Richard Dawkins : Planting God More Firmly on His Throne, part 1 of 10

This is part one of ten part essay responding to various assertions made about the Bible by Professor Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion.

Professor of biology, Richard Dawkins,
“Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists.”[1]

Physicist, and former Chairman of the Department of Materials Science at Stanford, Richard Bube,
“There are proportionately as many atheistic truck drivers as there are atheistic scientists.”[2]

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Setting the Stage
Part 3: Who is My Neighbor?, part 1 of 2
Part 4: Who is My Neighbor?, part 2 of 2
Part 5: Family Values and Moral Cherry Picking, part 1 of 2
Part 6: Family Values and Moral Cherry Picking, part 2 of 2
Part 7: The Genesis Myth? and Sodom and Gomorra
Part 8: On the Sacrifice of Isaac and Faith
Part 9: Lot and His Daughters, The Levite and Jephthah and His Daughter
Part 10: The Dawkinsian Meme is an Enthymeme

Introduction
In his book The God Delusion Prof. Richard Dawkins approvingly quotes Irish playwright and poet Sean O'Casey’s statement, “Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.”[3] I have thus far not been able to determine when O'Casey made that statement. O'Casey, a supporter of the Soviet Union, lived 1880-1964 and appeared to have an extremely loose definition of precisely what Communism is since he defined a Communist as “anyone who tries to help humanity.” Then again O'Casey is said to have been “more concerned with poetry than logic; more with shoulder-heaving laughter than with back-bending research.” We can only assume that living until 1964 offered plenty of opportunity to witness that religion has slain its tens of thousands, but political atheism has slain its tens of millions.

It is interesting to note that Prof. Richard Dawkins states that he chooses to besmirch Christianity and the Bible in particular and at length since those subjects are known to him. Prof. Richard Dawkins was brought up in the Anglican Church and abandoned it around the age of 16 after realizing that, as we discuss at length in our essay The Gap Filler, Darwinism was big enough to do the job. This, mind you, was not because at that tender age he read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life but “because I was taught”—like so much scripture book, chapter and verse. In studying biology Prof. Richard Dawkins looks through a microscope and infers atheism—what a tragic misapplication of science. This makes us recall statements by William Lane Craig who notes just how many atheists abandoned their “religion” (whatever that means) as children and maintain a childlike conceptualization of that which they abandoned. When asked is there was ever a time that he believed in God Prof. Richard Dawkins responded, “As a child I did.”[4] This is quite evident in the New Atheist activist’s references to the Bible as “a magic book” or “fairy-tales,” Jesus’ miracles as “magical powers,” and God as an “imaginary friend,” or “sky daddy.” No doubt that this tickles those whom already agree with them but to the rest of us it is all too reminiscent of playground bullying and role playing with superheroes. What next, will they triple-dog-dare theists to debate?

[1] Wired Magazine online: Gary Wolf, The Church of the Non-Believers (found here and here)
[2] Byron Barlowe (Leadership University Editor/Webmaster), Science & Religion: Oil & Water?
[3] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), p. 235
[4] Nick Pollard talks to Dr. Richard Dawkins (interviewed February 28th, 1995 published in Third Way in the April 1995 edition [vol 18 no. 3])