Darwin, the Idol of Richard Dawkins and His Followers

 

Richard Dawkins’ God is Charles Darwin

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

Besides owning almost every book Richard Dawkins has authored, including his newest, his 15^th book (2017), I have watched him in many video interviews. I consider the most honest interview he gave to be the one with Ben Stein in the movie Expelled.[1] Dawkins is very frank about his beliefs and is not afraid to buck against society’s norms. His upcoming book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism (2019), is aimed at children.

A Debate Dawkins Backed Out Of

Several years ago I was contacted by an atheist society in Indianapolis in their effort to have Dawkins debate a creationist. I was told this would be a David vs Goliath event (with Dawkins the Goliath, in their opinion). The atheists were anxious to see their champion, Dawkins, triumph against one who they considered to be one of the most qualified creationists. After I agreed to the debate, I was at first nervous, but an in-depth reading of his beliefs helped me begin to develop my debate strategy.

At this point I was looking forward to the debate, confident that I would prevail, or at least hold my own. About this time I received a request from Dawkins through the atheist group for a copy of my resume, which I sent. A short time later the atheist group informed me that Dawkins backed out of the debate. I was very disappointed. After all of my work, the debate was off. From my research, it was clear that Dawkins pathologically hated God and religion, and actually almost worshiped another god, this one named Charles Darwin.

The Darwin Worship Industry

Sophie Elmhirst, who interviewed Dawkins for several articles, observed that he “has expressed admiration for Darwin in the way a schoolboy might worship a sporting giant. In his first memoir, Dawkins noted the ‘serendipitous realization’ that his full name – Clinton Richard Dawkins – shared the same initials as Charles Robert Darwin.”[2] Dawkins makes a point of this fortuitous coincidence almost every chance he gets.

Other examples of his admiration for Darwin include the fact that he “owns a prized first edition of On The Origin of Species, which he can quote from memory.”[3] The value of this book can be gauged by the fact that one copy of the Origin of Species just sold for $125,000 at Sotheby’s. It is one of the most valuable books ever printed. Not even most early Gutenberg Bibles fetch that much. This price needs to be evaluated in light of the fact that 1,250 copies of the first edition were printed, 58 of which were distributed by the publisher, Murray, for review, promotion, and presentation. Of the original 180 Gutenberg Bibles printed in 1455, 49 are known to exist today, and 21 are still complete.

Something less common, such as a letter signed by Darwin, was listed at $8,625.00. That’s actually a very reasonable price for original Darwin ephemera. Another letter, consisting of three pages, in which Darwin expressed his disbelief in the Bible and discussed the future world when our omnipotent and omniscient God would be relegated to the dustbins of history, sold for $197,000.[4]  Darwin once admitted that his god-destroying theory was like “confessing to a murder.”[5] Darwin’s fame is also obvious from the fact that government-issued postage stamps honoring Darwin now number well over 100 since the first Darwin stamp was released by Ecuador in 1935.

Dawkins’ Idol

For Dawkins, the Origin of Species is totemic, the founding text of his career. Dawkins claims that Darwin’s case for evolution—what Darwin called “one long argument”—is now, in contrast to everything else in science, thoroughly proven beyond any doubt. Dawkins believes that the book succeeded in putting God out of a job. As a description of Dawkins’ own life, particularly the late phase of his life, “one long argument” serves fairly well.[6]

Besides his god, Darwin, Dawkins has now become the global face of atheism. In the last decade Dawkins “has ratcheted up the rhetoric in his self-declared war against religion. He is the general who chooses to fight on the front line – whose scorched-earth tactics have won him fervent admirers.”[7]

Dawkins’ Mission

While still an atheist in my college days, one fact that bothered me was the atheists’ passionate goal to destroy religion by whatever means possible, including by promoting laws suppressing religion and forcing their implementation through the courts. Up until now they have been enormously successful in using the courts to do their bidding. The totalitarian society the atheists were working hard to create bothered me then, but bothers me more now that I see the harm atheists have caused society. Back in college, I agreed with the atheism worldview – but not with their goal of forcing their will on everyone else by a powerful government. Yet that is actually what history has shown they have accomplished. Actually, they have succeeded beyond their own expectations. Dawkins supports this totalitarian goal, openly stating for everyone listening that his desire is “ultimately, to eradicate religion from society.”[8] I have documented this in three thick volumes.[9]

Dawkins’ Passion

His actually pathological hatred for religion seems to be the driving force of his life. He claims he wants to leave the world a better place by suppressing religion,

where there is illogic, obscurantism, pretension.” Religious faith, for Dawkins, is above all a sign of faulty thinking, of ignorance; he wants to educate the ill-informed out of their mistakes. He sees religion, as he once put it on Twitter, as “an organized license to be acceptably stupid.”[10]

In fact,

The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth were all battles against the irrationality of creationist thinking. It was not enough to say that he did not approve of religion or its role in society; he needed to prove its impossibility. The God Delusion contains a 42-page chapter devoted to this enterprise, titled, “Why There Is Almost Certainly No God.”[11]

Dawkins Has Resurrected Eugenics

Evolutionists have a long history of supporting eugenics, which led to the Holocaust. Dawkins does not seem to have learned much from this sordid history. The fact is, Dawkins, the bestselling writer, “has become the face of a new crusading atheism.”[12] But even most evolutionists have, at least for public relations purposes, learned this position is untenable today in view of the abuses of the past, but Dawkins has not learned this. Or if he has, does not care. Consequently, “even his closest allies worry that his online provocations do more harm than good.”[13]

I have many quotes about Dawkins’ support for eugenics. In one case, he wrote that he believes “it would be immoral for a mother to continue with a pregnancy if the baby would be born with Down syndrome, and a mother has a responsibility to ‘abort it and try again’ if she knows her baby would have the disorder.[14] In response to the claim that it would be “immoral” to carry a baby to term if she knew it had Down syndrome, one woman commented that she would be faced with “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant and learned that the baby would be born with the disorder. Dawkins tweeted: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” His tweet created a backlash. One woman who had a child with a major genetic deformity responded angrily at Dawkins. Emphasizing the strength of her feelings, she tweeted back: “I would fight till my last breath for the life of my son. No dilemma.”

Amazingly Dawkins did not backtrack, but stubbornly defended his view. He stated he would not apologize “for approaching moral philosophic questions in a logical way.” The Nazis used that same logic in applying Darwinism to create a pure Aryan society void of “useless eaters.”[15] Although Dawkins correctly mentioned that Down syndrome fetuses are often spontaneously aborted, this fact does not negate the worth of children that are born. Those who are carried to term often have a less severe deformity, not the result of trisomy 21, but the less serious transposition 21 condition, where a small part of chromosome 21 is attached to another chromosome.

Some Dawkins fans actually supported his eugenics-supportive tweet. They agreed with his assertion that termination before a child is born is the best choice. The Down Syndrome Association’s (DSA) responded to Dawkins’s initial comment, saying, “People with Down syndrome can and do live full and rewarding lives; they also make a valuable contribution to our society.”

Dawkins appears to lack normal human feelings, like empathy. In one of many examples, a friend of Dawkins recalled a discussion the two had about what you would tell a terminally ill child about death. Dawkins “was very unwilling, . . .  to say that it would be OK at that point to tell a fairytale about heaven.” ¹⁵

In another example Dawkins noted that the world’s Muslims were awarded fewer Nobel prizes than the Trinity College Cambridge professors, implying that Muslims are genetically or culturally inferior, or both. He even argued that some types of rape or pedophilia are not as bad as others, then retorted to people who couldn’t understand his logic to “go away and learn how to think.”

Dawkins Actively Seeks to Convert College Students to Atheism

Dawkins gives close to 100 lectures a year. He and fellow militant atheist, Professor Lawrence Krauss, once lectured at the University of Ulster in Belfast and also

appeared on a radio talk show, when they had attempted to debate a creationist (an “idiot”, in Dawkins’s terminology). “She simply tried to shout down everything Lawrence and I said. So she was in effect going la la la la la.” Dawkins stuck his fingers in his ears as he sang.[16]

Dawkins has been on his atheist mission since 1976 when he published The Selfish Gene, a book that made him rich and famous,

which has now sold over a million copies. Since then, he has written another 10 influential books on science and evolution, plus The God Delusion, his atheist blockbuster, and become the most prominent of the so-called New Atheists – a group of writers, including Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.[17]

When Dawkins and Krauss gave their lectures on why atheism fits the facts and theism does not in Burke Theatre in Trinity College, the “large modern lecture hall . . . was full. … As he spoke, Dawkins took on a grandfatherly air, as though passing on hard-earned wisdom.”[18] Atheists are welcomed in academia, but in the last three decades creationists have been spectacularly unsuccessful in their attempts to get their ideas heard in colleges and universities. As a consequence, most students are indoctrinated in one side only. Dawkins has spent half his life behind a lectern, preaching to students and others about the ‘truth’ of atheism and the ‘evils’ of theism. And since Dawkins joined Twitter in 2008, he amassed more than a million followers. When the Trinity event was over,

a crowd of about 40 audience members descended on to the stage, clutching books [by Dawkins] to be signed. Dawkins eventually retreated into the wings to avoid a crush. One young schoolteacher lingered in the hallway long after the rest of the audience had left, in the hope of shaking Dawkins’s hand.  . . .  he is used to receiving a steady flow of letters from fans of The God Delusion and new converts to atheism … the book has sold three million copies.”[19]

Dawkins’ Motivation

An academic of his eminence could have eased into a distinguished late career period, but a peaceful life has not been Dawkins’ goal: “Some people might say why don’t you just get on with gardening? I think [there’s a] passion for truth and a passion for justice that doesn’t allow me to do that.”[20] To him, this passion means abolishing the Christian God, and to do this,

Dawkins remains indefatigably active. He rarely takes a holiday, but travels frequently to give talks – in the last four months [as of November 2017], he has been to Ireland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Brazil. …. “I suppose some of what I do is an attempt to change people’s minds about religion,” he said, with some understatement, . . . . “And I do think that’s a politically important thing to be doing.” For . . . . In his mission, Dawkins is still, at heart, a teacher. “I would like to leave the world a better place,” he said.¹⁹

—a place, Dawkins admits, without either God or Christianity. Furthermore, the two sides of Dawkins’s mission, namely

promoting science, demolishing religion – are intended to be complementary. … Since his arrival on Twitter in 2008, his public pronouncements have become more combative – and, at times, flamboyantly irritable: “How dare you force your dopey unsubstantiated superstitions [of God] on innocent children too young to resist?,” he tweeted last June. “How DARE you?”¹⁹

His pathogenic hatred of theism is illustrated in research by Professor Paul Vitz, who did a study of academic atheists like Richard Dawkins. Vitz concluded that academic atheists are likely to have had a very destructive relationship with their father or were molested as children.[21] Dawkins admits his experience of sexual abuse by a teacher at his junior school. Also, at his senior school, Oundle, he was forced to fend off older boys who tried to climb into his bed at night.[22]

Richard Dawkins Inc.

The Dawkins empire includes the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), founded in 2006. The foundation supports multiple projects in the US, such as Openly Secular, to encourage atheists to proclaim their secularism, and the Teaching Institute for Evolutionary Science, which provides teachers with evolution tools. Dawkins regularly goes on fundraising lecture tours. Tickets for a tour to Portland, Oregon; Rochester, Minnesota; and Boston are $35. A reception beforehand is $250. Membership in the “Dawkins circle” costs as much as $9,999 a year. Partakers have invitations to events with “RDFRS personalities,” and for more money they get two tickets to an “invitation-only” event with Dawkins himself. Fundraising is led by the full time CEO of his foundation, Robyn Blumner.[23] Dawkins’s personal fortune is over ten million dollars from his efforts to murder God, and yet he complains about the comparatively small change Intelligent Design organizations manage to raise.[24]

[1] His last book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist (New York, Bantam) is a book of his essays. 2017.

[2] Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation. November, 2017.

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/rare-darwin-lovelace-letters-sold-auction-125000-32500/

[5] Rowan Hooper. 2009. One Minute with Charles Darwin. New Scientist. 204(2736): 29. November 28.

[6] Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation. November, 2017.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] See Censoring the Darwin Skeptics. How Belief in Evolution is Enforced by Eliminating Dissidents. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press. 2018; Silencing the Darwin Skeptics. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press. 2016; Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. 2008. Revised version 2012. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter.

[10] Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation. November, 2017.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Richard Dawkins: ‘immoral’ not to abort if foetus has Down’s syndrome. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-immoral-not-to-abort-a-downs-syndrome-foetus#comments.

[15]  Richard Dawkins: ‘immoral’ not to abort if foetus has Down’s syndrome. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-immoral-not-to-abort-a-downs-syndrome-foetus#comments.

[16]Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation. November, 2017.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Paul Vitz. 1999. Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. Spence Publishing Company

[22] Did your absentee father make you an atheist?https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/did-your-absentee-father-make-you-an-atheist/2014/01/13/a0d96b5a-7c9f-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8b508ca592cf.

[23] Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation. November, 2017.

[24] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/authors/richard-dawkins-net-worth/.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at several colleges and universities including for over 40 years at Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored, are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more of his articles on CEH, see his Author Profile.

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We appreciate Jerry Bergman’s detailed research into the harm caused by Darwinism. Look at this case: a man, Richard Dawkins, who makes millions on a view that is patently illogical at its base. Dawkins uses morality to preach that there is no absolute moral standard. He uses the ‘Truth’ to preach that truth is an illusion caused by material forces. He uses passion to preach that emotions are neural artifacts of natural and sexual selection. If he really believed what he says he believes, he would just try to have as many kids as possible, not caring what they believe, as long as they also have lots of kids. Instead, he borrows from theistic assumptions about truth, goodness and beauty to destroy those values. In the process, he leaves a trail of hate, bigotry and totalitarianism that could motivate another genocide. —Ed.