Dawkins’ anti-gospel

The Health and Wealth Prosperity teachers are a blight upon Christianity. They offer a dumbed-down and exploitative version of the gospel, which turns it from something beautiful into something ugly. It’s some-thing which all decent Christian teachers should warn against.

Now it appears that the New Atheist Fundamentalists have their own Health and Wealth Prosperity evangelist. Richard Dawkins has returned to the fray with a new book, Outgrowing God, which demonstrates all the qualities of the worst tele-evangelist.

Exploitative

The Guardian is right when it describes Outgrowing God as ‘an accessible, “junior” version of The God Delusion (2006)’.

The arguments Dawkins uses in Outgrowing God are just a rehash of those in The God Delusion. So we have all the old ones – atheists just worship one god less; evolution proves there is no God; you don’t need God for morality; and of course the oldie but goldie ‘who created God, then?’ He’s even got the same old stories and illustrations – the cargo cult, the universe where you have a green moustache, the (mis)citation of Hitler, etc.

It’s exploitative, because people are being asked to fork out lots of money for a book that is a dumbed-down version of The God Delusion – which in turn was a dumbed-down version of previous atheist arguments. It’s exploitative, because Dawkins is charging up to £40 per ticket to hear him say to people that there is no God – something they already believe and will lap up. A fool and his money are easily parted. The Godless Prophet is finding his Atheism to be quite profitable.

A loose association with the truth

What matters is style and not substance. It doesn’t matter so much what you say, but how you say it. As long as you are on the main message, then examples, illustrations and logic can be removed from the truth. Dawkins argues as though he had just done a Google search to find things that confirm his prejudices. The Bible is bad, Jesus probably didn’t exist, science disproves God, etc. And look – I found something on the Internet that proves it!

It’s always astonished me that the more extreme the claim of the tele-evangelist (like Todd Bentley’s claim to have raised people from the dead, which he couldn’t evidence because of confidentiality laws!), the more people seem to believe it. This is Goebbels’ law – ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’ Dawkins, in asserting The Big Lie, uses a series of smaller ones to make his case. He asserts with such authority things which are false. A couple of examples: his statement that the Epic of Gilgamesh is written in Sumerian. It isn’t. It is in Akkadian. Another example is his claim that Abraham could not have existed when Genesis said he did (2nd millennium BC) because camels (mentioned in Genesis) were not domesticated until hundreds of years afterwards – and yet we have evidence of camels being used in the 3rd millennium BC.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is seen, not just in Dawkins own rather loose use of the facts, but also in the reactions and reviews of those who want what he says to be true. The whole anti-Christian establishment joined in the chorus of praise for the new emperor’s clothes. The BBC conducted a sycophantic interview. Philip Pullman spoke of the book as though it were already a classic. Mark Smith in The Herald said that his reasoning was ‘irresistible’. The Times rather mockingly stated: ‘Richard Dawkins has always had it in for the Almighty and he’s back to take another pop at the poor bloke. Here he outlines what he believes is the real meaning of life.’ No one dared to rigorously question, fact-check or even doubt the Prophet of Atheism. It’s almost as if they wanted what he says to be true – no matter how inaccurate, badly argued or repetitive.

If you want to understand how Dawkins works, take this example: ‘No serious scholar today thinks that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses.’ Here you need to grasp how Dawkins uses language. ‘Serious scholar’ means ‘someone who agrees with me’… if they don’t they obviously can be neither serious nor a scholar. Which is why he can dismiss, if he even knows about, Professor Richard Bauckham of the University of St Andrews, whose serious scholarly work Jesus and the Eyewitness is an authoritative piece of academic research.

Those who want to be seen as ‘serious scholars’ or ‘intellectuals’ must agree with Dawkins. Christian apologists, preachers and evangelists must not follow this fundamentalist binary model. We must be honest, avoid distorting facts and above all learn to present the truth, beauty and person of Jesus Christ. He is The Truth. And Truth will prevail.

Dawkins wants to assure us that the atheist emperor is covered in a fine robe of scientific rationalism. He argues that those who do not see this are ‘uneducated’ and, to be frank, quite thick. Of course there are those who declare, in the fawning interviews and book reviews, that the emperor is fully clothed and in his right mind. But his book only demonstrates that the emperor is naked. The childish arguments and sneering mockery only show his inability to see beyond his own prejudices and preconceptions. It’s time for him to outgrow his atheism and mature in his thinking. If our society follows the philosophy and faith of Dawkins we will be heading into a dark abyss. It’s time for another Christian Enlightenment.