The Dawkins Debate

Message / Question

This is a quote from Richard Dawkins: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" Please discuss.

Response

There is ample debate on the internet regarding the claims made by Prof Dawkins, and space in a short Q and A blog is certainly nowhere near sufficient to debate/discuss fully these issues.

I do however, note a couple of things in response to Dawkins’ comments.

Many of the stories cited by Dawkins as examples of violent horror are not endorsed in the Bible at all. The incidents throughout the book of Judges, such as Jephthah’s killing of his own daughter just to keep a promise, or of the cutting up of a women into 12 bits (both ridiculed by Dawkins specifically) are in the book of Judges precisely to show us how low Israel had sunk. They are not moral examples to us – they are, in fact, quite the opposite.

The God of the Bible (including the Old Testament) is a God of justice. Judgment and punishment are normal parts of a system of justice and that which we see in the Old Testament is simply a manifestation of God’s justice and righteousness. Today we have prisons (for men, women and children) and, in many parts of the world, sentences of a physical nature are employed (e.g. strokes of a cane) as is capital punishment. Punishment is an integral part of justice.

God is portrayed in the Old Testament as forgiving, patient, and slow to bring forth judgment. However, He is also revealed to be a holy, just and righteous God who will bring justice about in His time. When judgment was looming, it was preceded by warning and/or long periods of exposure to the truth and time to repent. Whilst I find capital punishment unacceptable today, I have to concede that it is a normal standard in many nations and has been a common standard throughout the annals of history. The nature of punishment has always varied from age to age and from culture to culture. So a 21st century British/Australian mindset will view punishments metered out in past ages very differently from the way they were viewed at the time they were used. It is difficult to view a culture that existed thousands of years ago through 21st century Western eyes and expect to make a fair and reasonable assessment.

However, I do find the professor’s comments somewhat confusing. Dawkins claims that God does not exist, yet he somehow manages to indignantly rant against God’s character. An interesting anomaly! Further, the very morality that Dawkins claims to have been breached is the morality that has its roots in the Judeo/Christian ethos. If God does not exist, then His set standards of morality must surely be irrelevant and all morality must be purely situational in terms of time and culture. It raises a question in my mind, could Professor Dawkins adoption of the Judeo/Christian moral code be an indication of his conversion to some form of theism? If it is, then the only god that he could turn to would be the one who developed the moral code that the professor seems so keen to adopt and that is the God of the Old (and New) Testament!

The other area that leaves me somewhat perplexed, is yet another sign of the duplicity of Dawkins’ argument. Dawkins, the modern champion of Darwinian evolution complains that the God of the Old Testament acted in ways that the very process of natural selection conducts itself. Does not the process of natural selection show callous indifference to all suffering, and actually select/target the weak and sickly for immanent destruction? Natural selection silently and insensibly determined whether any changed organism was worthy of salvation or would simply be discarded as unacceptable to the new order of things. Did not natural selection use suffering, destruction and death as the means to create new forms of life?

Would the good professor see natural selection as a callous, capricious, malevolent, genocidal bully that pitted one part of the population against another in life and death struggle for mere survival? Even Dawkins’ worst description of the God of the Old Testament (as he calls God) never even comes close to the repugnant processes ensconced in the process adopted by natural selection’s means of determining which part of the gene pool was carried forward.

I’m sure that Prof Dawkins has some analogies in his mind as he seeks to find fault with the God of the Old Testament, but the one that I find hard to displace in mine as I read the good professor’s diatribe has something to do with a pot and a kettle.....