How the failure of Christian education has enabled Richard Dawkins' atheism—and why even he now thinks society has gone too far in jettisoning Christianity
Bill this is excellent work and i agree w your list…looking forward to more as your expand on each. Of particular interest to me is the question of what precisely breaks college students of their faith. It seems to me to possibly be breaking of habit versus and outright intellectual assault. Thanks for the article.
"Woke ideology is not a betrayal of scientific materialism but its logical conclusion."
Great post, Dr. Dembski! :)
I want to add that I fear it's not a remote possibility that, in turn, woke ideology could become totalitarian if given the right opportunity.
In this respect, there's something to be said for the connection between the evolutionary materialism of people like Dawkins, widely shared by the Western intelligentsia today, and totalitarian systems of government.
(By the way, I don't use intelligentsia to refer to true intellectuals, but rather to the faux intellectuals; that is, those who may believe they're intellectuals, and who may even hold positions at academic and similar institutions, but whose quality of work if judged strictly on the merits is intellectually lacking to say the least. The true intellectuals may or may not hold any academic post or similar position. Indeed, given our homogenous or monolithic academic climate today, I doubt most true intellectuals do. Yet their work would be considered of the highest intellectual caliber or quality based on objective standards. As such, I use intelligentsia similar to how it was used by, for example, the Soviets, or how it is used by the present day Chinese Communist Party, who have displaced, sent into exile, or otherwise "disappeared" the true intellectuals, and substituted the true intellectuals with their intelligentsia. In fact, the true intellectuals in Russia before Lenin and the Russian revolution stood vehemently against the intelligentsia - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, etc. Same with their predecessors like Pushkin who would have too. Indeed, Dostoevsky, for one, even predicted that a kind of Napoleonic "great man" or Nietzschan "will to power" or Melian "might makes right" mentality would possess many of his fellow Russians and lead to bloody revolution in his works The Possessed/The Demons, Crime and Punishment, and elsewhere.)
And some or many ID proponents have made this point in the past: it's not necessarily a fallacious slippery slope from evolutionary materialism to woke ideology to totalitarianism.
At the time, many found it almost laughable, or at least were utterly incredulous about the purported connection, but given the Zeitgeist of the West now, it's no longer a laughing matter, but very much a live possibility if not a high plausibility.
Alas! we live the Chinese curse of living in "interesting" times.
Thanks for this comment EoD. You write: "I fear it's not a remote possibility that, in turn, woke ideology could become totalitarian if given the right opportunity." I would put this more starkly: "Woke ideology is seeking every opportunity to establish totalitarian control." To make an analogy with the French Revolution, Dawkins is a (moderate) Girondin to the Woke (radical) Jacobins. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins is one of the first to be liquidated if we get to the terror stage -- the politics of maximal intimidation. Happily, we're not there yet.
This is an outstanding expose of the transformations in the philosophy expressed for many years by Richard Dawkins, whom I debated via email a few decades ago. Back then he wrote that none of what he sent me could be published with but one exception: "I warmly congratulate the Editors of Scientific American for firing Forrest Mims." (Feb 16, 1997.) I lost the Scientific American column because I reject Darwinian evolution, and the background of the exchange with Dawkins is given in "Maverick Scientist," my new memoir, in which I agreed with Dawkins. Why? Writing the Scientific American column would have become a full-time career that would have blocked the highly productive science career I successfully pursued. Based on Bill Dembski's essay about the easing of Dawkin's anti-Christian views, perhaps I should renew our correspondence.
Bill, glad you are on Substack. I've joined and will be building a home for lots of photos and data. The Nature of Nature conference is covered on pp. 255-258 in "Maverick Scientist," my new memoir. Your role is covered as is my encounter with Steven Weinberg after my talk on UV. Included is a key quotation from Robert Sloan's lengthy response to the many heretics on Baylor's faculty. You and that conference will be remembered long after the Baylor faculty has met its eventual fate. BTW, I made peace with Martin Gardner ("Mathematical Recreations" in Scientific American) during an afternoon visit at his home in North Carolina. He was intrigued by a cricket suspended in a beautiful blob of ancient amber I showed him. He was surprised when I was able to solve a mechanical puzzle he had created. He said only two others had solved it, both being women. He drove me to an apartment where he stored thousands of copies of his many books and articles. After leaving that evening, I enjoyed a total lunar eclipse while driving west toward Texas.
Thanks for sharing this story about Martin Gardner. He was a skeptic who lost his faith as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Phil Johnson used to give students going off to seminary a copy of Gardner's semi-autobiographical THE FLIGHT OF PETER FROMM, which I would read with my apologetics students at seminary. That book details the incremental loss of faith of a college student as he is exposed to one modern heresy after another. Darwinism looms large in this loss of faith as described in this book (p52):
"Darwin did commit a murder, or rather several murders. His great book was a death blow to the literal interpretation of the Bible and also a mortal blow against the doctrines of Original Sin and Atonement. Were not Darwin’s opponents exactly right in contending that the central doctrines of Christian orthodoxy hang and fall together? “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,” was the way the old Puritan school readers put it. Knock over the doctrine of the Fall, and the others, including Jehovah himself, topple like the proverbial row of dominoes."
Gardner always struck me as someone who regretted losing his faith.
Here is a thesis I have and it obviously involve England which Dawkins knows well.
The modern world is the result of two things, Christianity and individual freedom. Christianity existed for over 1500 hundred years throughout a large part of the world but no modern world emerged. Lots of minor progress but nothing major especially for the average person.
Then Henry VIii had no heir so he kicked the Catholics out and appointed himself as head of his own church. It was the time of Luther and Calvin. So there developed at least two forms of Protestantism and eventually both or more persisted. So freedom for each’s members extended much further down the social scale. Individual freedom began to grow in a sea of rival Christianities for the first time in the world. Innovation also began to grow both in England and then in its colonies.
Voila, the Industrial Revolution, quickly copied by other parts of Europe. It didn’t happen in Spain and Portugal or their colonies, the richest countries from the discovery of the Americas. It didn’t happen in other Protestant European countries.
Now 2 1/2 centuries later the two forces behind the great global expansion is disappearing. Both freedom and Christianity are on the wane. The Western world is enthralled with technology that has brought incredible well being. But the human being has not changed. Power still drives a small number to dominate. But will they use this technology to control and limit freedom and will there be no ideology that all accepted to moderate their power
Does Dawkins see this without realizing that besides the niceties of Christmas Carols and civility what he really misses is the stabilizing influence of Christianity on power.
I'm not saying Henry VIII knowingly caused the Industrial Revolution 2 1/2 centuries later. But he did introduce Protestantism to England and this had an effect. One that Henry hadn't a clue about. Henry was interested in power only and not religion and certainly not changing the world..
If Henry had 3-4 sons by Catherine of Aragon who then had 6-8 grandsons, there would have been no introduction of Protestantism to England. Catherine's nephew, Charles V, was the most powerful person in Europe and with the help of Henry would have probably eliminated Protestantism in Europe.
No freedom for the little guy, no Industrial Revolution and probably no United States in the English colonies if they ever developed.
My point is that what happened led to greater freedom for the common person and to technological innovation. The main early changes were from steam and textiles.
It's always difficult to play"what if" but this seems to logically follow. I am open to any ideas or criticisms.
Why don’t you destroy atheism in 500 words or less.
I believe it can be done but I never saw it done. It’s what been missing from religious education since the beginning. It wasn’t necessary for thousands of years since nearly everyone believed in God. The question was the correct version of God.
But starting in the enlightenment, alternative deities (deism for example) started to appear in the West as well as attacks on theism in general. To the point 140 years ago Nietzsche declared “God is dead and we killed Him.”
So complaining about teaching our youth is missing an essential ingredient, namely, a short essay on why atheism is bogus.
"He also laments the rampant loss of reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking, and respect for science in the academy and wider culture. In other words, he laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any current figure also to bring about this shift."
******
Indeed. Materialist reductionism is incompatible with the idea that we objectively can have beliefs or thoughts with objectively real propositional content that is objectively true or false. Hence, anyone who advances materialist reductionism is implicitly attacking reason and truth and is contributing to the societal abandonment of same. And since human beings are biological creatures, anyone who advances materialist reductionism in biology specifically (aka Darwinism) is attacking reason even closer to home, so to speak.
But Dawkins is particularly guilty of contributing to post-modernist insanity in an even more direct way than that. His whole ridiculous "meme theory" was a *direct* and *explicit* assault on the existence of reason. The whole point of that theory (if you can even call it a theory) was to reconstrue human thought in a way that eliminated the existence of a rational self who deliberates and reasons about propositions using universal laws of logic to determine which are true, and to instead construe the propositions themselves as little viruses mindlessly infecting and spreading their way through hosts in a Darwinian manner.
Of course, Dawkins has always been a sloppy thinker, and as such he was never consistent in thinking through the implications of what came out of his mouth, and instead used so-called "meme theory" mostly as a polemic to bash only religious beliefs with. But others who ran with Dawkins' meme nonsense and who have a reputation for being at least somewhat more thoughtful than Dawkins himself, like Stephen Pinker, have also been complaining about the woke anti-rational takeover of the academic world lately, yet likewise remain seemingly totally clueless about their own very obvious contribution to it.
How can allegedly smart individuals be so clueless and incapable of putting two and two together even now? But then, I have to catch myself somewhat, because as you point out in the rest of your essay, complacency, silence, and intellectual shallowness in the Christian world as all this lunacy has been building up around us has been very much to blame for this mess as well.
A meme is just an idea that is memorably articulated and so becomes influential. The term is therefore entirely dispensable because existing words are able to capture it. That said, it is a brilliant stroke for denigrating ideas that Dawkins doesn't like, such as belief in God, characterizing them as the equivalent of viral genes. As you note, there is no "Meme Theory" -- it doesn't and indeed can't rise to that. But as a rhetorical ploy, it has been effective. It does seem now to be biting RD in the hindquarters. What's lacking from memes is responsibility -- as infections of the mind, they latch themselves on and so we are not free agents to engage and refute them. But RD still wants to maintain some place for responsibility, such as for reason and truth in science. Woke ideology, which he has helped inspire, won't give him that and is happy to use memes to undercut all responsibility.
I think originally Dawkins thought that the whole meme idea could be a serious account of how human cognition actually works in general. But it was so half-baked, and it was so immediately obvious that any beliefs arrived at in the manner so described would necessarily be irrational, that he couldn't possibly maintain that. The whole thing would fall apart the moment anyone asked "So is belief in evolution a meme?"
And of course, Dawkins being Dawkins, he couldn't help but use it as a polemical weapon to bash religious belief specifically at every chance he got, which only served to give the game away entirely.
Dawkins' flirtations with "cultural christianity" is typical of the essential emotional and intellectual incontinence of the man.
It's a simply brutal logical proposition: a bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit.
If Christianity is bearing good fruit then it is a good tree.
But now Dawkins has spent most of his career and his public credibility attacking the root of the tree, he wants to cry about the loss of the free fruit it provided him and his ludicrous cohort of celebrity atheists.
Bill this is excellent work and i agree w your list…looking forward to more as your expand on each. Of particular interest to me is the question of what precisely breaks college students of their faith. It seems to me to possibly be breaking of habit versus and outright intellectual assault. Thanks for the article.
"Woke ideology is not a betrayal of scientific materialism but its logical conclusion."
Great post, Dr. Dembski! :)
I want to add that I fear it's not a remote possibility that, in turn, woke ideology could become totalitarian if given the right opportunity.
In this respect, there's something to be said for the connection between the evolutionary materialism of people like Dawkins, widely shared by the Western intelligentsia today, and totalitarian systems of government.
(By the way, I don't use intelligentsia to refer to true intellectuals, but rather to the faux intellectuals; that is, those who may believe they're intellectuals, and who may even hold positions at academic and similar institutions, but whose quality of work if judged strictly on the merits is intellectually lacking to say the least. The true intellectuals may or may not hold any academic post or similar position. Indeed, given our homogenous or monolithic academic climate today, I doubt most true intellectuals do. Yet their work would be considered of the highest intellectual caliber or quality based on objective standards. As such, I use intelligentsia similar to how it was used by, for example, the Soviets, or how it is used by the present day Chinese Communist Party, who have displaced, sent into exile, or otherwise "disappeared" the true intellectuals, and substituted the true intellectuals with their intelligentsia. In fact, the true intellectuals in Russia before Lenin and the Russian revolution stood vehemently against the intelligentsia - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, etc. Same with their predecessors like Pushkin who would have too. Indeed, Dostoevsky, for one, even predicted that a kind of Napoleonic "great man" or Nietzschan "will to power" or Melian "might makes right" mentality would possess many of his fellow Russians and lead to bloody revolution in his works The Possessed/The Demons, Crime and Punishment, and elsewhere.)
And some or many ID proponents have made this point in the past: it's not necessarily a fallacious slippery slope from evolutionary materialism to woke ideology to totalitarianism.
At the time, many found it almost laughable, or at least were utterly incredulous about the purported connection, but given the Zeitgeist of the West now, it's no longer a laughing matter, but very much a live possibility if not a high plausibility.
Alas! we live the Chinese curse of living in "interesting" times.
Thanks for this comment EoD. You write: "I fear it's not a remote possibility that, in turn, woke ideology could become totalitarian if given the right opportunity." I would put this more starkly: "Woke ideology is seeking every opportunity to establish totalitarian control." To make an analogy with the French Revolution, Dawkins is a (moderate) Girondin to the Woke (radical) Jacobins. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins is one of the first to be liquidated if we get to the terror stage -- the politics of maximal intimidation. Happily, we're not there yet.
This is an outstanding expose of the transformations in the philosophy expressed for many years by Richard Dawkins, whom I debated via email a few decades ago. Back then he wrote that none of what he sent me could be published with but one exception: "I warmly congratulate the Editors of Scientific American for firing Forrest Mims." (Feb 16, 1997.) I lost the Scientific American column because I reject Darwinian evolution, and the background of the exchange with Dawkins is given in "Maverick Scientist," my new memoir, in which I agreed with Dawkins. Why? Writing the Scientific American column would have become a full-time career that would have blocked the highly productive science career I successfully pursued. Based on Bill Dembski's essay about the easing of Dawkin's anti-Christian views, perhaps I should renew our correspondence.
Nice to have you here, Forrest. We go back a long time. Let us know if you contact Dawkins and what response, if any, you get.
Serendipitous to see youre both here- two charming people. Ann kelly
Very nice to find you here as well, Ann!
Bill, glad you are on Substack. I've joined and will be building a home for lots of photos and data. The Nature of Nature conference is covered on pp. 255-258 in "Maverick Scientist," my new memoir. Your role is covered as is my encounter with Steven Weinberg after my talk on UV. Included is a key quotation from Robert Sloan's lengthy response to the many heretics on Baylor's faculty. You and that conference will be remembered long after the Baylor faculty has met its eventual fate. BTW, I made peace with Martin Gardner ("Mathematical Recreations" in Scientific American) during an afternoon visit at his home in North Carolina. He was intrigued by a cricket suspended in a beautiful blob of ancient amber I showed him. He was surprised when I was able to solve a mechanical puzzle he had created. He said only two others had solved it, both being women. He drove me to an apartment where he stored thousands of copies of his many books and articles. After leaving that evening, I enjoyed a total lunar eclipse while driving west toward Texas.
Thanks for sharing this story about Martin Gardner. He was a skeptic who lost his faith as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Phil Johnson used to give students going off to seminary a copy of Gardner's semi-autobiographical THE FLIGHT OF PETER FROMM, which I would read with my apologetics students at seminary. That book details the incremental loss of faith of a college student as he is exposed to one modern heresy after another. Darwinism looms large in this loss of faith as described in this book (p52):
"Darwin did commit a murder, or rather several murders. His great book was a death blow to the literal interpretation of the Bible and also a mortal blow against the doctrines of Original Sin and Atonement. Were not Darwin’s opponents exactly right in contending that the central doctrines of Christian orthodoxy hang and fall together? “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,” was the way the old Puritan school readers put it. Knock over the doctrine of the Fall, and the others, including Jehovah himself, topple like the proverbial row of dominoes."
Gardner always struck me as someone who regretted losing his faith.
Hello bill! Accidentally started reading your substack this morning and thought, who wrote this?! Glad to find you here!
Oh hi forrest! Great story- never had heard that.
Here is a thesis I have and it obviously involve England which Dawkins knows well.
The modern world is the result of two things, Christianity and individual freedom. Christianity existed for over 1500 hundred years throughout a large part of the world but no modern world emerged. Lots of minor progress but nothing major especially for the average person.
Then Henry VIii had no heir so he kicked the Catholics out and appointed himself as head of his own church. It was the time of Luther and Calvin. So there developed at least two forms of Protestantism and eventually both or more persisted. So freedom for each’s members extended much further down the social scale. Individual freedom began to grow in a sea of rival Christianities for the first time in the world. Innovation also began to grow both in England and then in its colonies.
Voila, the Industrial Revolution, quickly copied by other parts of Europe. It didn’t happen in Spain and Portugal or their colonies, the richest countries from the discovery of the Americas. It didn’t happen in other Protestant European countries.
Now 2 1/2 centuries later the two forces behind the great global expansion is disappearing. Both freedom and Christianity are on the wane. The Western world is enthralled with technology that has brought incredible well being. But the human being has not changed. Power still drives a small number to dominate. But will they use this technology to control and limit freedom and will there be no ideology that all accepted to moderate their power
Does Dawkins see this without realizing that besides the niceties of Christmas Carols and civility what he really misses is the stabilizing influence of Christianity on power.
You're on the right track but crediting Henry with this is a bit of a reach.
Check out a map of world religions. Compare and contrast with maps for wealth, crime, longevity, etc.
It becomes very obvious what the causal relationship is here.
I'm not saying Henry VIII knowingly caused the Industrial Revolution 2 1/2 centuries later. But he did introduce Protestantism to England and this had an effect. One that Henry hadn't a clue about. Henry was interested in power only and not religion and certainly not changing the world..
If Henry had 3-4 sons by Catherine of Aragon who then had 6-8 grandsons, there would have been no introduction of Protestantism to England. Catherine's nephew, Charles V, was the most powerful person in Europe and with the help of Henry would have probably eliminated Protestantism in Europe.
No freedom for the little guy, no Industrial Revolution and probably no United States in the English colonies if they ever developed.
My point is that what happened led to greater freedom for the common person and to technological innovation. The main early changes were from steam and textiles.
It's always difficult to play"what if" but this seems to logically follow. I am open to any ideas or criticisms.
Fair enough.
Why don’t you destroy atheism in 500 words or less.
I believe it can be done but I never saw it done. It’s what been missing from religious education since the beginning. It wasn’t necessary for thousands of years since nearly everyone believed in God. The question was the correct version of God.
But starting in the enlightenment, alternative deities (deism for example) started to appear in the West as well as attacks on theism in general. To the point 140 years ago Nietzsche declared “God is dead and we killed Him.”
So complaining about teaching our youth is missing an essential ingredient, namely, a short essay on why atheism is bogus.
Dr Dembski:
******
"He also laments the rampant loss of reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking, and respect for science in the academy and wider culture. In other words, he laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any current figure also to bring about this shift."
******
Indeed. Materialist reductionism is incompatible with the idea that we objectively can have beliefs or thoughts with objectively real propositional content that is objectively true or false. Hence, anyone who advances materialist reductionism is implicitly attacking reason and truth and is contributing to the societal abandonment of same. And since human beings are biological creatures, anyone who advances materialist reductionism in biology specifically (aka Darwinism) is attacking reason even closer to home, so to speak.
But Dawkins is particularly guilty of contributing to post-modernist insanity in an even more direct way than that. His whole ridiculous "meme theory" was a *direct* and *explicit* assault on the existence of reason. The whole point of that theory (if you can even call it a theory) was to reconstrue human thought in a way that eliminated the existence of a rational self who deliberates and reasons about propositions using universal laws of logic to determine which are true, and to instead construe the propositions themselves as little viruses mindlessly infecting and spreading their way through hosts in a Darwinian manner.
Of course, Dawkins has always been a sloppy thinker, and as such he was never consistent in thinking through the implications of what came out of his mouth, and instead used so-called "meme theory" mostly as a polemic to bash only religious beliefs with. But others who ran with Dawkins' meme nonsense and who have a reputation for being at least somewhat more thoughtful than Dawkins himself, like Stephen Pinker, have also been complaining about the woke anti-rational takeover of the academic world lately, yet likewise remain seemingly totally clueless about their own very obvious contribution to it.
How can allegedly smart individuals be so clueless and incapable of putting two and two together even now? But then, I have to catch myself somewhat, because as you point out in the rest of your essay, complacency, silence, and intellectual shallowness in the Christian world as all this lunacy has been building up around us has been very much to blame for this mess as well.
A meme is just an idea that is memorably articulated and so becomes influential. The term is therefore entirely dispensable because existing words are able to capture it. That said, it is a brilliant stroke for denigrating ideas that Dawkins doesn't like, such as belief in God, characterizing them as the equivalent of viral genes. As you note, there is no "Meme Theory" -- it doesn't and indeed can't rise to that. But as a rhetorical ploy, it has been effective. It does seem now to be biting RD in the hindquarters. What's lacking from memes is responsibility -- as infections of the mind, they latch themselves on and so we are not free agents to engage and refute them. But RD still wants to maintain some place for responsibility, such as for reason and truth in science. Woke ideology, which he has helped inspire, won't give him that and is happy to use memes to undercut all responsibility.
I think originally Dawkins thought that the whole meme idea could be a serious account of how human cognition actually works in general. But it was so half-baked, and it was so immediately obvious that any beliefs arrived at in the manner so described would necessarily be irrational, that he couldn't possibly maintain that. The whole thing would fall apart the moment anyone asked "So is belief in evolution a meme?"
And of course, Dawkins being Dawkins, he couldn't help but use it as a polemical weapon to bash religious belief specifically at every chance he got, which only served to give the game away entirely.
Look forward to hearing more from you on this 'cultural' topic Bill...
Dawkins' flirtations with "cultural christianity" is typical of the essential emotional and intellectual incontinence of the man.
It's a simply brutal logical proposition: a bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit.
If Christianity is bearing good fruit then it is a good tree.
But now Dawkins has spent most of his career and his public credibility attacking the root of the tree, he wants to cry about the loss of the free fruit it provided him and his ludicrous cohort of celebrity atheists.
So much for the Age of Reason, eh Dick?