I am no great scholar to take on Richard Dawkins on his book,
“The God Delusion,” but as I started to read the book, it made no sense that
such great minds should find it plausible to thumb their nose at God! What audacity
or what ignorance! Or how Satan has blinded their minds and intelligence that
they should think in this manner and write such books!
Jesus said of such people, in John 12:40, quoting Isaiah
6:10,
“He
has blinded their eyes and
hardened their heart,
lest
they should see with their eyes
and understand with their heart,
lest they should turn, so that I
should
heal them.”
Again Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:4,
“whose minds the god of this age has blinded,
who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is
the image of God, should shine on them.”
In the first quote it looks like God himself has blinded
these unbelieving people, just like He blinded the reasoning power of the Pharaoh
and hardened his heart so that he would not let the Hebrew people go. This sort
of hardening of the heart happens, when repeatedly one refuses to acknowledge
the power and glory of God, as Pharaoh did.
In the second quote, Paul hints at the ‘god of this age,’
Satan to be the instrument who blinded such people’s understanding. The one
main work of Satan is to separate people from the love of God. When he has made
a person like Dawkins question the very existence of God, Satan can smirk and
feel he has achieved something in this world, where he is temporarily in
charge.
In both, such blindness led to their own destruction and
demise and eternal separation from God and His goodness. Had they only
understood and believed God, they would have repented of their sin, their stubbornness
and sought forgiveness from God and received His grace and enjoyed healing and
life that comes from God. Not to be, because their hearts and understanding are
blinded, as if a curtain has been drawn across their hearts and minds!
While questioning the existence of God and raising Darwin’s
theory of evolution through natural selection to the sky, Dawkins clearly bats
for evolution over creation. He also affirms the view that in this universe as
we see it, there are only physical things or matter and anything that we cannot
see or prove, like a supernatural phenomenon like God or miracles do not exist.
For him as an atheist, “there is nothing beyond the natural,
physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence…no soul that outlasts the
body and no miracles…” This sort of philosophy
is called ‘Materialism.’ For them anything
unseen or anything that cannot be proven in the scientific laboratories does not
exist.
What a poverty of experience! When they die they just die, there is no world beyond the river or life after death. They have no hope! If what we have and live in this world is all that there is to a life, then we are really impoverished. We are miserable creatures, after all.
That there is a world beyond this world of injustice and
suffering, a world where justice and righteousness will rule and where the there
will be no sickness or sorrow, where the redeemed will spend eternity in the
sweet presence of God and Christ! That is the hope we believers have. How sad,
these atheists and unbelievers do not have such a hope!
Dawkins says he is against the “interventionist,
miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of Bible…”
Why? Is it that you cannot stand a Father figure who will punish you when you
sin, but forgive you when you repent and seek pardon? Did you have a difficult father while growing
up as a small child and boy and suffered emotional damage due to such abuse
that you cannot stand any father-figure, even God?
Or is it that you are so arrogant that you do not want anyone
to tell you what to do and be answerable to? Isn’t it the same sin for which
Lucifer fell due to his pride, that he wanted to raise his throne above that of
God, so that he didn’t have to worship the Almighty God any longer, but be a
god himself?
Wasn’t the same sin that Eve and Adam fell to when they
reasoned that they could be as good as God and know everything, so that they
could lead their lives without the superintending power of God? Is that finally
it? Wanting to be independent, arrogant, not answerable to any power, be on
your own? Be a master of your own fate? That is the real delusion, wanting to
lead a life apart from God, who gave life to us.
His main objection to religious faith, he says is ‘that it
does not depend on rational justification.’ Great apologists like Ravi Zacharias,
Craig, Warner Wallace and such others, have given rational arguments to prove
the existence of God in writing and in debates. Would you listen to them? Or have
your heart been hardened and eyes blinded and ears deafened?
Before ending this blog I want to say just one thing. Nietzsche,
the famous German philosopher, wrote in the 1845s that ‘God is dead.’ He also
argued that human beings could be super-humans themselves and achieve great
heights in whatever they set their mind. Fed by these concepts there arose in
the land of Germany, Hitler, who thought of himself as a super human and
brought devastation to the whole world.
Today the English Evolutionary biologist has written this
book ‘The God Delusion,’ in 2006. It is not even a decade since, but already
Europe is under the throes of a great deluge of refugees swamping the European
countries, especially Germany. These countries are open heatedly welcoming
these refugees, most of whom are young Muslim men. Europe is committing ‘harakiri.’
It is plunging in a knife into its own belly and is going to wallow in its own
death blood.
Why such a situation? That, countries which have risen to the
pinnacle of civilization should commit such acts, which will harm only them and
change the face of Europe? If the population of Europeans is dwindling and
there is a need for laborers and workers, why not follow the model of USA and
hire educated professionals from developing countries on work-permit and later
absorb them?
The reason for such hara-kiri is not far to search. It is
writings like that of Dawkins, which destroy even the vestige of religious
faith that their population have. When Christ and faith in Him are thrown out
of a country, there is a vacuum and who will fill it up? Hoards of Jihadist and
Muslims refugees, who thumb their nose at European civilization and proclaim, “We
will produce five and six children; we will marry your girls and make them wear
the veil.”
Jesus narrated a parable of a man from whom an unclean spirit
was thrown out; this spirit returns and finds the place in the heart of that
man empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes, gathers seven other spirits
more wicked as him and enters and dwells there. “…and the last state of that
man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation,” Mt.12:43-45.
Yes, perhaps that is what is happening to Europe and to the
West in general. But there is still time to repent, get back to the compassionate
and kind God, who is ever willing to forgive such renegades and welcome them
back into His fold.
Will people who are swayed by Dawkins and writings like that
listen?
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