Articles on Dawkins and Atheism

Why I Believe Again
Written by: A.N. Wilson

A.N. Wilson experienced a conversion to atheism in his youth that exhilarated him. He was relieved and delighted to fit in with the in-crowd of intellectual atheists who scorned the very notion of a God - any god. But in 2009 A.N. Wilson announced that he now "believes again". His article in the New Statesman is a fascinating read about a change of mind which, along with that of Anthony Flew, makes a mockery of fortress atheism. Read

Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving?
Written by: Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips comments on an Oxford debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins. She notices a subtle shift in Dawkins's position and reports on a conversation she had with Dawkins after the debate. Read

The Delusions of Richard Dawkins
Written by: Professor Peter Harrison (Oxford)

Professor Peter Harrison (Oxford) critiques 'The God Delusion' exposing what he calls its two main weaknesses. Firstly, it violates a standard principle of academic debate – that the most powerful critiques are those that succeed against the strongest version of the opponent’s position. Dawkins has simply not bothered to familiarise himself with the vast literature on philosophy of religion and science and religion. He has not taken on the most sophisticated representatives of the religious viewpoint. Instead, he finds himself a few easy targets and scores cheap points. The second general weakness of the book is that Dawkins persists with a quaint and erroneous nineteenth-century view of the relation between science and religion that historians of science now routinely refer to as ‘the conflict myth’. In reality, science and religion were rarely at odds in the past. Read

The Theory of Evolution
Written by: Conservapedia

It is a well-known and documented fact that Wikipedia is biased towards a Darwinian view of origins. Despite repeated attempts, this atheistdelusion.net website has been refused a link on the Richard Dawkins Wikipedia page, even though it is the leading portal to material critical of Dawkins. However, links critical of creationsists are always allowed on Wikipedia. Now there is an alternative. The Conservapedia website features articles critical of Dawkins, the theory of evolution and atheism. This link is to a major contribution by Conservapedia editors on Darwin's theory of evolution and contains numerous references to Richard Dawkins. Read

The Dawkins Confusion - Naturalism ad absurdum
Written by: Alvin Platinga

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In this insightful article he gives a number of examples of faulty logic on the part of Richard Dawkins (in his book The God Delusion). Read

Darwin's Rottweiler and the Public Understanding of Scientism
Written by: Peter S. Williams

Peter S. Williams studied Philosophy at Cardiff University (BA), Sheffield University (MA) and the University of East Anglia (MPhil), where he completed his thesis on objective definitions of truth, knowledge, goodness and beauty in relation to the nature of God. He has written extensively on Dawkins in his book 'I Wish I could Believe in Meaning'. Read

God vs. Science
Written by: Francis Collins & Richard Dawkins

From Time Magazine: "Francis Collins devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint. He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate Time arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30 2006. Read

God Knows Why Faith is Thriving
Written by: Dinesh D'Sousa

Dinesh D'Souza graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1983. He is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The author of numerous books, the New York Times Magazine named him one of America's most influential conservative thinkers. D'Souza's articles have appeared in virtually every major magazine and newspaper, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, New Republic, and National Review. D'Souza speaks at top universities and business groups across the USA. Read

The Course of Waterfalls
Written by: Jill Carattini

Jill Carattini challenges Dawkins' purposelessness argument through the fascinating story of Ernest Gordon and the Burma-Siam railroad. Read

The Dawkins Delusion
Written by: Prof. Alister McGrath

From Wikipedia: "McGrath was born in Belfast and studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at Methodist College. He was "completely convinced that the future lay with atheism, and that religion would either die of exhaustion or be eliminated by a resentful humanity within [his] lifetime". When he attended the University of Oxford, where he gained first class honours in chemistry in 1975, he "began to discover that the intellectual case for atheism was rather insubstantial. Christianity ... seemed rather more interesting" and became a committed Christian. He began research in molecular biophysics in the Oxford University Department of Biochemistry under the supervision of Professor Sir George Radda, FRS...He was awarded an Oxford D.Phil. for his research in molecular biophysics and gained first class honors in Theology in June 1978...McGrath was elected University Research Lecturer in Theology at Oxford University in 1993. In 1995, he was elected Principal of Wycliffe Hall, and in 1999, was awarded a personal chair in theology by Oxford University, with the title "Professor of Historical Theology". Read

Beyond Belief
Written by: Jim Holt

A perceptive article in the New York Times by regular contributor Jim Holt states "The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins’ treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God." Read

Dawkins the Dogmatist
Written by: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown, The Religious Affairs correspondent of British Newspaper The Independent, writes a fascinating piece on Richard Dawkins 'God Delusion' in Prospect, a magazine that has acquired a reputation as the most intelligent magazine of current affairs and cultural debate in Britain. Read

The Storyteller and the Scientist
Written by: Prof. Phillip E. Johnson

Phillip E. Johnson was for many years Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the landmark book 'Darwin on Trial' which became, historically, the first move by the intelligent design movement which has now risen to prominence. Read

A Mission to Convert
Written by: H. Allen Orr

"The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion," says H. Allen Orr, "is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins' cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought." Read

An Exercise in Contempt
Written by: Richard Kirk

"Far from being a serious philosophical book," writes Richard Kirk, "this ill-edited and garrulous diatribe [The God Delusion] contains just about anything that crosses the author's mind - including numerous quotes from that popular author, atheist, and graduate student, Sam Harris. What one won't find in The God Delusion is serious curiosity about the essential nature of the universe. The billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that Carl Sagan invoked with semi-mystical awe, become, for Dawkins, a mere premise for his theoretical conceit that random interactions could have produced the phenomenon of life on earth. (With so many planets, it had to have happened somewhere!) Never mind the fact that scientists endowed with that mysterious chemical characteristic known as consciousness can't, with purposeful intent, replicate that vital accident." Read

The Big Bad Wolf, Theism and the Foundations of Intelligent Design (Part 1)
Written by: Peter S. Williams

"In short, Dawkins delivers a feast of fallacies in The God Delusion," explains Peter Williams, "including: wishful thinking (supposing that the odds against the spontaneous formation of life are less than 1 in 109), equivocation (over the anthropic principle), data picking, ridiculing anything he cannot understand (on the apparent assumption that there must therefore be nothing to understand) and various ad hominem attacks, from name-calling to ‘poisoning the well’. Dawkins also attempts to advance a tautology as an explanation and contradicts himself on several occasions." Read

The Big Bad Wolf, Theism and the Foundations of Intelligent Design (Part 2)
Written by: Peter S. WIlliams

Part 2 of Williams' exposure of the feast of fallacies in Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. Read

Is Life Designed or Designoid?
Written by: Peter S. Williams

Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was converted to the idea of a purposeless universe through reading Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins believes that the universe has no design, no purpose, contains no absolute evil or good, and at its bottom exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Peter Williams, author of the fascinating book 'I Wish I Could Believe in Meaning' (Damaris, 2004), argues persuasively against Dawkins' version of nihilism in this perceptive article. Read

BeThinking Articles on Dawkins
Written by: Various

bethinking.org is a website that aims to defend the Christian faith at University level. It's run by the Christian Unions (UCCF) and features numerous articles and audio downloads on Dawkins, atheism, Darwinism, science and faith. Read

Dawkins' Delusional Arguments Against God
Written by: Chuck Edwards

The Press have frequently lauded Dawkins' 'logic' though trained philosophers have repeatedly demonstrated gaping holes in Dawkins' reasoning in 'The God Delusion'. Prominent among the brief list of issues Edwards raises in this article is Dawkins' use of an ad hominem argument (appealing to emotion, not reason). What does an ad hominem argument sound like? "Richard Dawkins has been divorced twice and is now married to a pretty actor 10 years his junior, so he shouldn't be taken seriously." Or, "Charles Darwin was a racist so his theory is wrong." You get the point. Dawkins accuses some believers of using such arguments and quotes samples in his book - yet, as Edwards explains, he is guilty of the very thing he so despises in others. Read

The New Atheism
Written by: Peter S. Williams

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a rush of books on atheism climb to the top of the best-seller lists around the world. Peter Williams discusses this phenomenon and reveals a disagreement in the world of atheism as to how to respond to the advances being made by the intelligent design movement. Read

The Pilgrim's Regress
Written by: Michael Behe

Behe writes: "About a decade passed until Dawkins’ next books, 'River out of Eden' and 'Climbing Mount Improbable'. Both pretty much just reprised 'The Blind Watchmaker'. A few years later in 'Unweaving the Rainbow' Dawkins unveiled his sensitive side, like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock shedding tears, to explain why science can inspire emotion just as much as poetry does. 'A Devil’s Chaplain' collected some disconnected Dawkins essays — book reviews, articles for newspapers — many of which were exercises in spleen venting, making a sustained argument for nothing. Now he writes a tome which, if it had been done right, would at best have made a great coffee table book, with pretty pictures to accompany the elegant prose, but which could have been assembled by the staff of National Geographic. It seems apparent that Dawkins’ creative intellect is spent." Read

A Response to 'A Devil's Chaplain' (Part 1)
Written by: Peter S. Williams

While happy to agree with a number of Richard Dawkins' points, Peter Williams finds much to critique in 'A Devil's Chaplain' - namely faulty logic, atheistic contradictions and what he calls "blithe, hand waving ignorance". Read

A Response to 'A Devil's Chaplain' (Part 2)
Written by: Peter S. Williams

Part 2 of the above. Read

A Response to 'A Devil's Chaplain' (Part 3)
Written by: Peter S. Williams

Part 3 of the above. Read

No Wonder Atheists are Unhappy
Written by: Madeline Bunting

Madeline Bunting critiques three of Dawkins' main points (in his TV series 'The Root of All Evil') - that, 1. religion causes violence and most of the world's conflicts can be traced back to faith; 2. that children should not be exposed to religion until they are old enough to make a choice; and 3. that religion cuts off a source of wonder. She concludes that 'The Root of All Evil' programme is "a piece of intellectually lazy polemic which is not worthy of a great scientist. He uses his authority as a scientist to claim certainty where he himself knows, all too well, that there is none." Read

Christians In Science
Written by: Various

The Christians in Science website has a Dawkins resource page linking to articles by numerous writers, philosophers and scientists who debunk Richard Dawkins' atheistic claims. Read

A Clash of Fundamentals
Written by: Dr. Denis Alexander

An article by Dr. Denis Alexander, the director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, exposing the 'Root of All Evil' TV documentary by Richard Dawkins, a shortened version of which appeared in the Times Educational Supplement (3 Feb 2006). Read

A Critique of Aspects of the Philosophy and Theology of Richard Dawkins
Written by: Michael Poole

Michael Poole is visiting Research Fellow at King's College London where he was, for twenty years, a Lecturer in Science Education. His research interest is in the interplay between science and religion with special reference to the educational context. His books include Science and Belief, and Miracles: Science, Bible and Experience. This article on Richard Dawkins is reproduced from Science & Christian Belief Vol 6, No 1, April 1994, pp.41-59. Read

Atheist with a Mission
Written by: Philip Bell

Philip Bell (BSc Hons. zoology; PGCE; CBiol; MIBiol) is a scientist and educator who studied biology and geology at the University of Wales (Swansea), graduating in zoology in 1989. A creationist, Philip Bell here examines The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, answering his arguments on design, morality, child abuse and more. Read

Comparing Dawkins' Blind Faith with Antony Flew's Evidence
Written by: Peter S. Williams

Professor Antony Flew has been described as ‘a legendary British philosopher and atheist who has been an icon and champion for unbelievers for decades.’ He once proposed, in classic naturalistic fashion, that nature probably explains everything about itself that is explicable, leaving no need or room for any sort of Creator. However, after watching the development of 50 years of DNA research by the scientific community, Prof. Flew felt compelled to abandon his former position and became a non-Christian theist. Interesting. Dawkins rejected the design argument as a teenager - before the mass of DNA research was available. Flew accepted it as an 81 year old philosopher after honestly facing the overwhelming case for design seen in our DNA which convinced him of the impossibility of life evolving from non-life by chance. Read

Why Richard Dawkins Is Wrong About Religion
Written by: David Sloan Wilson

A fellow atheist of Richard Dawkins, David Sloan Wilson, writing in the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society critiques Dawkins' view of the evolutionary origin of religion. This is a technical article not at all favourable to religion - however, it demonstrates disagreements among atheists in their efforts to explain away the almost universal belief in God. Sloan says of Dawkins, "At the moment, he is just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion." Read

Intelligent Design Blog on Richard Dawkins
Written by: Various

Check out this interesting intelligent design blog on Richard Dawkins containing numerous links and articles of interest. Read

Who Wrote Richard Dawkins' New Book?
Written by: Logan Gage

A short article highlighting a public exchange between Richard Dawkins and American Enterprise Institute's Joe Manzari at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC, in October 2006. Dawkins' weak and muddled view on determinism is fully exposed in this short piece. Read

The Robot Rebellion of Richard Dawkins
Written by: Phillip E. Johnson

Lawyer Phillip Johnson exposes what he calls Dawkins' "not only absurd but embarrassingly naive" theory of rebellious genes. From the article: "If human nature is actually constructed by genes whose predominant quality is a ruthless selfishness, then pious lectures advocating qualities like generosity and altruism are probably just another strategy for furthering selfish interests. Ruthless predators are often moralistic in appearance, because that is how they disarm their intended victims. The genes who teach their robot vehicles not to take morality seriously, but to take advantage of fools who do, will have a decisive advantage in the Darwinian competition. If a man is preparing his son for a career with the Chicago mafia, he'd better not teach him to be loving and trusting. But he might teach him to feign loyalty while he is planning treachery! There is an even more fundamental problem with the robot rebellion, however. Just who is this "we" that is supposed to do the rebelling? Like other Darwinian reductionists, Dawkins does not believe that there is a single, central self which utilizes the machinery of the brain for its own purposes. The central self that makes choices and then acts upon them is fundamentally a creationist notion, which reductionists ridicule as 'the ghost in the machine'. Selfish genes would produce not a free-acting self, but rather a set of mental reactions that compete with each other in the brain before a winner emerges to produce a bodily reaction that serves the overall interests of the genes." Read

The Simple Answer (Interview with Dawkins)
Written by: Nick Pollard (Interviewer)

Nick Pollard discusses Darwin and morals with Richard Dawkins. From the interview: "[NP] Suppose some lads break into an old man’s house and kill him. Suppose they say: ‘Well, we accept the evolutionist worldview. He was old and sick, and he didn’t contribute anything to society.’ How would you show them that what they had done was wrong?" [RD] "You credit them with rather more rational thought than I suspect the real thugs would have had. If somebody used my views to justify a completely self-centred lifestyle, which involved trampling all over other people in any way they chose – roughly what, I suppose, at a sociological level social Darwinists did – I think I would be fairly hard put to it to argue on purely intellectual grounds. I think it would be more: ‘This is not a society in which I wish to live. Without having a rational reason for it necessarily, I’m going to do whatever I can to stop you doing this'." [NP] "They’ll say, ‘This is the society we want to live in'." [RD] "I couldn’t, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, ‘Well, in this society you can’t get away with it’ and call the police. I realise this is very weak, and I’ve said I don’t feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it’s a separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths." Read

A Review of 'Climbing Mount Improbable'
Written by: Jonathan Safati

Jonathan Sarfati exposes the weak guesswork of Richard Dawkins' as to the origin of life and reveals how the Oxford atheist's Darwinian stories about the origin of flight and sight come up short. Read

Britain's Crusading Atheist
Written by: Jonathan Luxmoore

Luxmoore outlines the driving force behind Richard Dawkins and warns of the bleak destiny ahead for any society that follows his vision. From his article: "Born into a British colonial family in Kenya, Dawkins is a self-described member of the political Left who lives comfortably in a 3 million-Euro house just off Oxford’s exclusive Norham Gardens. It is tempting to view him as a distinctly English eccentric, more outrageous than offensive, with middle-class secularist obsessions that hark back to the paternalism of figures such as the anti-religious philosopher Bertrand Russell. Yet this would be a mistake. For one thing, his atheist campaign, with its chilling eugenic undertones, appeals to many people raised with little knowledge or understanding of religious belief-people for whom the fear of Islam touched off by September 11 has metamorphosed into a public phobia about all religion. Such people may be tempted by Dawkins’ Darwinist notion of religious belief as a virus that infects inferior genes and needs 'quarantining', as well as by the summons to defend society against a rising tide of 'religious fanaticism'." Read

The New Atheism - A Publishing Phenomenon
Written by: David Robertson

David Robertson examines why the God Delusion has sold so well despite its poor logic, history and argumentation. From the article: "...Dawkins in 'The God Delusion' make[s] the incredible claim that the racism of such ‘liberal’ thinkers as H G Wells and Thomas Huxley would now be unacceptable because of ‘improved education and in particular the increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex – both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution’. Only someone with a complete ignorance of the Bible, theology and the early history of 19th Century evolutionary thought could make such a claim. Whereas in the early 19th century Christians such as Wilberforce were arguing that all human beings were made in the image of God and should be treated equally, liberal evolutionary thinkers such as Huxley argued in 1871 “No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man!” " Read

The God Delusion (Review)
Written by: Barney Zwartz

From Barney Zwartz's review: "I imagine this book's main contribution will not be to reach the unconverted, as he hopes, but to provide more bullets for atheists to fire. Or one could read him simply for informative entertainment, like a bigoted Bill Bryson. It may be too harsh a judgement, but not by much, to cite the comment once attributed to Dr Johnson: 'This book is both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good'." Read