Gunning for God
Authors: John C. Lennox
JOHN C. LENNOX
GUNNING FOR GOD
WHY THE NEW ATHEISTS ARE MISSING THE TARGET
Copyright © 2011 John C. Lennox
This edition copyright © 2011 Lion Hudson
The author asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work
A Lion Book
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First edition 2011
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First electronic format 2011
All rights reserved
Acknowledgments
All Scripture quotations are from The Holy bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All right reserved.
Here
,
here
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All right reserved.
Here
Extract from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Here
In God we Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist
by John Humpreys © John Humpreys 2007, reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.
Here
David Bentley Hart “Believe It or Not”
First Things
(www.firstthings.com), May 2010, reprinted by permission.
Here
This extract is from According to Luke by David Gooding, published by Inter-Varsity Press 1987, Used by permission.
Cover image: Ocean/Corbis, adapted by Jonathan Roberts
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Are God and Faith Enemies of Reason and Science?
Chapter 2: Is Religion Poisonous?
Chapter 3: Is Atheism Poisonous?
Chapter 4: Can We be Good Without God?
Chapter 5: Is the God of the Bible a Despot?
Chapter 6: Is the Atonement Morally Repellent?
Chapter 7: Are Miracles Pure Fantasy?
Chapter 8: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?
To my friends and colleagues
David Gooding, Michael Middleton, and
Arthur Williamson, with deep appreciation
INTRODUCTION
“Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.”
Richard Dawkins
“There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
British Humanist bus advertising campaign
Atheism is on the march in the Western world. Noisily. A concerted attempt is still being made to marshal the atheist faithful, to encourage them not to be ashamed of their atheism but to stand up and fight as a united army. The enemy is God. They are gunning for God. The biggest gun, otherwise known as the former Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, has been Richard Dawkins. In 2005 he was voted by the magazine
Prospect UK
as one of the three leading public intellectuals in the world. His book
The God Delusion
,
1
published in 2006, has dominated best-seller lists and sold over 2 million copies in English alone.
However, there is now an even bigger gun, certainly so far as scientific credentials are concerned — the Cambridge theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. For years Hawking appeared to have left the question of God open. At the end of his best-selling
A Brief History of Time
he wrote: “If we discover a complete theory… it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”
2
However, in his latest book,
The Grand Design
,
3
co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, he claims there is now no room for God. Richard Dawkins is delighted, of course, and speaking of God he says: “Darwin kicked him out of biology, but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grâce.”
Trailing behind Dawkins come a phalanx of lesser calibre but equally trigger-happy fusiliers. First, the highly articulate British-born, US-based Christopher Hitchens, a writer and professor of liberal studies in New York, who has written
God is not Great
.
4
Next is a scientist, Daniel Dennett, who produced
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
.
5
He describes himself as a “godless philosopher”.
6
Finally, the more junior Sam Harris, a graduate in neuroscience, who has written
The End of Faith
;
7
Letter to a Christian Nation
,
8
and, more recently,
The Moral Landscape.
9
The anti-God adrenalin is not only running in the English-speaking world. In France the most prominent activist is, unsurprisingly, not a scientist but a philosopher. He is the prolific author Michel Onfray, who has written
In Defence of Atheism
.
10
Dressed from head to foot in black, he regularly addresses overflowing crowds of eager listeners. In Italy the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi has stirred up controversy with his essay
Why we cannot be Christians (much less Catholics)
.
11
The Vatican is not amused by his parody of the Latin blessing, in which he replaces the Trinity by Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Newton.
Dawkins hopes that he can orchestrate an atheist revival — although the task, he feels, is as tricky as the proverbial herding of cats: “Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.”
12
Well, he, as Cat herder-in-Chief, and his colleagues are certainly showing how to make plenty of noise. Whether that noise can be resolved into intelligible language is another matter entirely.
One attempt they have made to get their message across is by advertising it on the sides of buses. For a time bendy buses became the medium that carried the atheist message. They charged around the UK’s major cities bringing the remarkably underwhelming missive: “There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Apart from the advertisement for a well-known beer, there are probably very few advertisements containing the word “probably”. After all, can one imagine being caught by advertisements like: “This medicine has probably no serious side effects…; this bank will probably not collapse…; this plane will probably get you to your destination”? Yet Richard Dawkins was prepared to dip into his own pocket to help finance the campaign.
Not to be outdone, German atheists, failing to get permission from local authorities to mount a similar campaign on public buses, rented one of their own to carry the message. In grand teutonic style it carefully announced: “There is (with probability bounding on certainty) no God. A fulfilled life needs no faith.” As the bus toured Germany it was shadowed by another, similar, vehicle, hired this time by Christians. It, more modestly, simply asked a question: “And what if He does exist?” The media were delighted at the sight of both buses parked together in city after city. The net effect? God was firmly on the agenda.
Now I imagine that the word “probably” may well have been included for legal reasons, to avoid prosecution under trade-description legislation. The atheists realize, of course, that they could not amass enough evidence to convince a court that the probability of God’s existence was zero; and if it is not zero, then God’s existence is possible. Come to think of it, the
a priori
probability of Richard Dawkins’ existence is very low. His existence, like that of the rest of us, is improbable. In spite of that, lo and behold, Richard Dawkins, you and I, are all actual. The message on the bus is beside the point. The real question is not, “How probable is God?” but rather, “Is there evidence that God is actual?”
If we have not yet boarded the atheist bus, we might well want to ask what kind of a God is it whose existence is deemed improbable? The slogan proudly informs us that it is a God whose existence is associated (at least in atheist minds) with worry and lack of enjoyment— no doubt with the implication that atheism is the fount of joy that will dismiss this gloomy God and alleviate all of life’s concerns.
Mathematician David Berlinski comes in with a reality check:
The thesis that
if
there is no God, then disbelievers may contemplate many new enjoyments prompts an obvious question. Have atheists, at least, stopped worrying and begun to enjoy their lives? To be sure, it has not been widely observed that prominent atheists have in recent years blistered their conscience with anxiety. Short of retiring into a coma, it is hard to imagine how Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens could have stopped worrying more than they had already stopped worrying and so hard to credit atheism for their ebullience.
Berlinski continues:
Those considering atheism as a
new
doctrinal commitment, however, will not find plausible the alleviation of anxiety it is said to afford. If the great concern occasioned by atheism is God’s indignation, then given the very tentative way in which his
in
existence has been affirmed, it might seem that atheists have drawn their worries prematurely to an end. Whatever its other benefits, atheism is not generally counted a position calculated to assuage the worst fears of mankind; and as the work of prominent atheists indicates, those who
have
stopped worrying have done so only because they have stopped thinking.
13
One of those prominent atheists, Jean-Paul Sartre, said: “Atheism is a long, hard, cruel business.” Might it not, therefore, rather be that worry is part and parcel of the
rejection
of God rather than a consequence of belief in him? And might it not be wise then to ask exactly where the atheist bus is headed before jumping on board? Slogans on the side of a bus can distract one from noticing the bus’s destination.