What We Might Say To Dawkins

The evangelist for atheism, Richard Dawkins, has explained here why he won’t engage in debate with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig. Craig left an empty chair at his Oxford debate last night.

In a nutshell, Dawkins accused Craig of defending what he calls “genocide” in the Old Testament, when God told Israel to kill the inhabitants of Canaan. Dawkins’ line was: I’m a busy man, I’m a good man, and I’m not going to waste time giving credence to a guy who says that it’s OK for thousands of people, including children, to be killed, or who believes in a God who says that’s OK.

A couple of commentators, who don’t appear to be Christians themselves, have helpfully critiqued Dawkins’ position: have a look here and here.

But how does the everyday Christian deal with all this? In three ways, perhaps, which we’ll put up in three separate posts. Here’s the first:

What we might say to Dawkins himself: You say that humans are just random collections of atoms. Everything is down to random chance. Yet you refuse to engage with a collection of atoms (William Lane Craig) which says that the random reordering of lots of collections of atoms (the Canaanites) by another bunch of collections of atoms (the Israelites) thousands of years ago was not “morally wrong”.

And anyway, if we’re all just atoms constantly randomly rearranging themselves, then there is no “wrong”. Your outrage is founded on a moral judgement that your views cannot support.

The only justification for being uneasy about what happened is if those humans were more than mere collections of atoms. But if they’re more than that, then where does that value come from? It can’t be bestowed by another human (we’re mere atoms!) It can only be by a “God”. Who you don’t believe in.