Richard Dawkins put his faith in Charles Darwin, not in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t just the wrong bet, it was a very foolish one:
On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”. We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.
They don’t need to be restated. They were demolished in 2009 by The Irrational Atheist. Ever notice that no one claims religion causes war anymore, Richard? Yeah, that wasn’t The New York Times or Nature. They were literally quoting me. Ever notice that no one cites the Red State argument anymore? Also me.
Christians don’t just know some hymns, or think it might be a rather nice idea if people loved their neighbours a bit more. Christians believe. They believe that a man called Jesus died to redeem our sins and walked three days later. If, like me, you reject such tosh, you are not a Christian.
I pay God the compliment of taking the hypothesis of his existence seriously. If verified, God would be the most exciting hypothesis in the entire history of science. A universe conceived and designed by a superhuman intelligence would be a totally different kind of universe from the one which, in my opinion, we actually inhabit. At a stroke, the whole of science would have to be rewritten, from the bottom up.
That “tosh” is exactly what we believe. And rewriting the whole of science is exactly what we’re doing. Starting with evolutionary biology.
