title: “Twenty Years After The God Delusion: Taking Dawkins at His Word” author: “Dr. Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-10-06 module: CFE type: engagement essay (pre-meeting reading) status: draft v0.1 — for Thomas’s edit register: academic, conversational occasion: “Richard Dawkins’ twentieth-anniversary reflection on The God Delusion (syndicated on MSN, early October 2026; the book was first published 2 October 2006)” source: “https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/twenty-years-since-i-wrote-the-book-the-god-delusion-won-t-die/ar-AA2dp2rU” topics: [New Atheism, argument from design, fine-tuning, natural theology, theodicy, divine simplicity, evolutionary epistemology, Conscious Point Physics, cultural Christianity] editorial_notes:
- “Organized by the order of Dawkins’ own argument, with concessions placed first.”
- “Quotations from the source article kept to a few short phrases; the rest is paraphrase.”
- “Factual corrections to the article are set off as clearly marked notes.”
- “In-house terms (Conscious Point Physics, conscious points) defined in plain words at first use.” changelog:
- “v0.1 (2026-10-06): first draft by Claude for Thomas’s review.”
Twenty Years After The God Delusion: Taking Dawkins at His Word
1. The Occasion
Richard Dawkins has marked the twentieth anniversary of The God Delusion with a short essay that restates the book’s case and declares that he stands by it. He notes that the “New Atheism” label was applied from outside, that he, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens wrote independently, and that he regrets the old arguments still need restating. He then runs through the core of his position: belief in God as consolation rather than conclusion; the invalidity of arguing from Stalin’s atheism to God’s existence; the death of the biological design argument at Darwin’s hand; the cruelty and waste of natural selection; the fine-tuning of physical constants answered by multiverse and anthropic reasoning; the “God of the gaps” fallacy; and, at the center, the claim that a designing God would be at least as improbable as anything he was invoked to explain. He closes by calling himself a “cultural Christian” who nonetheless rejects the resurrection, and by granting that the existence of God, if verified, would be the most exciting hypothesis in the history of science.
That last sentence is the right place for a Christian reader to stand. Dawkins pays God what he calls the compliment of treating his existence as a hypothesis. We should return the compliment: treat Dawkins’ argument as an argument, concede what it gets right, and answer what it gets wrong, in that order.
2. What Dawkins Gets Right
A fair reply begins with concessions, because several of his points are correct, and a Christian who cannot say so has already lost the argument about honesty.
Religion is not exempt from criticism. Dawkins, following Douglas Adams, objects to the cultural habit of treating religious claims as untouchable. Scripture agrees with him. The Bereans were commended for checking Paul’s preaching against the Scriptures daily (Acts 17:11). Paul told the Thessalonians to test all things and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Peter told believers to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them (1 Peter 3:15). A faith that claims to be true has no business asking for a cocoon. The Fellowship exists precisely as a place where claims are tested.
Comfort is not proof. The inference “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X exists” is invalid, and no Christian argument should rest on it. The desire for God may be evidence of something (C. S. Lewis made a careful argument along those lines), but the bare fact that a belief comforts proves nothing either way. The same rule cuts in both directions: that a belief is uncomfortable does not make it true either.
The Stalin syllogism is a bad argument. “Stalin was an atheist; Stalin was evil; therefore God exists” does not follow, and anyone who argues that way deserves the correction.
The God of the gaps is a fallacy. “I cannot explain X, therefore God did it” is an argument from ignorance, and every advance that fills a gap shrinks the God who was placed in it. Theologians have warned against this for a century and more.
Cosmology alone does not reach the cross. Dawkins is right that a fine-tuned universe, even if granted, does not establish that Jesus died for our sins. The case for Christ is a historical case, resting on the testimony to his death and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Natural theology can, at most, show that the universe is the kind of place in which such a claim is not absurd.
Christianity means belief in the resurrection. Here Dawkins is clearer than many churchmen. He says that knowing the hymns and admiring the ethic does not make a man a Christian; a Christian believes Jesus rose from the dead. Paul said the same: if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17). Dawkins has defined the faith correctly and declined it honestly. That is more respectable than redefining it until it can be accepted without cost.
The multiplication of intercessors. His jab at the many titles of Mary, each apparently assigned to separate errands, is mockery, and mockery is not argument. But many Protestant readers will recognize the underlying objection, since they hold that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). The point to take from it is not to join the laughter but to notice that a practice which can be caricatured this easily invites the question of whether it rests on Scripture at all.
3. The Borrowed Ledger: Moral Language Without a Moral Ground
Notice the vocabulary Dawkins uses. Stalin was a “horrible man.” A God who designs predator and prey would be a “sadist.” Natural selection exhibits “hideous cruelty.” Some religions are “greater evils” than others.
These are moral judgments, and they are delivered with confidence. But in Dawkins’ own account, the universe has no designer, no purpose, and no standard outside the evolved preferences of a particular primate. On that account, “horrible” can only mean “something many of us, for evolutionary reasons, dislike.” That is a report about the speaker, not a verdict about Stalin.
This is the serious form of the argument Dawkins caricatures as the Stalin syllogism. The argument is not “Stalin was an atheist, therefore God exists.” It is this: when we say Stalin was really evil, not merely disliked, we are appealing to a standard that binds Stalin whether he agreed with it or not. Where does such a standard come from in a universe of matter in motion? Dawkins writes as though the moral law is real and binding, which is what the Christian believes, while denying the only foundation on which its reality and binding force can rest. He is spending from an account he has closed.
The Christian answer is that the moral law is real because it expresses the character of a real Person. The command to love God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40) is not an arbitrary rule laid on us; it describes how beings made in his image actually flourish. When Dawkins condemns cruelty, he is right to condemn it, and he is, without intending to, testifying to the law written on the heart (Romans 2:14–15).
4. The Cheetah and the Gazelle: Whose Side Is God On?
Dawkins asks: if God designed the cheetah to catch the gazelle and the gazelle to escape the cheetah, whose side is he on? Is he a spectator enjoying the sport?
First, a logical point. This is not an argument against design; it is an argument against a certain kind of designer. A cruel designer would still be a designer. The objection belongs to the problem of evil, not to the question of whether the world shows evidence of mind.
Second, Scripture does not hide the predator. It boasts of him. God asks Job whether Job can hunt prey for the lioness or provide food for the raven’s young (Job 38:39–41). The psalmist says the young lions roar after their prey and seek their food from God (Psalm 104:21). God is on the side of the whole: a living system of balance, beauty, strength, and speed, in which each creature is fitted to its place. The cheetah’s sprint and the gazelle’s leap are both his work, and both glorify him.
Third, Scripture also says that this order is not final. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, and groans as in childbirth, waiting for its liberation (Romans 8:20–22). The prophets foresee a day when the wolf lives with the lamb and the lion eats straw like the ox (Isaiah 11:6–9). The Christian claim is not that the present order of death is what God ultimately intends, but that he works within it, and through it, toward a restoration in which death itself is undone (Revelation 21:4).
Whether one finds that answer satisfying is a fair question for discussion. But it is an answer, and it is far older than Darwin.
5. Has the Biological Argument Really Disappeared?
Dawkins says the biological design argument now persuades only those whose thinking predates 1859. This claim needs to be stated in proportion.
What Darwin explained is how populations of self-replicating organisms change and adapt over time through variation and selection. That is a real achievement, and the Christian has no reason to fear it. Many believers, from Asa Gray in Darwin’s own day onward, have accepted descent with modification as the means God used.
What Darwin’s mechanism does not explain is the origin of the first self-replicating system. Natural selection requires a replicator with heritable information before it can begin. How the first living cell, with its coded information, its machinery for reading the code, and its membrane, arose from non-living chemistry remains an open problem in origin-of-life research. This is not a claim that it can never be solved. It is a claim that it has not been solved, and that Dawkins’ “mortally wounded” covers more ground than the evidence currently supports.
To keep this argument honest, it must not be a God-of-the-gaps argument. The point is not “we cannot explain the first cell, therefore God.” The point is positive: in every case where we know the origin of coded, functional information (language, software, blueprints), it comes from a mind. To infer a mind from such information is an argument from what we know, not from what we do not know. One may dispute the inference, but it is not the fallacy Dawkins names.
6. The Savanna Brain and the Self-Undermining Step
In the middle of his discussion of cosmology, Dawkins makes a striking concession. Common sense, he says, evolved only to think as deeply as survival and reproduction required; we have no right to assume our brains, schooled on the African savanna, can understand everything about the universe.
This cuts deeper than he intends. If our cognitive faculties were shaped only for survival, and not for truth, what grounds our confidence that they deliver truth when we use them to build theories, including the theory of natural selection, and including the argument that God does not exist? Darwin himself felt this. In a letter to William Graham in 1881, he confessed a “horrid doubt” whether the convictions of a mind developed from lower animals are of any value or trustworthy at all. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has developed the point into a formal argument: naturalism combined with unguided evolution gives us reason to doubt the reliability of our own reasoning, and so undercuts belief in naturalism itself.
Theism has no such problem. If the universe was made by a rational God, and man was made in his image (Genesis 1:27), then the fit between our minds and the order of nature is expected. The Word, the Logos, through whom all things were made, is also the light that gives light to every man (John 1:1–9). The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the physical world. On theism it is not unreasonable at all. It is what one would expect if the world and the mind that studies it have the same Author.
7. Fine-Tuning: Knobs, Multiverses, and What Remains
Dawkins describes the fine-tuning argument fairly: a handful of physical constants (Martin Rees lists six) appear set within narrow ranges that permit stars, chemistry, and life. He offers three replies. Some physicists, such as Victor Stenger, argue that if many knobs are turned together, life-permitting combinations may be common. Inflationary cosmology may predict a multiverse in which some fraction of universes happen to be life-permitting, and we necessarily find ourselves in one of them. And in any case, invoking God here is the God-of-the-gaps fallacy.
Each reply deserves an answer.
On Stenger: his book was reviewed in detail by the astrophysicist Luke Barnes, whose 2012 paper in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia surveyed the technical literature and concluded that fine-tuning is a real feature of our physical theories, not an artifact of turning one knob at a time. The debate among physicists continues, but the claim that fine-tuning has been dissolved is not the consensus position.
On the multiverse: it has three difficulties. First, other universes are, by construction, unobservable, so the hypothesis is at best an inference, not an observation. Second, a mechanism that generates universes is itself governed by laws, and those laws must have just the right form to produce varied universes, so the fine-tuning question moves up a level rather than disappearing. Third, not all fine-tuning is of the “constants” kind. Roger Penrose calculated that the low-entropy initial condition of our universe was special to a degree of roughly one part in ten raised to the power of ten to the 123rd. The anthropic principle explains why we observe a universe compatible with our existence; it does not explain why there should be a life-permitting universe to observe.
On the gaps: the fine-tuning argument, rightly made, is not “we do not know why the constants have these values, therefore God.” It is an inference to the best explanation: a universe with these features is more expected if it was intended than if it was not. Dawkins may judge the multiverse the better explanation. That is a legitimate position. But it is a weighing of explanations, not the refutation of a fallacy.
8. The Central Argument: Who Designed the Designer?
Dawkins’ main argument, here and in the book, is this. Design arguments appeal to statistical improbability. But a God capable of setting the knobs must be at least as improbable as the settings themselves. Explaining improbability by postulating a greater improbability explains nothing. Darwin’s genius was to build complexity from simplicity, step by step; invoking a complex God at the start reverses the direction of explanation. And when theologians reply that God is “simple,” Dawkins scoffs: a being who hears a billion prayers at once, judges every sin, numbers every hair, and notices every sparrow is not simple by any reasonable definition.
This is his strongest point, and it should be stated at full strength before it is answered. If God is a very large and complicated thing, assembled from parts, then asking how such a thing came to exist is a fair question, and “he just did” sounds like special pleading.
Here are four responses.
First, improbability applies to things that could have been otherwise. Statistical improbability is a measure of how unlikely an outcome is, given a range of possible outcomes and a process that selects among them. A cell is improbable because its parts could have been arranged in countless other ways by an undirected process. But classical theism does not claim that God is one outcome drawn from a distribution of possible gods. It claims that God is the necessary ground of all contingent things: the one who exists of himself, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). One may reject that claim, but one cannot refute it by calculating his improbability, because the calculation assumes he is the sort of thing the claim says he is not.
Second, simplicity is not the same as limited capability. When theologians call God simple, they mean he is not composed of parts, not that he can do only a few things. Dawkins himself admires how simple rules generate vast complexity: a few lines of code can produce a fractal of unlimited detail; a short set of equations governs every electromagnetic phenomenon. The breadth of what something can do does not measure how many parts it has. A single unified Mind whose knowledge is not assembled piece by piece is not refuted by pointing at how much that Mind knows.
Third, the regress objection proves too much. If an explanation must itself be explained before it can count, nothing could ever be explained. An archaeologist who finds arrowheads may infer a human maker without first explaining where the humans came from. The inference to a designer stands or falls on the evidence of design, not on whether we can also give an account of the designer.
Fourth, Dawkins’ alternative does not escape the problem. He recommends Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing as being on the right track. But Krauss’s “nothing” is a quantum vacuum governed by the laws of quantum field theory, which is not nothing at all. The philosopher of physics David Albert made this point sharply in his 2012 review of the book in The New York Times. Dawkins himself retreats to “primeval simplicity,” which still requires laws, a substrate, and the capacity to unfold. Every account must begin somewhere. The question is whether it begins with mindless law or with Mind.
An ontological picture. At the deepest level of this question, the Hyperphysics Institute’s work offers a picture that bears directly on Dawkins’ “bandwidth” objection. Conscious Point Physics (CPP) is a research program that models the physical universe as built from a vast number of elementary units called conscious points: the smallest units of reality, each of which perceives its immediate surroundings and responds according to a few fixed rules. On this picture, God is not an engineer standing outside the universe, monitoring it through some immense processing channel. Every point of reality is held in being by his awareness and acts according to his rules. The hairs of your head are numbered (Matthew 10:30) not because God tallies them from a distance, but because they are made of what he sustains moment by moment. This is the sense of Paul’s statement that in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), and of the claim that he upholds all things by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:17). Dawkins’ image of a celestial switchboard straining to receive a billion prayers assumes a God who is one more object in the universe. The biblical God, and the CPP model of him, is the ground of the whole.
This is offered as a model, not a proof. But it shows that “too complex to exist” is an objection to a picture of God that informed theists do not hold.
9. The Cultural Christian and the Fruit Test
Dawkins acknowledges that he is a cultural Christian: baptized, confirmed, fond of the hymns, at home in the liturgy. He regards some versions of Christianity as relatively harmless and even as a bulwark against what he considers worse alternatives. And he laments that ignorance of the Bible impoverishes the understanding of English literature.
Jesus gave a test for judging a tree: by its fruit (Matthew 7:16–20). Dawkins has, in effect, applied that test and found the fruit of Christianity preferable to many alternatives. The natural next question is why this tree bears this fruit. Christians would answer that the ethic he admires (love of neighbor, the dignity of the weak, forgiveness, the equal worth of every person before God) grew from the belief he rejects. It was because they believed God had become man and died for every man that Christians founded hospitals, ransomed captives, and insisted that slave and free were one in Christ (Galatians 3:28). Whether the fruit can be kept long once the root is cut is a question the West is now testing.
10. Accepting the Challenge
Dawkins closes with his most interesting sentence. A universe conceived by a superhuman intelligence, he says, would be a totally different kind of universe from the one he believes we inhabit, and the whole of science would have to be rewritten from the bottom up.
The Christian should accept that challenge rather than deflect it. If God made the world, the world should bear his signature, not only in gaps we cannot yet explain but in the structure of what we can.
This is the wager of the CPP program. Its claim is that a universe built from conscious points, operating under a few rules set by God, reproduces the established results of physics and predicts things the standard models do not. The program has proposed over one hundred predictions that do not depend on adjustable parameters, and a specific, falsifiable prediction about faint “echoes” following black-hole mergers that can be checked against existing gravitational-wave data from LIGO. These claims await independent review, and they may fail. But they are the right kind of answer to Dawkins: not an appeal to what science cannot explain, but a proposal that a God-made universe is testably different, offered for testing.
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made from things that are visible (Hebrews 11:3). Faith in that sense is not a substitute for evidence. It is trust in the Author, which then sends us to study his work. That is how the founders of modern science (Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell) understood their calling.
11. Answering a Neighbor
Dawkins is not our enemy. He is our neighbor, and he has given us twenty years of honest, if sometimes cutting, objections. The right response is the one Peter commanded: a reason for our hope, given with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). That means conceding where he is right, refusing to answer mockery with mockery, and pressing the points where his argument fails: the moral law he presupposes but cannot ground, the reliability of a reason he believes was not built for truth, the improbability argument that mistakes a necessary God for a contingent object, and the “nothing” that is not nothing.
He says he stands by what he wrote. We stand by what we believe: that the universe is the work of a Mind, that this Mind has made himself known in Jesus of Nazareth, and that the evidence of his work is open to anyone who will look. Dawkins has been looking for fifty years. We may pray that he keeps looking.
Notes and Corrections
Note 1 — The timing of the first atoms. The article places the formation of the first neutral atoms about a quarter of a million years after the Big Bang. The standard figure for this event (recombination, which released the cosmic microwave background) is about 380,000 years. The point he makes from it is unaffected.
Note 2 — Hitler’s religion. The article says Hitler was not an atheist. That is defensible but contested. Hitler publicly invoked “Providence” and spoke favorably of a “positive Christianity” aligned with Nazi ideology, while private remarks attributed to him (in the Table Talk, whose reliability historians dispute) are hostile to Christianity. The fairest summary is that he was neither an orthodox Christian nor a declared atheist.
Note 3 — “Walked three days later.” In describing Christian belief, the article says Jesus “walked three days later.” The Christian claim is that he rose from the dead on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4). The wording appears to be a slip, not a misrepresentation; elsewhere Dawkins states the belief accurately.
Note 4 — Recent counter-arguments. Readers wanting a sustained response to the cosmological side of Dawkins’ case may consult Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), and Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis, A Fortunate Universe (2016), which presents the physics of fine-tuning for a general audience.
Questions for Discussion
- Dawkins condemns cruelty and calls Stalin “horrible.” Can an atheist ground those judgments, or is he relying on a standard he cannot account for? How would you put this to him without sounding like the Stalin syllogism he rightly rejects?
- Is the cheetah-and-gazelle question an argument against God, or only against a certain picture of God? How do Job 38–39, Psalm 104, and Romans 8 together shape your answer?
- Dawkins says a God who hears a billion prayers cannot be simple. Does the picture of God as the ground of every point of reality, rather than an observer outside it, answer him? What does it leave unanswered?
- Dawkins grants that a universe made by God would be a different kind of universe. What would you expect to be different? Is that difference something science could, in principle, detect?
- Dawkins values the fruit of Christianity while rejecting its root. Can a culture keep the fruit for long once the root is cut? What evidence do you see either way?