I was aware of and had even begun reading Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, but then I saw the promotional material around it and it’s absolutely shocking.

 

On the dust jacket inside cover it says, “The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In American schools, and in schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance” In other words, as Dawkins has said elsewhere, if you don’t believe in evolution “that person is ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”

 

The promotional piece also says,

 

“In 1859 Charles Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he surely would have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question it’s veracity. Now the author of the iconic work The God Delusion takes them to task.”

 

How does Dawkins take people to task in his latest work, The Greatest Show On Earth? His presupposition is that Darwinian evolution based on common descent is an established fact as reliable as the law of gravity. In other words, you can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are the product of common descent, that you came from monkeys. Well, even worse maybe you came from a turnip or a banana. Surely Dawkins would not go that far would he? Actually he does:

 

Evolution is a fact: beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt, evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of the chimpanzees, some what more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips…continue the list as long as desired.

Let’s think about that for just a second. Here Dawkins is suggesting that you and I are the distant cousins of bananas and turnips. If you don’t believe that you’re “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.” He is saying Darwinian evolution is a fact. He is saying that inequality within in the races is an established fact. In other words, he is saying that there is a degradation of races.

 

Remember he’s not just touting evolution in general, he’s touting Darwinian evolution. He must be as aware as anyone else that Darwinian evolution postulates survival of favored races in the struggle for survival. This was the subtitle of Darwin’s magnum opus, The Origin of the Species. Dawkins must know that Darwinian evolution postulates that:

 

The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

 

So Dawkins must understand that for evolution to succeed it is as crucial that the unfit die as that fittest survive! If the fittest give up survival for the sake of allowing the unfit to survive, the unfit would infect the fit with their unfit genes, rendering evolution inoperable. So Dawkins is the latest militant purveyor of inequality and to believe in the biblical Christian position of equality is “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”

 

No doubt since he is taunting Darwinian evolution, he is well aware of Darwin’s statement in his book The Descent of Man under the subheading “Difference in the Mental Powers of the Two Sexes,” he attempts to persuade his followers that “the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn [sic] by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” In this sense, he is well aware of sexism.

 

Yet, here we are in the twenty-first century and he’s touting Darwinian evolution and saying that any theologian who doesn’t buy it or believe it is ignorant. He saying that there is an insidious attempt afoot to undermine evolution and that fact of the matter is nobody is trying to destroy evolution.

 

Evolution is crumbling! We now, Mr. Dawkins, live in an age of scientific enlightenment. We now know that a fertilized human egg is not merely a microscopic blob of Jell-O. It is among the most complex, ordered structures in the entire known universe. So we’re no longer in 19th century science, Richard Dawkins, we’re in the twenty-first century and because we are evolution is crumbling under the weight of evidence.

 

There is no real evidence for Dawkins’s ape to man icon. That’s a dogmatic declaration, not a defensible argument. The icon has become the argument. Again we should be able to question that which does not appear in the book of nature; which is the odd predilection of people like Charles Darwin and his new rottweiler Richard Dawkins.

 

You know of course that Darwin’s has had a lot of dogs. He’s had his bulldog Thomas Huxley who said,

 

No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still the less superior, of the white man…It is simply incredible [to think] that…he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites

 

In other words, Huxley carried on the racist idea of inequality suggested by his mentor, Charles Darwin. Now in the twenty-first century, you could maybe give a pass to Thomas Huxley. He was a 19th century guy, but Dawkins in the twenty-first century is carrying on the legacy and now wants to believe that nothing produced everything but that we evolved from turnips.

 

It’s simply amazing to me but I’ve said this numerous times. Pagans are going to exercise their job description. They’re going to march lock step unthinkingly into the abyss. That’s not the problem. The problem is Christians who do not have an answer to Richard Dawkins. They don’t have an answer when Richard Dawkins suggest that a woman reproduces the evolutionary process or that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This is basically the idea that the emerging embryo goes through all the evolutionary processes. Here’s how Dawkins’s puts it,

That irascible genius J.B.S. Haldane, who did so much else besides being one of the three leading architects of neo-Darwinianism, was once challenged by a lady after a public lecture. It’s a word-of-mouth anecdote, and John Maynard Smith is sadly not available to confirm the exact words, but this is approximately how the exchange went:

Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling.

But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.

 

And he calls “that irascible genius”? I mean this is a plain old, simple category mistake. First, in Dawkins view life is not frontloaded to become all that life is it has to gain information along the way over billions of years. Conversely, a conceptus or zygote contains chemical instructions that fill more than 500, 000 printed pages. In other words, it is front loaded every aspect of the developing embryo from height to hair color is included in that genetic library.

 

So this is a plain old category mistake, but Dawkins brings this out and calls it “irascible genius” and the gullible buy it! And Dawkins gets millions of dollars, an advance on a book, puts it out, and he says there you have it, an iron clad case for evolution against Intelligent Design.

 

Now if you watched the movie Expelled with Ben Stein, you see that Dawkins does possibly believe in Intelligent Design of some sort, to see this is priceless, first he sweats and then stumbles and there is this exchange between Ben Stein and Richard Dawkins

 

Ben Stein: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?

Richard Dawkins: It could come about in the following way: It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded on to, perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that, if you look at the details of bio-chemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

Stein: Wait a second! Richard Dawkins thought that Intelligent Design might be a legitimate pursuit?

Dawkins: And that designer could very well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence itself would have to had have come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.

Dawkins doesn’t have an answer for the most basic questions, yet he provides an iron clad case for evolution.

 

Well, again pagans are going to exercise their job description. They’re going to be pagans. The question is: are you as a Christian going to exercise your job description? Can you take the very weak arguments that are militantly portrayed, deceptively communicated, with great pomp and circumstance and use them as springboard or opportunity for sharing truth? Not the caricature of Christianity but truth and then do this with gentleness and respect. If you can, be on the vanguard of doing something totally significant in the twenty-first century. That is, you can be announcing the demise of evolution, and demonstrating that it is no longer tenable in an age of scientific enlightenment.

 

Then we can get back to the basics, and that is Richard Dawkins and all else who don’t believe in the design revolution are sitting in a very dark room. They may have very good eyesight, but the room is dark, and they can’t see.

 

We have many resources on this topic such my book, Fatal Flaws and the DVD I mentioned earlier Expelled and much, much more. Check these all out at our Website of www.equip.org or call us at 1-888-7000-0274.


 Recommended Resources:

 

 

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Expelled
$11.99
Order NOW!

Fatal Flaws
Fatal Flaws
$12.99
Order NOW!

Creation 3 Pack
Creation 3 pack
$45.00
Order NOW!


The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2009). Inside front cover of the dust jacket to the hardcover edition.

 

 

The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.

 

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2009). Inside front cover of the dust jacket to the hardcover edition.

 

 

” (of Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey’s Blueprint), The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.

 

 

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1, 316, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 343, quoted in Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, public school edition (San Diego: C.L.P. Publishers 1981), 179; emphasis added.

 

 

 

The Descent of Man, in Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, vol. 49, Darwin (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 566.

Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (New York, Appleton, 1871), 20, quoted in Henry Morris, The Long War Against God (Grand Rapids, Mich, Baker, 1989), 60.

 

 

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, 211.

 

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed with Ben Stein (Vivendi Entertianment/Premise Media Corporation, 2008).