What Do the New Atheists Say about the God Hypothesis?
Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 1.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Stephen, in your book, Return of the God Hypothesis, you argue that, contrary to the perspective that’s offered right now by popular New Atheists, modern scientific discoveries are doing something to them that’s just the opposite. It’s bringing the God hypothesis back into favor. Before we talk about some of those discoveries, tell us, first of all, what are the claims of today’s New Atheists? You’ve debated enough of them. What are they?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the New Atheists, which would include writers like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking got into the act near the end of his life, all of these scientists are making the argument that science, properly understood, undermines the credibility of belief in God. And Dawkins emphasized, in particular, the role of Darwinian theory in undermining that belief. He said that up until the 19th century there was strong public evidence for the existence of God in the design that we perceived in living systems. But since the 19th century, we’ve known that that design is just an illusion. And it’s an illusion because Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations and mutations, can produce that appearance of design without being guided or directed in any way. And Dawkins, who has a tremendous talent for framing issues clearly, goes on to explain that “the universe that we observe has precisely the properties that we should expect, if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” And this is his key claim, that if you look at the physical world, you see no evidence of design, no evidence of purpose, only evidence of blind, pitiless indifference. And that’s what you would expect if scientific atheism, or materialism as it’s sometimes called, were true. And I think that’s a very instructive quotation, because it kind of frames the issue beautifully. Is the universe in fact the kind of place that we would expect if there was nothing but blind materialistic processes at work? I think there have been at least three major discoveries about biological and cosmological origins—the origin of the universe and the origin of life—that are not at all what we would expect if there was nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, if the materialistic or scientific atheistic view is true.
