Dawkins’ Morality.

Biological evolution is a philosophical proposition having no basis in scientific fact.  Make no doubt that organisms change over time, often when placed in new environments and most often under human direction but the changes are only within limited ranges of variation.  Those variations are provided for either in the makeup of the genetics inherent to that species or in the degenerate condition of the genome due to mutations.  Recombinant DNA is a human novelty for engineering organisms with new traits but does occur in limited ways in the natural world, for instance in the case of the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes among some bacteria. Mutations are changes in the blueprints for living things and most are damaging; altering the function of the metabolism or features of the organism so that it is at a disadvantage to successful living.  There are many mutations that are inherited without any apparent, serious detriment to the organism.  These changes are detectable through sequence analysis of individuals.  In many cases, non-lethal mutations may even accumulate without detectable harm for a particular gene due to the known wobble of the codons (words) of the DNA blueprint.  If mutations change the coding of a protein, they may not affect the functional portion of the protein for which the gene codes.  Mutations that become detectable do so because they cause abnormalities not improvements in the genome and so do not promote evolution of any kind. Pushing the theory of evolution by way of natural selection of mutations in the DNA code has proven to be a fatal paradigm to scientific materialism.  Mutations create nothing novel.  Mutations improve nothing in the blueprints of the genetic code.  Mutations are harmful and if not delectable they are neutral; they add nothing of value.  No mutation has ever been characterized

as giving a new function to an organism. Unfortunate for many believers in this metaphysical philosophy of scientism, evolution is equivalent to atheism.  Though there are no workable mechanisms by which the physical world can “create” and improve living beings, believers in evolution are deeply devoted to this mythology.  This is especially true for people whose agenda is to reject religious dogma and in particular, the authority of the Christian God.  I side with the rejection of religious dogma, as I do not credit any Christian church with having a full grasp of their own scriptures.  This does not mean I reject the faith of Christ.  It means I have built my spiritual foundation on a personal knowledge of God through my understanding of the Bible.  This gets us off the topic when my main interest is to note the dangerous but deliberate rejection of a Creator God by those who have a vested interest in claiming evolution proves God does not exist.  Intelligence is not allowed to interfere with the desperate belief that matter is all there is and the mystery of evolutionary faith drives creation.

I have argued with many, that good science does not support biological evolution in any way.  The ramification of disbelief in design is a rejection of common sense.  When common sense and critical thinking are tossed out of one’s perspective, things like the concept of evolution are allowed to create and to answer everything.  Evolution takes on mystical powers. Even obvious roadblocks to evolution’s supposed mechanism are ignored, or minimized or attributed to unknown chemistry, untouchable worlds, and even rocky debris floating in outer space.  We become the product of stardust, meteors or Martian soils.  Many are so deeply indoctrinated into evolution that flights of fantasy are rationalized as useful concepts to the “science” of evolution. People can believe what they want but once again the ramifications of believing in nonsense (no sense) is dangerous.  It leads people to delusional thinking.  Many people want to believe a lie, especially if it supports their personal agenda.  Believing the fraud of evolution establishes a failure to think objectively and honestly about many other things in life such as, abortion, the death penalty, marriage, sexual perversions.  For evolutionists, life without God opens up all sorts of possibilities to justify their behaviors.  No God, no wrong.  Morality is artificial and situational.  Theft, sexual promiscuity, greed and even murder can be justified if there is no absolute truth to morality.  In the past, I have argued that such a world eventually hands our human rights and freedoms over to the state.  The government then decides what is right and wrong and human dignity and integrity is seriously jeopardized, and in time altogether lost.

Many are familiar with Richard Dawkins and his take on evolution, religion, sexual freedom and reason.  Here is a man

convinced that all religions are damnable.  History has indeed shown that religion can be treacherous.  Religious fanatics, ignorant but enthusiastic in their freedom to condemn others, have done great harm to the simplicity and purity of the Christian message of love and personal responsibility.  But Dawkins uses evolution as a tool to ridicule and reduce the true spiritual nature of humankind by attributing the failures of organized religion to the message of Christ.   To him, evolution being true, there is no God.  There is no spirit or prospect of eternal life and we are not creatures made in the image of an infinite, almighty and personal God.  Dawkins goes so far as to suggest that even if there is a god behind it all, he must have used evolution and he could not possibly be the God of the Bible.  That God, for Dawkins, is ridiculous.  A true god, one who had the power to make the universe, has no interest in what humans do with their lives, their search for meaning or what they do with their sexuality.  To Dawkins, this kind of god is not a personal being and certainly, he is not a moral being.  Morality is below such a god.

Even Dawkins finds a couple things that evolution cannot explain.  The origin of life is one.  Consciousness is another. Sexuality is a third but morality is on the top of his list of problems that evolution cannot explain. [Note: Everyone of these is dealt with in the first chapter of the Genesis account.]  Recently, in a very frightening but revealing interview, Dawkins was reported to have protected a certain immoral behavior and had this to say to the Times magazine as reported by the Religious News Service.

“Dawkins attempted to defend what he called “mild pedophilia,” which, he says, he personally experienced as a

“Mild Pedophilia?” Is there such a thing?

young child and he does not believe causes “lasting harm.”  Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,” and that to condemn this “mild touching up” as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.  “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.  Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

The only people I know who see, like Dawkins, the crimes and sins of a former time as somehow less than the same acts in the modern world are atheists.  No clear-thinking human being can legitimize child sex abuse because it was a different time.  It was understood to be wrong to society then and it is now.  Even the law of God given 3800 years ago condemned such sin.  Dawkins even protects racism of another generation. Racism is actually a relatively new hate crime and it was legitimized by Darwinian philosophy in pursuit of the missing link.  Nazism was wrong 80 years ago and it is wrong today.  Hitler may have brainwashed the German people but just beneath the surface, everyone knew that what they were doing to the Jewish people was wrong.

Incidentally, this form of genocide was popularized as the natural condition of the world by those who tried to apply Darwin’s principles in a program of survival of the fittest. The result was eugenics; the breeding of the most fit humans and the elimination of the less fit (less according to Hitler’s standards). As to lasting harm on such children of abuse Dawkins is no authority on the subject even if he has accepted the fact of his own molestation with such tolerance.  How can he not see that this type of perversion reflects a deeply troubled mind and represents one of the greatest forms of evil known to humanity?  The Bible had laid down laws against sexual misconduct 3800 years ago.  People do not change and neither does right from wrong.

“He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up. ” There are shades of being abused by a priest, and I quoted an example of a woman in America who wrote to me saying that when she was 7 years old, she was sexually abused by a priest in his car. “At the same time, a friend of hers, also 7, who was of a Protestant family, died, and she was told that because her friend was Protestant, she had gone to hell and will be roasting in hell forever. “She told me, of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse; it was yucky, but she got over it. But the mental abuse of being told about hell, she took years to get over. ”

Thank goodness, I have never personally experienced what it is like to believe – really and truly and deeply believe ­– in hell. But I think it can be plausibly argued that such a deeply held belief might cause a child more long-lasting mental trauma than the temporary embarrassment of mild physical abuse.

Anecdotes and plausibility arguments, however, need to be backed up by systematic research, and I would be interested to hear from psychologists whether there is real evidence bearing on the question. My expectation would be that violent, painful, repeated sexual abuse, especially by a family member such as a father or grandfather, probably has a more damaging effect on a child’s mental well-being than sincerely believing in hell. But ‘sexual abuse’ covers a wide spectrum of sins, and I suspect that research would show belief in hell to be more traumatic than the sort of mild feeling-up that I suffered. All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).

The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I

Is Hell a Christian concept?

dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses.”

The only delicate way to take Dawkins’ view of the world is to try, painful as it might be, and understand that he is comparing two horrible things; the idea of a God who tosses people into a burning lake of fire for eternity and child molestation.  It is unfortunate that Dawkins has never attempted to study the Bible for himself or church history for that matter.  He would find the Catholic theology has little bearing on New Testament Christianity and that the place of hell, in particular, is a contrivance unknown to the Bible.  In the 11 times, the word “hell” was translated from the words of Christ in the Bible, its literal meaning in the original language was Gehenna or “the valley of Hinnom”.

Gehenna was a garbage pit outside the walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem; known for being the site of child sacrifice in the

days when the Jews began to worship the god Moloch. This valley was later cursed and used as the city dump.  The place was kept burning by the additions of pitch and bitumen (sulfur). The rot of dead bodies and garbage kept the place ever infested with maggots (worms).  Jesus said this would be the resting place for those of the Jews who rejected the Messianic message.  In 70 A.D. when the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem over a million dead or dying souls were tossed into Gehenna.  Why was the Greek concept of hell used to replace the physical garbage pit of Jerusalem?  Religion!

Regardless, Dawkins would rather that children endure some form of “mild molestation” (if there is such a thing as mild molestation) as he did than learning about the Catholic hell.  I would rather learn the truth about God’s love and righteousness and apply that to saving children from the dreadful nightmare of molestation.  And why compare the two travesties?  Is it to show that godlessness is better than godliness since hell must be a far worse fate than a momentary affliction of horrifying humiliation, confusion, and abuse as a child? Dawkins says that teaching religion and Christianity, in particular, is a form of child abuse.  He contrasted these two horrific ideas as a proof of religion’s evil effect on people.  It still remains in my mind a contrast between what he thinks is abuse in the godless world versus abuse in the religious world.  It cannot be taken as anything more than a pathological attempt to ridicule religion and bolster his position.  He has set up a straw man.

You see then the effect of the teaching of evolution.  It is blind to real harm and lazy to real study.  It is quick to accuse God and defensive of human trafficking.  To Dawkins mild pedophilia is harmless but how about tomorrow.  It seems if Dawkins’ moral persuasions are any indication of the world to come, cannibalism will one day be acceptable in some form, murderers will be praised for their survival tactics and child sacrifice will be considered honorable.  We have already legalized the act of abortion, which is nothing less than a child sacrifice to the god of convenience.

Abortion, genocide, racism and eugenics programs have as their scientific basis the fundamentals of evolution.  Abortion and eugenics can be traced back in this country to Margaret Sanger who in 1916 began the reproductive rights movement.  She was against giving reproductive rights to the unfit and promoted improvement in the human species not unlike the Nazi programs of human breeding trials (eugenics).  Racism was a relative novelty until Darwin promoted the idea that the black man is something less than human.  Australian aborigines were murdered in the 1800s so that specimens of skulls could be used to compare the anatomy of the black creature to the other “races” of humans.  Some Australians were put in zoos and put on display in England as proof of the evolution of man.

Darwin in his book “The Descent of Man” said this in support of racism:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Do I drift from the Dawkins’ morality?  Not hardly.  Dawkins like most atheists can never be satisfied with any absolutes including and especially in the area of morality.  While propagating the idea that moral and ethical behavior is a genuine characteristic of civilized humanity what he will not promote openly is that his idea of civilization can change with the politics, population size, limit on resources and natural catastrophes.  When pressed by these natural selective pressures, morality and ethics become situational and change, like the direction of the wind.  This is why he is so blasé fair about child molestation.  He survived it in a time when people kept quiet about the horror of this abuse.  Today there is such an awareness and rejection of child abuse that he cannot justify acceptance of such abuse.  Dawkins holds this to be true of racism and I must suppose any immoral acts of bygone days that went neglected by the developing countries of the world.  The culture dictates the morality according to Dawkins.  This is Dawkins’ morality.

Darwin also lost sight of common sense as he delved deeper into the godless evolutionary story.  Searching for mechanisms of change, forces of nature, selective pressures from the ecosystem, climate and or catastrophes that might play a role in “creating” the species and advancing complexity in biological systems by natural selection, Darwin drifted further from sanity.  He admitted in personal letters how the acceptance of a purely materialistic world had left him without the ability to derive joy or pleasure and happiness in the world he had come to see as ruthless, bloodthirsty and certainly without God.  This loss of desire and emotional cognition of the beauty of the world, art, music, novels were for Darwin lamentable.  He thought that scientific reasoning had damaged that part of the higher faculties dedicated to such pleasures.  Ultimately, he was sure that his studies had destroyed his loss of happiness, damaged his intellect and could have injured his moral character.  It seems that he had lost the sensibility to care or for that matter, discriminate between what is right and wrong.  Is this the effect of a belief in godless evolution?  Darwin said,

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Mil­ton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great plea­sure, and even as a school­boy I took intense delight in Shake­speare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily– against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suf­fered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” CHARLES DARWIN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Addendum. Written May 1st, 1881 [the year before his death].

Charles’ life had become meaningless.  Indeed, an evolutionary worldview makes it very clear that humans have no purpose in living.  We are an accidental combination of molecules that fell together and under unknown laws of chemistry were selective advances to greater complexity and self-awareness without aim, without design, and without a destiny.  Teaching that human life is essentially meaningless to anyone, especially our youth opens up a plethora of negative philosophical arguments for accepting any behavior as normal and natural.  Charles was not the only evolutionary atheist who had lost his moral compass.  Like Dawkins and every devoted atheist that I know, evolution is the basis for non-judgmental acceptance of all moral depravity. In 1966 Aldous Huxley wrote in his article, “Confessions of a Professed Atheist”:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently, assumed it had none, and was able

Science does not determine right from wrong. These are universally known by humans throughout time and in any culture. Governments may deny it. People reject it. But morality is an absolute.

without any difficulty to find reasons for this assumption…. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do…. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom (1966, 3:19).”

 

The effect that evolution has had on Darwin was dark and deranged.  This generally the case for every devoted atheist I have met.  They are unhappy, miserable people who become their own worse enemies.  But evolutionary philosophy justifies their misery and their lawless behavior and immoral decisions. So much for the Dawkins’ morality as it develops out of a departure from evolutionary mechanisms and cannot be defended or explained by materialistic means.  The existence of morality in humans cannot be explained by evolution.  And “cultural morality” is a pure cop out on what people know is an absolute unchanging truth.  Richard Dawkins’ view of the world has castrated his ability to reason as a civilized person.  He has asked the question that if any god had a role in creating the universe he would certainly not be the God of the Bible; for what kind of intelligent being would care about the morality of humans?  Richard cannot conceive of a God who is a person; a God who created with a purpose.  For Dawkins, it is inconceivable that a god made people in HIS own image.  Most important to Dawkins and all atheists is that no god should have authority over personal human freedom.  For this reason, evolution has become the paradigm for science, education, and intellectualism.  Not because it can be proven to be true.  Not because there is any empirical evidence that evolution took place or could take place but because it is a convenient strategy to justify atheism and godless living.  I am not saying that Richard knows evolution is a false.  His absolute belief in evolution is the basis for his inability to reason emotionally, sympathetically or comprehend morality.

There may be many people who have become atheists because they believe what they have been taught; evolution is a fact.  There may be just as many atheists that are so, not because they understand anything about the theory of evolution but because they want it to be true.  In either case, the belief in evolution justifies freedom from any absolute morality and a complete rejection of absolute authority.  Each man will do what is right in his own eyes.  This is the very definition of anarchy and chaos.  There is little motive for persons holding this persuasion to reexamine the evidence or to objectively listen to the sound arguments coming out of the intelligent design theorists.  For if science actually proves intelligence was and is required for the universe, life and man in particular then the absolutes of morality are not merely justified; they are unequivocal facts of life.

It would not be fair to end here without a word of rebuke for organized religion.  Dawkins claims that Christians pick and choose

morality from the Bible that suits their own needs and fits the popular culture of the time.  We all know this is true.  Why else would Christianity be divided into over 3000 denominations?  But this does not discredit the revelation from the Creator.  His morality has been and is absolute.  Nowhere is racism advocated in the Bible.  The moral, civil and cultural laws of the Old Testament established the Jewish people as some of the healthiest, charitable and happy people on the planet – when they followed God’s revealed word.  The darkest history of these people is to be found when they rejected the absolute moral teachings of the Revelation.

The history of the Christian churches is indeed replete with failures in judgments, notorious for persecution and fraught with contradictions.  The atheist and any other godless philosophy don’t need to look far for evidence that Christianity has so far failed to uphold the teachings of the Creator.  In conversations with many would-be Christians, ready to abandon their atheism, they fall short of the final decision for fear that to wear the name “Christian” would immediately place them in the category of “biggest hypocrite”.  This is not because they fear being associated with God but fear being associated with those who say they are God’s and live like they are not.  All believers in God need to be knowledgeable of what the Bible has to say and reject what doctrines are not found there.

Christians need to realize their personal responsibility to God, not to men, and reject their particular breed of Christian theology if

it is not found written in the scriptures. Every one of us who say we believe need to come clean in answer to the Lord’s rebuke, “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?”  Luke 6:45-46. After all, how and why should any atheist believe in a people or their God if that people cannot agree on His written assignments; we who say we are one but are many; we who say we are of God but refuse to reject the traditions of men?

“Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through their word; that they may all be one; even as you, Father, art in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us: that the world may believe that you did send me.” John 17:20-22.