Richard Dawkins and the God of the Old Testament

[Randy Carson]

Richard Dawkins, Misguided Mentor


Over the past few months, I have observed and participated in a number of threads regarding the moral character of God as portrayed in the Old Testament.

Richard Dawkins undoubtedly spoke for many when he wrote:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Devastating stuff at first blush. But Dr. Benjamin Wiker takes Dawkins' ideas and goes a little deeper with them. Wiker asks:

Suppose upon reading his devastating attack on the God of the Old Testament, we would reject the Bible and embrace Dawkins' atheism—exactly what Dawkins wishes to be the effect on readers. What then? Would we be any better off?

Wiker notes that in coming over to the atheist side, we face a number of new problems that arise.

First of all, as he himself admits in his book River out of Eden, in coming over to Dawkins' side, we have thereby embraced a cosmos indifferent to good or evil. As a consequence, we immediately face a dilemma: we have no moral grounds for condemning the actions of God (He doesn't exist) or the characters in the Bible (good and evil don't exist). Since God doesn't exist, there is no reason to work up a froth of indignation against Him, anymore than against the lunkheaded Zeus in Homer's Iliad.

Yet now another, more amusing problem arises for Dawkins as the champion of Darwinism today. It would seem that a good many of the complaints made by Dawkins against the God of the Old Testament could with equal justice be made against natural selection itself. To say the least, that puts himself in a paradoxical position.

Applying the principles and logic of natural selection to an "Evolution God", Wiker asks a number of questions:

...many sociologists of religion argue that primitive people tend to fashion their notions of the gods according to the way they experience nature, as nature deified .... What would evolution look like if we tried to deify evolution's principles?

Would the Evolution God (EG) be "unjust" in its callous indifference "to all suffering," and supremely so, for continually picking off the weak and sickly?

Would EG be an "unforgiving control-freak," "megalomaniacal," and "petty" since (as Darwin stated), "It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relations to its organic and inorganic conditions of life"?

Would EG be "sadomasochistic" in his use of suffering, destruction, and death as the means to create new forms of life? A "capriciously malevolent bully" in his "lacking all purpose" and being "callous"? A "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," "genocidal," and "racist" in his continually pitting one species population against another in severe struggle, the struggles among humans taking place between tribe and tribe, race and race? And what adjective would describe EG, who uses these deadly struggles as the very vehicle responsible for the upward climb of human evolution?

So we've rejected the God of the Old Testament for Dawkins' atheistic account of evolution, only to find out that many of the traits Dawkins marked as repugnant are ensconced in natural selection (except that now, as a new and even more unfortunate kind of Job, we have no one against whom to complain).

Clearly, a deified Evolution is no less objectionable than the God of the Old Testament. But what of the people of the OT, the Jews themselves? Wiker notes:

On Dawkins' own grounds, it would be hard to imagine a people who more assiduously pursued a better set of evolutionary strategies for ensuring that its gene pool was carried forward, undiluted by rival tribes and races, than the ancient Jews. They were genetic geniuses!

Consequently, it seems to me that the atheists who reject the God of the OT on moral grounds are hoisted by their own petard. As Wiker concludes:

What, then, is left of Dawkins' case against the God of the Old Testament? Nothing at all.

Taken from:

Richard Dawkins and the God of the Old Testament
by Dr. Benjamin Wiker
http://www.strangenotions.com/richard-da...testament/