Richard Dawkins: The Self-Refuting Argument

When man tries to deny reality, purpose becomes nothing but a fantasy.

In the world we live in today, especially in America, job opportunities are endless. Anyone can be anything they want. If you work hard enough, you can even make your own career, simply by doing something no one has thought of doing that way before.

Still, even in this age of infinite career paths, it’s sort of surprising (at least to me) to see someone who is making a living as a professional atheist. The person of whom I’m speaking hardly needs an introduction, since his name is known worldwide as nearly synonymous with the word “atheist” (and was mentioned in the title of this article), but for courtesy’s sake, I’ll give him one anyway.    

Dr. Richard Dawkins is the author of several books, an ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior), an evolutionary biologist, and a recipient of the Fellowship of the Royal Society award[1]. He is also a well-known, very outspoken atheist and critic of religion, as is evidenced by this quote taken from a 1997 article he wrote for The Humanist:  

“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.”[2]     

Richard Dawkins

In the same article, Dr. Dawkins goes on to say that “Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.” It’s rather obvious that he isn’t willing to give a nanosecond of consideration to the possibility that any “religious faith” might be logical and substantiated by “verifiable evidence.”

But this is where we come to the first inconsistency of Richard Dawkins’s worldview. As we just observed, Dr. Dawkins is very adamantly opposed to the idea of faith. And yet, when one takes a closer look at his writings, it becomes clear that he himself has faith. And not only faith, but passionate faith, a faith which is unable to be verified by evidence.

Dr. Dawkins has classified himself as a “de facto atheist”, stating his beliefs about God as follows:

“I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”[3]

Richard Dawkins

So, even in his own words, Richard Dawkins reveals that he does indeed have faith. It is faith is God’s nonexistence rather than in His person, work, and Word, but it’s faith nevertheless, a faith on which Dr. Dawkins bases the way that he lives! If there was verifiable evidence that God does not exist, Dr. Dawkins would not have to be content thinking that His existence is merely “improbable”. He could just point to the evidence as the grounds for knowing rather than assuming that God does not exist. But there isn’t evidence to support that assumption, so he can’t state it as an absolute fact (and even if he tried to, it wouldn’t change anything).

The second inconsistency we see in Dr. Dawkins comes in the form of his stance on social matters. He is a feminist, a humanist, and a supporter of the Great Ape Project, which seeks to give basic moral and legal rights to all “non-human” great apes on earth. But, if you think about it, none of that makes any sense in an evolutionary worldview. (And that last one is just plain weird.) If he is correct in his statement that the universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference,”[4] how can Dr. Dawkins say that feminism is “enormously important” and “a political movement that deserves to be supported”[5]? If there is no purpose to anything, why bother trying to create one? Who cares that people are dying of curable diseases, that feminists aren’t getting what they want, or that gorillas are put in cages at zoos? If it’s all meaningless and going to be destroyed anyway when the universe’s energy runs out, what’s the point in caring about it, much less wasting one’s own energy trying to do anything to change the way things are?                                                       

Now for the third inconsistency. When Dr. Dawkins speaks of religious faith as being an “evil”, where does he get his standard? Where does he get the idea that something can be evil? Certainly not from his own worldview, which excludes any concept of evil or good, as is demonstrated in the previously noted quote from his book River Out of Eden (see footnote four). In this we see that Dr. Dawkins’s practical worldview is in direct conflict with his stated worldview. If the two were consistent, he wouldn’t give a hoot about what faith supposedly is or is not. He wouldn’t write or give lectures about his own beliefs in order to persuade others to believe them. He would simply let others do what they want to do, and leave it at that, because, as before stated, if there is no purpose in the universe, there is no purpose anywhere for anyone. If the human race and everything else came about by purely random chemical processes over billions of years, then there was no purpose to life, there is no purpose to life, and there never will be any purpose to life. So why bother? Just let everyone do, think, and believe as they please. This postmodern worldview, which Dawkins has implied that he does not esteem very highly[6], is the only logical end of evolution, of which he is by trade a strong proponent. So how in the world does that work?      

But now we come to the fourth and final inconsistency, and main point of this article. As bad as the first three are, this last contradiction of Dawkins’s is the worst, and by far the most grievous.

Professor Dawkins very strongly denies the existence of the God of the Bible, often doing so in very blasphemous language (just go to www.goodreads.com and skim over a few quotes from his book The God Delusion–yikes). He rejects the notion that God exists, even though he says that on the scale of theistic probability, where a 1 is absolute certainty that God exists and a 7 is absolute certainty that He doesn’t, he himself is only a 6.9.

Now, 6.9 out of 7 might seem pretty close to absolute certainty—but shouldn’t even that 0.1 percent of doubt be enough to cause Dr. Dawkins concern? If he’s willing to admit that he doesn’t know for sure that God doesn’t exist, shouldn’t he be open to the consideration that he doesn’t know everything and could be wrong?

The fact is that if Dr. Dawkins is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God, he is wrong about everything else. What’s horrifying about it is that, despite what he claims, Richard Dawkins is wrong. And he knowingly proves it every day, because his very existence is his own downfall.                                                   

Richard Dawkins is the ultimate contradiction, the paramount self-refuting argument, for he denies the existence of God while he exists as a human being created in the image of God. Dawkins calls religious faiths and systems ridiculous, but he is in fact being ridiculous himself. His arguing against God’s existence is on the same level of a mirror denying the existence of the man whose face it reflects, and both have the same end—absolute absurdity. There is simply no other name for it.                              

Dr. Dawkins has been labeled an excellent scientist and a very intelligent man by the secular world. That much is obvious if you just look at the letters behind his name. But in reality, the most mentally impaired Christian is more intelligent than Richard Dawkins could ever hope to be while he still clings to his atheistic beliefs. Because the Christian does not fight against God’s existence, which is the sole most important fact in and beyond the universe; Richard Dawkins, with all his education and awards, does.                                         

I am in no way, shape, or form trying to insult Dr. Dawkins. I don’t hate him, and that’s why I wrote this article. I want him to see the error of his thinking and actions, but not so he will convert to theism and creation science. I want him to repent of his sins and trust in Christ, who is God manifest in human form, so that he will give glory to God, be saved from hell, and be received into the realm of light, redeemed from the kingdom of darkness. I pray that God in His magnificent grace will grant Dr. Dawkins spiritual life and repentance from his sins, renew his soul, and draw him to Himself through Jesus Christ to the praise of His glorious name.

Dawkins dismisses the concepts of the Incarnation, salvation, and hell (along with all other Christian doctrines) as false and misleading, but they are true, whether he accepts them or not. And God does exist, in all His infinite glory, holiness, righteousness, and truth. And because He is holy, He cannot allow sin (the breaking of His holy Law) to abide in His presence; because He is just and loving, He will not allow that sin to go unpunished.

We have seen that Dawkins is wrong in a number of ways, one of the most obvious being his claim that there is no justice, no good or evil, in the universe. God is good— that is, He is the very essence and source of all goodness—so everything He is and does is good and right. So, because He is good and holy, He cannot and He will not allow sin or the sinners who commit it to go unpunished. That righteous, holy wrath that God has for all sin will be satisfied in one of two ways—either Christ has paid for it on the cross for those who believe in Him, or the person who continues to refuse to repent and trust in Christ alone for salvation will pay for it eternally in hell. That is what God’s holiness, what His very nature, demands, so it will be accomplished, whether we like it, hate it, understand it, or not.  

Dawkins may not realize it, but he (along with every other atheist) is staking his life and soul on what even he calls an “assumption.” It’s an assumption that is as fragile as a spider’s web, and before God’s judgement throne it will be just as insignificant as a dead leaf is when it is placed in the flames of a blazing fire. I pray that he and those with the same misplaced faith will realize this before it leads to their downfall, both in the present and in eternity.

SDG <><

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins, accessed December 16, 2019.

[2] Dawkins, Richard (1 January 1997). “Is Science A Religion?”. The Humanist. Archived from the original on 30 October 2012. Accessed December 16, 2019.

[3] See footnote one.

[4] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

[5] See footnote one.

[6] “In 1998, Dawkins expressed his appreciation for two books connected with the Sokal affair, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt and Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Jean Bricmont. These books are famous for their criticism of postmodernism in US universities (namely in the departments of literary studies, anthropology, and other cultural studies).” Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins.