to him), it seemed to me as if Evolution™ had an “invisible hand of God” problem that’s never been seriously addressed.

Meet me in the middle

The mythology of Evolution™ seems to have a beginning (the Big Bang), an end (modern Homo sapiens), but no middle. And as I came to understand from my conversation with Dr. Luskin, much of the evidence for evolutionary theory amounts to flimsy, tenuously linked assumptions on the verge of being disproved in various fields.

We began by discussing one of the more popular arguments against intelligent design: the concept of “junk DNA."

The argument goes something like this: If everything is intelligently designed, then why does the vast majority of our DNA seem to serve no purpose?

As Dr. Luskin explained, the idea originated in the early 1960s, when scientists mapped out the molecular protein production process: DNA encodes RNA, which then carries that information to ribosomes, which in turn use it to assemble chains of amino acids into proteins.

Because so much of the DNA that had been studied up to that point did not seem tobe doing that, it was tossed in the proverbial junk bin, hence the name.

Selfish genes

The idea really took off with the publications of Japanese geneticist Susumu Ohno’s “So Much Junk DNA in Our Genome” in 1972 and Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene" in 1976.

Ohno famously asserted that 90% of our DNA was total nonsense. Dawkins piggybacked off that and gave the junk DNA a “purpose,” saying that the only true function of the gene was to replicate itself. Whether or not the gene helps you is of non-substance.

Luskin was one of the first to push back against this idea. As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand how the "junk DNA" theory was used to dismiss the burgeoning ID movement.

Luskin would argue with his professors and peers that it was still premature to conclude that most of our DNA could be classified as “junk,” citing the unfinished-at-the-time Human Genome Project as evidence for the lack of evidence.

Luskin seems to have been onto something. In the past few years, the “junk DNA” theory has slowly unraveled.

God don't make no 'junk'

This is in large part thanks to a groundbreaking series of papers entitled the ENCODE Project, published by biologists studying “non-coding” DNA — the goal being to uncover the mysteries of the human genome.

Since the ENCODE Project began in 2010, it has found that at least 80% of the genome has shown evidence of biochemical functionality. In other words — contrary to junk DNA theory — this DNA is transcribing information into the RNA.

And as for the other 20%?

The lead researchers of the ENCODE Project say that many of these non-coding elements of DNA occur within very specific cell types or circumstances, so to catch them in action doing what they’re supposed to be doing is simply very difficult. But they predict that as they study more and more cell types, that that 80% figure will most certainly jump up to 100%.

All this is to say that applying a Darwinian paradigm to discoveries about gene function has led to erroneous conclusions about "junk DNA" — which then, in turn, has been used to justify the same Darwinian theory that spawned it.

Information, please

Meanwhile, Intelligent Design's predictions that we would find function for that junk DNA have been borne out.

As Luskin pointed out, the origin of life is the origin of information. Life, on its face, is a very strange arrangement of matter.

It’s very easy to find things that are high entropy-high energy (think tornadoes or explosions) or low entropy-low energy (snowflakes, crystals). But life is different. Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy.

How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

Machinery.

Jedi mind trick?

Our cells are full of molecular machines that process and encode information to be used as applicable instructions. That is what our DNA, RNA, and ribosomes are all there for. They’re machines that process information.

Imagine you wanted to watch "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" on DVD. Would you be able to watch it without the DVD player? No.

Imagine if the instructions for building the world’s first ever DVD player were on a DVD. Could you build the DVD player just with the DVD? No.

The information and the information-processing machine are inseparable.

The question then becomes: How did these machines come into being?

Did they build themselves? No, we just showed how that can’t be the case.

The only plausible answer is — intelligence. There needed to be an intelligent designer to create both the machinery and the instructions.

Despite the initial mockery greeting Intelligent Design, the theory is gaining ground as a reliable model and explanation for the origin of life and genes. And that’s simply because the evidence is getting to be a bit undeniable.

Make sure to follow Dr. Casey Luskin’s work here.

America’s Conflicts Are Not Primarily Political Or Ideological, But Religious

Without a civic life shaped by Christianity, there can be no American republic.

Behind Jordan Peterson’s ‘Biblical’ Teaching Is His Own Humanistic Agenda

Sensing a market with Christian evangelicals, Jordan Peterson is leaning into the Bible. The problem is, Peterson is not a Christian.