The Dawkins Delusion

On Sunday 22^nd February 2009, an episode of the Channel 4 TV series “Christianity: a History” was broadcast. The commentator was a Professor Colin Blakemore, who is, or at that time was, an atheist.

In one sequence of the programme, Professor Blakemore interviewed another professor, namely Professor Richard Dawkins, who is well-known for his attitude towards everything to do with God and his commitment to what I would call ‘antitheism’.

Professor Dawkins made the comment that the last argument for the existence of God had been removed by the scientific findings that prove the theory of evolution.

I remember at the time thinking that this was a rather odd observation, for two reasons:

1. Because it makes no sense, and
2. Because it displays a woeful ignorance, on Professor Dawkins’s part, for why people believe in God in the first place.

(Unless, of course, the good professor was being mischievous, which would not be out of character!)

1. It makes no sense

Why do I say that this comment makes no sense?

Let me say, first of all, in Professor Dawkins’s defence, that the blame for this assertion must be shared by certain Christians, who hold strongly to the view that evolution does not exist, because God created all flora and fauna as they are, and they can never change.

This belief is based on the following passage of scripture:

So, if God made everything according to its kind, then the idea that one kind can transition into a different kind is contrary to the Word of God. Therefore, evolution cannot exist.

Professor Dawkins then, quite logically, turns the exclusion on its head and says, “Well, evolution does exist, therefore God cannot exist”.

However, I believe we need to take a step back and look at this from a different angle.

First of all, let’s remind ourselves that there are two ‘levels’ or ‘grades’ of evolution, usually referred to respectively as ‘micro evolution’ and ‘macro evolution’.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with micro-evolution. This is the one we come across in daily life. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 we were being notified regularly about new variations in the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Over time, it was becoming more contagious but less virulent, so more people were being infected, but fewer were experiencing serious symptoms. It was evolving.

This is what Charles Darwin was observing among his Galapagos Island finches, where minor variations caused by genetic mutations provided certain individuals an improved ability to survive in a particular environment, while others were less able to survive there, but perhaps survived better in a slightly different environment in a neighbouring region, the result being that, for example, there were more long-billed finches in one area and more short-billed ones in another area.

Rose breeders, horse breeders, and English aristocrats all understand breeding, which is the application of the principles of micro-evolution. However, a finch is always a finch, a rose is always a rose (by any other name), a horse is always a horse, and an Englishman is always an Englishman, though some may well be more impressive specimens than others.

It is the other level of evolution – macro-evolution – which is controversial, for here we are talking about fish evolving into reptiles, reptiles evolving into birds, and, most controversial of all, apes evolving into human beings.

But the story of evolution starts long, long before we get as far as fish turning into frogs. In order for there to be fish in the first place there must be living cells, and in order for there to be living cells there must be DNA, and in order for there to be DNA there must be simpler nucleic acid molecules, and so on back to the very beginning of the process that produces living organisms.

Before I continue, let me nail my colours to the mast. I am not a scientist. I cannot pretend to have any scientific training, knowledge, or understanding beyond what one might glean from reading books and articles or watching TV documentaries. What I am about to say is not based on scientific knowledge, research, or experiment, but purely on personal observation as an ordinary everyday guy from Northern Ireland.

In my experience, anything left to its own devices tends towards mess.

For example, if I leave my garden unattended, within a few years it will become an overgrown wilderness replete with thorns, thistles, dandelions, and fungus. Any semblance of order that there may have been while I was tending it will have disappeared entirely. If anyone comes to buy the house, their first thought will be, “that garden needs to be sorted out”.

If I leave my car unattended on the side of the road, within a short period of time the tyres will be dozed and deflated, rust will be appearing between the panels, and the engine will have seized and become inoperable.

Every school teacher knows that a class which is not controlled will quickly become a rabble, if not a riot.

In short, where there is no organiser, there is no organisation. With no-one to bring order, there will inevitably be disorder.

This is true in the world of every-day experience, but if there is no ‘intelligent designer’, then the opposite would have to be true in the unseen world of quarks, atoms, and molecules – they would have to be able to organise themselves to very sophisticated degrees of complexity.

A living cell is quite complex, but the most complex part is the DNA molecule, which comprises a double-helix composed of two polynucleotide chains that wind around each other, forming what looks rather like a twisted ladder.

When a cell divides into two, the DNA molecule goes through four stages in its replication of itself, as follows:

• INITIATION – a chemical process which kicks off the next stage, which is …

• UNWINDING – where the two strands of DNA separate from each other, leaving two single-stranded DNA molecules

• PRIMER SYNTHESIS – a chemical process which is a necessary precursor to …

• ELONGATION – where each of the two original strands have a complementary adjoining strand generated, which is an exact copy of the original adjoining strand. So, let’s say the original two strands are ‘a’ and ‘b’, a new ‘b1’ will be generated to attach to ‘a’ and a new ‘a1’ will be generated to attach to ‘b’.

There are now two DNA molecules, one of which will power the first of the new cells, and the other of which will power the second new cell.

(This information was drawn from this page on the nature.com website.)

Now, I can’t speak for anyone else, but the first question to arise in my mind when I consider this phenomenon is, “Why on earth would this ever happen? What is the driver, the initiator, behind this process?”

I can get my head around the process of molecules being formed by atoms being attracted to each other by some physical force that I don’t understand, but a complex process such as the division and replication of DNA is too much for me.

Yes, I know, I know – the argument from design has been refuted many times; but for an ordinary mortal such as I am, the ‘why’ question still cries out for an answer.

There has to be something that causes a complex phenomenon such as this to occur, and without an intelligent designer you’re left with two options: chance and necessity.

I’m not a statistician, but I would hazard a guess that the statistical probability of DNA replication coming about by chance would be pretty close to zero.

This leaves you with necessity, which implies that there must be a law of physics which makes DNA replication inevitable under certain circumstances, but I’ve never heard of any such law, nor heard of anyone suggesting that there is such a law.

So, the bottom line for me in relation to this issue is that in order to be an atheist I’m going to have to believe in something that is logically highly improbable, if not impossible, without any hope of ever being able to prove it. I’m just going to have to wait with baited breath for someone who has the scientific nous to do it for me, and then hope that I can understand the explanation.

At this point, someone reading this will be accusing me of invoking ‘the god of the gaps’ – i.e. we don’t understand it, so it must have been God that did it.. However, it has been suggested that the corresponding invocation from the atheist camp is ‘the evolution of the gaps’ – i.e. we don’t understand it, but it was evolution that did it.

However, ‘evolution’ is not the answer at this stage of the game, because evolution only kicks in once the DNA and cell replication system is fully up and running.

So, let’s get back to macro-evolution, by which we mean one kind of plant or animal evolves, over time, into a different kind of plant or animal.

Let’s begin by addressing the following problem: in order for any feature or facility to afford a survival advantage, the feature has to be in good working order.

As an example, let’s take the development of the sense of touch, which seems to be a fairly basic feature of any fauna.

I would conjecture that for the sense of touch to work there need to be at least four functions all working correctly, both separately and together:

1. A touch-sensitive cell, which would probably mean a cell that produces some sort of output when pressure is applied to it, such as the release of a chemical or an electric charge.

2. An interpretive centre of some kind, however basic, which is able to receive the output from the touch-sensitive cell and assign significance to it – e.g. danger, safety, food, poison, etc.

3. A nervous system of some kind, however basic, which is able to convey the output from the touch-sensitive cell to the interpretive centre.

4. A means whereby the interpretive centre is able to communicate with the motor centre of the organism so that the organism takes whatever action, if any, is appropriate.

As can easily be seen, if any of these sub-systems is not working correctly, or is unable to integrate with the others, whatever touch sensitivity there may be will be of little or no use to the organism. This is especially true if the interpretive centre is not attributing the correct significance to the signal, as it may be telling the motor centre to approach danger or to flee from safety or to ignore the food or to consume the poison.

Therefore, all four sub-systems must be working correctly and be successfully integrated with each other in order to provide any survival advantage.

This means that while the sub-systems are developing, presumably over many generations, the organism which has them has no advantage over those that do not, and is therefore no more likely to prosper than any other, so the development of the touch sensitive system is left entirely to chance.

It is also necessary to ask the same question that we asked earlier on in relation to DNA – why on earth would such a system begin to develop in the first place? What is the driver behind it?

I worked for over four decades in software, and during that time I came to understand that for every right way to do something there are many wrong ways to do it, and many more ways to sabotage the program by making a simple typographical error.

In the early eighties, a friend of mine got hold of a micro-computer (anyone remember them?) which ran the BASIC programming language. She had enough knowledge of BASIC to write a simple program. One day she wanted to print some documents, but she wanted to set some conditions on how they should be printed, so she began to key in the appropriate (as she thought) BASIC commands on the screen that controlled the printing function, and was unable to understand why it wasn’t working. I explained to her that the BASIC run-time system was not available on the print screen, but she couldn’t get her head round it. “It’s a computer. The computer runs BASIC. So it ought to work!”

Logical enough, I suppose, but that’s not how the system is set up. The software has to match up with the hardware, because the software is designed to control the hardware, so software designed to perform calculations and output results to a screen will not be able to control a printer.

As a programmer, I think of the cell as being the hardware and the DNA and its genetic instructions as being the software. The cell behaves according to the genetic instructions in the DNA. So, for instance, the DNA is coded for ‘ginger hair’, so the hair cell does ‘ginger’.

But what does the cell do if the DNA mutates sightly and codes for something that the cell doesn’t recognise?

It has been suggested that the dinosaurs didn’t die out, they just evolved into birds. One of the big differences between dinosaurs, which are reptiles, and birds is that birds have feathers and reptiles don’t.

This means that random mutations in the DNA need to start coding for ‘feathers’. But there are a few questions:

• a) How does the reptilian DNA know what the code for feathers is?
• b) How does the reptilian cell know what the DNA code for feathers is?
• c) How does the reptilian cell know how to behave as a feather cell?
• d) How does the reptilian cell know that it should become a feather cell, rather than carrying on being, for example, a bone cell?

In programming, if you include code that the system does not recognise, depending on the programming language and run-time system, you will either get an error message, or the system will simply ignore the statement and carry on regardless.

Random mutations in computer code are virtually guaranteed to produce rubbish. In over forty years, I never knew a mistake to produce an improvement.

And yet we are told that random mutations in DNA code produce evolutionary enhancements and transitions from one kind of animal to another.

In my mind I try to imagine what a transition between a reptile and bird might look like. For instance, I imagine the poor beast with its reptilian scales interspersed with rudimentary avian feathers.

What are the chances of a freak like this passing on its DNA to another generation? In the merciless world of nature, freaks are not welcomed, but shunned, like the Ugly Duckling, who was shooshed right out of town.

And what if the cells that respond to the new feather code in the DNA happen to be in the reptile’s internal organs rather than on the outside? Disaster!

Another example of macro-evolution is tree-dwelling primates evolving into ground-dwelling hominids. During this transition the creature has to develop feet and legs that are capable of walking and running, but those feet and legs are not suitable for swinging through the treetops. In the middle of this evolutionary process there will be a few generations which are neither one thing nor the other – no longer very good in the trees and as yet not very good on the land. They exist in the worst of all worlds. They are neither one thing nor the other. When danger looms they can neither take to the trees nor take to their heels. In short, they’re gonners!

And they have the same problem as the reptiles-becoming-birds – that they’re freaks, and therefore rejected by their community, and therefore unable to propagate their genes.

Of course, the answer to this is TIME. If only there is adequate time, any evolutionary advance is possible.

But is it probable?

In each generation, the variation caused by the random mutation is very slight – virtually imperceptible, so any significant alteration takes place over long periods of time, many years, or even thousands or millions of years.

But this does not provide a solution to the objection, because the imperceptible, slight variation provides no survival advantage, and so has no natural selection advantage, and so the individuals that inherit it are no more likely to prosper than their cousins.

Additionally, there is no guarantee that further mutations will occur which will promote a survival advantage. That is purely a matter of chance. And the same objection again demands an answer – why should a train of survival-advantage mutations occur if there is no survival advantage until, say, a hundred generations have elapsed?

If macro-evolution does occur, then there must be a driver behind it.

In his book ‘the Blind Watchmaker’, Professor Dawkins tells us about a computer program which he developed in order to demonstrate how random mutation could produce a significant outcome over a very few generations.

He begins with a ‘target’ outcome, in this case a rather memorable quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Hamlet and Polonius are debating what a cloud looks like to them, and one of them observes: “Methinks it is like a weasel!”

The program has a function which produces letters of the alphabet at random. Whenever a random letter matches one of the letters in the target sentence, it is memorised. The program continues until all of the target letters have been matched and a duplicate of the ‘weasel’ sentence is output.

But Professor Dawkins knows perfectly well that what his program really demonstrates is that an intelligent designer can harness random events in order to produce a desired outcome.

(Here is a discussion on this subject by Jonathan Witt.)

It seems to me that the objections to macro-evolution are so strong that, far from evolutionary theory removing the last argument for the existence of God, if macro-evolution does actually take place, then that is a very strong argument for the existence of God, or at least for intelligent design, if you have difficulty in believing in God.

In fact, I would say that the atheist position on macro-evolution requires a leap of blind faith, in the power of random events to produce non-random results, that necessitates a suspension of one’s critical faculties.

2. Why do people believe in God?

Do people believe in God because they’re unable to answer the kind of questions that scientists such as Professor Dawkins ask? This is the ‘god of the gaps’ idea – we don’t know the answer, so we’ll attribute it to god, and then when the scientists come up with an answer we’ll accept that and move on.

In fact, people believe in God for a number of different reasons.

I have no statistics for this, but I would suspect that the most common reason for belief is cultural. We are all born into and brought up in a culture that has beliefs and values which are impressed upon us and engrained into us in many ways. Those born into a Christian culture will most probably become Christians; those raised in a Moslem culture will become Moslems; similarly with Hindus, Buddhists, and every other religion. In atheistic societies, such as Communist countries, they will be committed atheists. And in secular societies, such as 21st century Britain, where belief in God is considered to be idiotic, backward, and bigoted, people tend to embrace atheism.

But then there are those who are free-thinkers, who don’t allow themselves to be slaves to whatever the cultural norm might be, but seek the truth for themselves. Some seekers end up settling for atheism, but many find that the necessity for God, and the evidence for Him, is conclusive.

Then there are those whose personal experience opens their eyes to the truth. I discovered an interesting example of this when I read the book “Patriot”, the autobiography of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who has been a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side for many years, and who was wickedly killed by the Putin regime a couple of weeks before he was due to be released from incarceration in Siberia through a prisoner-swap, which saw many Russian so-called ‘dissidents’ exchanged for a corresponding number of Putin’s activists who had been imprisoned in the west.

I’ll let Mr. Navalny speak for himself:

“In 2001, our daughter, Dasha, was born. Having a child changed my life in an unexpected way. Yulia and I had wanted to have children, and I was very happy when I became a father, but something else happened. Like everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I had never believed in God, but looking now at Dasha and how she was developing, I could not reconcile myself to the thought that this was only a matter of biology. That did not alter the fact that I am a big fan of science, but I decided at that moment that, on its own, evolution was not enough. There must be more. From a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I gradually became a religious person.”

(Patriot by Alexei Navalny, tr. Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel, the Bodley Head / Penguin / Random House, 2024, page 181, para. 3)

My own experience of finding God, or being found by Him, is described elsewhere on this website.

Some people, many of whom are scientists and many of whom are not, believe that science provides all of the answers to the questions of life. It certainly does provide many of them, but there are some questions which are entirely beyond the scope of science.

I have already mentioned T.H. Huxley, the father of agnosticism. It was Huxley’s contention that it is not possible to know anything except by means of scientific enquiry. But was he right?

A teenager might ask an older sibling or friend, or even a parent, “How will I know when I’m in love?” What’s the answer to this delicate question? The answer is, of course, “You’ll know!”

If I asked you, “are you married?”, how would you go about answering my question? I suspect that you’d immediately say either “yes” or “no”, unless you were going through a divorce or a separation, in which case you might give a more thoughtful answer.

If I then asked you, “how do you know?”, what would your answer be? Worse, what if I then asked you what scientific experiment you had conducted to prove the theory?

You see, Huxley was a scientist, and so he thought like a scientist, and Dawkins is a scientist, so he thinks like a scientist – in fact, he thinks like a geneticist, which is why he believes that ideas are like intellectual genes, for which he coined the term ‘memes’.

What Huxley SHOULD have said was that it is not possible to know anything SCIENTIFICALLY except by means of scientific enquiry.

Which brings us neatly to our next section, where we’ll consider what constitutes evidence for, or against, the existence of God …