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.
Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.
Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.
As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.
Darwin’s solution has no significance. Darwin is irrelevant. It’s now logically, mathematically, and empirically proven that evolution by natural selection never happened. It couldn’t have ever happened and it didn’t happen. The scientific case is closed, Richard Dawkins just doesn’t know it yet.
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.