by Boyan Mak Michaylov

Please, read the whole debate or listen to it before you read my comments.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXf9A4wJ3lk

Why the Belief in God Can Not Be Compared to Tooth Fairies or Santa Claus

According to Richard Dawkins highly intelligent people believe in God because:

...People are sometimes remarkably adept at compartmentalizing their mind, at separating their mind into two separate parts. There are some people who even manage to combine being apparently perfectly good working scientists with believing that the book of Genesis is literally true and that the world is only 6000 years old. If you can perform that level of doublethink then you could do anything

Here Richard Dawkins makes an argument as if there are believers in God only from the young earth creationists camp. But as a matter of fact many religious people believe in many different kinds of evolution or creationism and answer the question of HOW the universe is created in a very different way without the need to become non-religious:

Quinn: ...The theory of evolution explains how matter — which we are all made from — organized itself into for example highly complex beings like Richard Dawkins and Ryan Tubridy and other human beings but what it doesn’t explain just to give one example is how matter came into being in the first place. That, in scientific terms, is a question that cannot be answered and can only be answered, if it can be answered fully at all, by philosophers and theologians. But it certainly cannot be answered by science and the question of whether God exists or not cannot be answered fully by science either and a common mistake that people can believe is the scientist who speaks about evolution with all the authority of science can also speak about the existence of God with all the authority of science and of course he can’t.

As an example a Bible believing Christian can be an evolutionist, progressive old earth creationist, young earth creationist or believe in a combination of different views about cosmology (like me). The argument of the Creator is not one of how things happened but Who created matter in the first place as Quinn puts it in a very straightforward way! To mix the belief in God with tooth fairies is a complete misunderstanding on Dawkins part of the philosophical question on which he is commenting as a scientist who doesn't recognize What the dispute is all about. As he says, religious believers compartmentalize their mind but it seems that Richard Dawkins atomizes his and he can not thing of anything outside purely materialistic categories. Like philosophy is concerned ONLY with the physical universe and not with values and the unseen.

According to a believer to believe that God created the universe / matter is a very legitimate and logical question because in everything there is somewhere a first cause. On the opposite an atheist must believe that matter came from nowhere or existed eternally itself and that intellect in human beings came from the mere elementary particles plus time plus natural selection. A Christian would believe this to be highly improbable. Atheism is inconsistent with Free Will

Atheism, Free Will and Good and Evil

Why an atheist can not believe in Free Will? No matter if interested in free will or not a true logically consistent atheist can not be a true believer in Free Will because according to atheistic naturalism our thoughts in our brains are caused entirely by physical and chemical combinations of matter through the natural evolutionary process. On a purely naturalistic basis one CAN NOT even say that he carries responsibility for his actions because his actions are simply a cause and effect of particles in matter.

This would naturally lead to an ethics in which one can say "good" and "evil" but this words are meaningless.

Dawkins says that believers pick from the Bible only verses they like and do not take verses they do not like. Also he states contemporary theologians do not take the Old Testament literary in which, he says, a very cruel God is displayed.

How in the world could a man who doesn't even have the reason to believe in "good" and "evil" state what kind of a person God is like? Dawkins uses the same moral categories he denounces to speak against God and thus being on his behalf irrational and inconsistent:

Turbidy: You have a very interesting description in The God Delusion of the Old Testament God. Do you want to give us that description or will I give it to you back?

Dawkins: Have you got it in front of you?

Turbidy: Yes I have.

Dawkins: Well why don’t you read it out then.

Turbidy: Why not. You describe God as a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully

Survival of the Fittest Makes Hitler and Stalin Heroes?

Naturalism clearly leads to a loss of free will and this way to a loss of moral responsibility. Dawkins says that religion always played a big bad part in wars but nor WWI nor WWII were caused by religion. On the contrary history shows that atheistic regimes as the one of Stalin eradicated people because of their religious beliefs. According to natural evolution Hitler would be a hero because what he wanted to do was simply survival of the fittest in purely naturalistic terms. But contrary to this, very irrationaly, many evolutionists say that Hitler is "evil". This is Christian thinking not naturalistic!

Dawkin's Old Testament "god" Should be an Evolutionistic Hero?

Pure natural evolution in terms of survival of the fittest would in a purely naturalistic sense mean the killing of one for the survival of the other. But then the God of the Old Testament, according to Dawkins, is a hero as he put it because He is "genocidal" as He lets Israel survive and all other die? So cruelty according to natural evolution is "good"!

As a Christian I believe equally in God's love and in God's judgement. Whenever God punishes a nation he always explains His actions. Theistic ethics is objective and absolute. It is grounded in the image the Creator put in human beings.

The fact that Biblical ethics comes in conflict with Dawkin's ethics just shows confusion on his part. It shows a Christian remains of ethics in Dawkins, an old echo, that comes to conflict with his naturalistic evolutionism. If his ethics is truly based on his naturalism then categories like "good", "evil", "misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" should be only relative and a matter of opinion to Dawkins having nothing to do with objective truth and science to which he so much wants to subscribe.

Can Probability "Prove" God's Existence?

All scientists agree that life on planet Earth or even in the universe has a very small mathematical probability and yet biological life is a fact. Dawkins goes to say that since the universe is highly complex if it is created of God then God should be much more complex than the universe itself. Then he goes to state that it is highly improbable that such a being created it!

Now that is really a funny argument to go because mathematical probability or improbability doesn't actually proof anything. The argument goes like this:

1) Life is highly complex but evolved out of the elementary particles through natural selection and time

2) God should be more complex than life

3) Then it is improbable that God created it because natural evolution did

Richard Dawkins here does a real bad service to mathematical science and is very inconsistent because:

1) Life is highly improbable itself even explained in evolutionary terms. But the fact is that there is life on the contrary and it was with a very small probability to ever happen. The existence of life instead of its non-existence shows that this very small probability really happened. Life shows to be somehow intelligent so it is more probable to come from an intelligent source. And as Quinn put it first someone must explain where matter itself came from!

2) If God should be more complex than the universe (,and in an intellectual sense God should be more intelligent at least than the intellects in the universe,) then the probability of it CAN NOT say anything about His existence or not! The probability doesn't prove anything because it is just a mathematical formulation of what COULD BE and not WHAT EXISTS. To say that it is very improbable that there is a God is not equal to proving there is no God. Mixing this two categories is not consistent and logical and rational! Probability is NOT being or not being. It just calculates possibility.

3) The principle of cause and effect leads us to think that intellect in human beings which is itself very improbable to appear by natural forces is itself very probable to appear from a more intelligent source which theologians and philosophers call God. And this IS scientific thinking because this way of thinking is observed by experiment in our every day encounter with engineering, information technology, computers and everything created by man. We naturally "see" what is created by another intellect. So a "blind Watchmaker" as Dawkins states in another of his books is STILL a watchmaker because we KNOW that every watch is made by a watchmaker no matter how you call him.

So simply by Dawkin's logic and using his argumentation we could easily "prove" theism instead of atheism:

1) Life is improbable BUT it is a fact. Human beings are intelligent and it is a fact.

2) God should be more intelligent than humans (or "complex" in Dawkins's materialistic terms)

3) It is most probable that since life exists it is most probably created by God because we see intelligence in it!

Now this would lead to a belief in God that God is an absolutely complex reality Himself . But a Christian is NOT forced to think of God exactly in materialistic terms as "complex" like God should be some kind of a computer. God could be of a different nature than matter. The same way as a human being is different from its creation. Richard Dawkins himself writes:

If somebody comes up with evidence that goes the other way, I will be the first to change my mind.

Well His "evidence" is probability but probability is only mathematical possibility something to be true or untrue.

Well as we said probability is only probability but not evidence! As we saw according to Dawkin's own argument it is more probable that life and matter in itself is more probable to come from an intelligent source than from nowhere! This is not evidence but it is a scientific argument. Of course he could argue "Who created God?" but this question by itself would need a first cause which would be all powerful in some sense be it a creator or be it an evolutionary process. But evolutionary process according to Dawkins is blind and unintelligent so how could it produce the whole universe and intelligent beings?

Christianity can not proof God's existence and by scientific method never will BUT it simply says almost as Dawkins that most probably God created the universe. To believe in probability is by itself faith not science!

In another debate with Francis Collins, Dawkins says:

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

What in the world happened with the atheist Richard Dawkins??? That is exactly what Christian theology says! That God is incomprehensible in his power, wisdom and might! Richard Dawkins seems to sound so theological! But concerning probability it is highly improbable that he believes in God!