Gunning for God (37 page)

The second source of evidence for God that we perceive directly has to do with our innate sense of morality – our point (2). We perceive ourselves to be moral beings. The apostle Paul points out that our daily experience of people accusing and excusing each other and themselves is evidence of the fact that we intuitively believe that there is a standard of morality outside of ourselves. If you accuse me of something, your accusation is based on the fact that you expect me to share your moral standard. If I then begin to make excuses, it proves that I do accept that standard. In other words, this everyday human behaviour shows that people believe there is a universal standard outside of themselves; and each of us expects others to conform to it. This universally observed phenomenon constitutes strong evidence for the existence of God. As the Oxford philosopher J. L. Mackie, an atheist, admitted: “If there are objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have a defensible argument from morality to the existence of a god.”
⁹

Immanuel Kant, though he argued that God’s existence could not be proved by pure reason, nevertheless confessed his belief in God on the basis of practical reason. As evidence he listed the two sources we have just discussed: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
¹⁰
Those words are engraved on the headstone of his grave in Kaliningrad.

As this book comes to its conclusion I should like to point out that Dawkins gives the game away in the Dedication at very beginning of his book
The God Delusion
. He cites Douglas Adams (of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
fame): “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Some may think that Dawkins does a great job of getting rid of the fairies; although it must be said that most of us have never believed in them anyway – and if we did we soon grew out of it. But when he sees the beauty of a garden, does Dawkins really believe that there is no gardener? Will he hold that its sublime beauty has come about from raw nature by pure chance? Of course not – for gardens are distinguished from raw nature precisely by the operation of intelligence. And that is just the point. Dawkins has a deserved reputation for describing, in enviable prose, the breathtaking beauty of the garden that is this universe. I find it incomprehensible and rather sad that he presents us with such an obviously false set of alternatives: the garden on its own, or the garden plus fairies. Real gardens do not produce themselves: they have gardeners and owners. Similarly with the universe: it did not generate itself. It has a creator – and an owner.

Twenty centuries ago, in the dawn of an oriental day, a woman, distraught at finding an empty tomb in a garden near the place of crucifixion, saw a man standing in the shadows. Thinking that he was the gardener, she asked him if he had removed the body of Jesus. He spoke her name, “Mary”; and, in a moment of overwhelming understanding, she realized that this was not the gardener but the owner, the Lord of Creation, the one who was ultimately responsible not only for all the beauty of flowers and trees, but for the whole universe in all of its prodigious glory. Jesus had risen from the dead. Death itself had been overcome.

Atheism has no answer to death, no ultimate hope to give. It is an empty and sterile worldview, which leaves us in a closed universe that will ultimately incinerate any last trace that we ever existed. It is, quite literally, a hope-less philosophy. Its story ends in the grave. But the resurrection of Jesus opens the door on a bigger story. It is for each one of us to decide whether it is the true one or not.

NOTES

Introduction

1.
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(hereafter
GD
), London, Bantam Press, 2006.

2.
Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
, London, Bantam Press, 1988, p.175.

3.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,
The Grand Design
, London, Bantam Press, 2010.

4.
Christopher Hitchens,
God is not Great
(hereafter
GNG
), London, Atlantic Books, 2008.

5.
Daniel C. Dennett,
Breaking the Spell
, London, Penguin, 2007.

6.
Ibid
, p.21.

7.
Sam Harris,
The End of Faith, London
, Free Press, 2006.

8.
Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation
, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

9.
Sam Harris,
The Moral Landscape
, New York, Free Press, 2010.

10.
Michel Onfray,
In Defence of Atheism
(hereafter
IDA
), London, Profile Books, 2007.

11.
Perché non possiamo essere cristiani (e meno che mai cattolici)
, Longanesi, 2007.

12.
GD
, p.27.

13.
Reproduced by permission of Fixed-Point Foundation.

14.
Ruth Gledhill,
The Times
, 21 November 2009, p.4.

15.
The God Delusion Debate
, a Fixed-Point DVD, www.fixed-point.org. See also www.dawkinslennoxdebate.com.

16.
John C. Lennox,
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
2nd ed, Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2009.

17.
Has Science Buried God?
A Fixed-Point DVD, www.fixed-point.org.

18.
Can Atheism Save Europe?
A Fixed-Point DVD, www.fixed-point.org.

19.
Is God Great?
A Fixed-Point DVD, www.fixed-point.org.

20.
Intelligence Quotient Squared is a series of public debates sponsored by the Sydney Morning Herald.

21.
Duelling Professors
, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx0CXmagQu0.

22.
www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#!/v/925.

23.
John C. Lennox,
God and Stephen Hawking
, Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2011.

24.
Alister & Joanna McGrath,
The Dawkins Delusion?
London, SPCK, 2007.

25.
Keith Ward,
Why There Almost Certainly Is a God
, Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2008.

26.
David Bentley Hart,
The Dawkins Letters
, Fearn, Christian Focus Publications, 2007.

27.
David Bentley Hart,
Atheist Delusions
, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009.

28.
GD
, p.141.

29.
GNG
, p.5.

30.
Dennett,
Breaking the Spell
, p.21.

31.
Alasdair Maclntyre,
After Virtue
, London, Duckworth, 2003.

32.
See Ward,
Why There Almost Certainly Is a God,
Chapter 8.

33.
Christopher Hitchens,
Letters to a Young Contrarian
, New York, Basic Books, 2001.

34.
GNG
, p.13.

35.
A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists
, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR, 19 October 2009.

36.
Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation
, p.ix.

37.
Der Spiegel
, 26 May 2007, pp.56—69.

38.
Der Spiegel
, 10 September 2007.

39.
Richard Dawkins,
A Devil’s Chaplain
, London, Phoenix, 2004, p.185.

40.
GD
, pp.23—24.

41.
And yet the New Atheists are prepared to accuse God of totalitarianism.

42.
GD
, p.28.

43.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2368534.ece.

44.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/wtwtgod/3518375.stm.

45.
www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm.

46.
Richard Dawkins,
River Out of Eden
, New York, Basic Books, 1995, see also his,
A Devil’s Chaplain
,
op cit.
pp.17—22.

47.
New Scientist
, 18 November 2006, pp.8—11.

48.
See David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.),
Where Science and Christianity Meet
, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp.198—200.

49.
GD
, p.33.

50.
A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists
, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR, 19 October 2009.

51.
McGraths,
The Dawkins Delusion?

52.
John Humphrys,
In God We Doubt
, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2007.

53.
l have interwoven Humphrys’ comments with his statements for sake of clarity.

54.
This role played by evolution in the debate is discussed in more detail in my
God’s Undertaker
.

55.
2 January 2011.

Chapter 1: Are God and Faith Enemies of Reason and Science?

1.
IDA
, pp.12, 13.

2.
Please note the significance of this step in Genesis where hitherto it is God who has provided the names (see Genesis 1 “And God called…”).

3.
Peter Harrison,
The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Science,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

4.
That is, reasons that have to do with the convictions, beliefs, and principles that we already have,
before
we bring them to bear on a situation.

5.
Sir Arthur Eddington,
The End of the World: From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics,
Nature, 127, 1931, p.450.

6.
Sir John Maddox,
Nature
, 340, 1989, p.425.

7.
See my
God’s Undertaker
for more on the use of science by the New Atheists.

8.
Hawking and Mlodinow,
The Grand Design
, p.180.

9.
Hawking and Mlodinow,
The Grand Design
, p.5.

10.
Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
, p.174.

11.
I am well aware that chaotic considerations (sensitivity to initial conditions) make this prediction practically impossible for all but the first few ricochets of the ball.

12.
See Clive Cookson, “Scientists Who Glimpsed God”,
Financial Times
, 29 April 1995, p.20.

13.
C. S. Lewis,
Miracles
, London, Fontana, 1974, p.63.

14.
Richard Feynman,
The Meaning of it all
, London, Penguin, 2007, p.23.

15.
Allan Sandage,
New York Times
, 12 March 1991, p.B9. Or see http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/12/science/sizing-up-the-cosmos-an-astronomer-s-quest.html.

16.
Hawking and Mlodinow,
The Grand Design
, p.164.

17.
For more on this concept, see my
God’s Undertaker
, pp.69–77.

18.
Sir John Polkinghorne,
One World
, London, SPCK, 1986, p.80.

19.
Hannah Devlin, “Hawking: God Did Not Create the Universe”
The Times Eureka
, 12 September 2010.

20.
Eureka
, 12 September 2010, p.23.

21.
Hannah Devlin, “Hawking: God Did Not Create the Universe” 12 September 2010.

22.
For more on this issue see my
God and Stephen Hawking
, Oxford, Lion Hudson, 2011.

23.
GD
, p.74.

24.
Richard Dawkins, “Is science a religion?”
The Humanist
, Jan/Feb 1997, pp.26–39.

25.
Richard Dawkins,
Daily Telegraph
Science Extra, 11 September 1989.

26.
IDA
, p.28.

27.
We note in passing that this statement is a rather blatant instance of begging the question.

28.
Julian Baggini,
Atheism – A Very Short Introduction
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.32, 33.

29.
http://atheistempire.com/atheism/faith.php.

30.
Baggini,
Atheism
, p.31.

31.
GD
, p.348.

32.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that revelation (in the biblical sense) is not a feeling but involves the claim that God can and has shown us things that would otherwise be inaccessible to the unaided human intellect. Nor does revelation preclude reason since reason has to be used on it to see whether it makes sense and to consider evidence for its truth-claims.