Richard Dawkins, the British author and champion of evolutionary atheism, has written against God once again. His latest book is titled “Outgrowing God.” It’s a beginners’ guide intended to help young people “grow out of” what he calls “all kinds of superstition.” The latter terms are a reference, in Dawkins’ own words, to religious beliefs, particularly Christian doctrines.

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Speaking about his latest publication in an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight program, Dawkins said that he considered as uneducated anyone who believed in the biblical stories of Adam and Eve and of the creation of the world. He added, “40% of Americans believe that humans were created less than ten thousand years ago, that is what I call uneducated.” He went on to say, concerning the British, “I don’t think there’s any evidence that there is a high percentage of people in this country who believe in Adam and Eve and that the world was created in six days.”

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With this new book, Richard Dawkins seems to be still on course for consolidating his new approach in his fight against “his oldest foe, the Almighty”. If only he could cultivate inside young people, at a tender age, a predisposition to embrace scientific evidence while downright rejecting Christian teaching, then would he be successful in “eradicating” belief in the Christian God. This, to me, is a grand evil scheme. It boils down to preventing Christianity, and all religions, from being passed on from one generation to the next. For, this former Oxford University’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science must know that the law of sustainability, whereby values are communicated from generation to generation, is at the core of the survival of any social group.

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The latest campaign by the British advocate of science appears to be one more push in his pernicious effort to bring about a completely secularized society in the United Kingdom. Already, the level of religious service attendance in this country has gone down in the space of a decade. The population of people living in the UK who claim to have no religion has risen from 31.4% to 50.6% between 1983 and 2013. In the meantime, only 41.7% individuals identify as Christians, compared to 49.9% in 2008 and 65.2% in 1983. To what extent have the writings of contemporary British atheists, including Dawkins, contributed to this decline is difficult to ascertain.

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But one thing is certain. Dawkins may feel the need to keep attacking religion because of the persistence of religious values, due to their social benefit, but science cannot suitably account for the existence of the universe and everything therein. Can dead matter, which evolutionists claim is eternal but cannot prove, reasonably become anything living? Until they can explain how a rock, a reality with no consciousness, turned into something capable of thinking such as the human brain, atheism will always fall short of explaining the existence of the world. Unless atheists can tell us how non-living matter developed mammals’ breast in such a way that it could change blood into milk, the evolution theory will be kept in check.

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There is a Designer behind the design that we see in the world. The design bears witness to the Designer. The psalmist said, “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). Only an omnipotent Creator can account for the existence of the universe. Evolutionists admit that a watch presents such characteristics that it demands the conclusion that it was designed by an intelligent being, but they repudiate the idea that complex bodily functions like the respiratory system necessitate a mind to bring them into being. Part of the respiratory system is the alveoli; they are grapelike bunches of small air sacs covered by a network of capillaries that we all have in our lungs. Capillaries are so small that red blood cells must pass through them one cell at a time. During respiration, an exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen takes place. Through the very thin walls of the capillaries, the blood gives up its waste (Co2) and takes on refreshing life-giving oxygen (O2). What a fascinating mechanism! But evolutionists will argue that it happened by chance.

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American Christian philosopher, William Craig, once explained that “science explicates a phenomenon in terms of certain initial conditions and natural laws that explain how those initial conditions evolved to produce the fact under consideration.” He argued, “But in the case of the universe, since it is the First Cause, it cannot be explained in terms of the earlier initial conditions and natural laws leading up to it. Therefore, there cannot be a material explanation of the state of the universe; it has to be a personal explanation. There must be a Person with a will behind it.” That Person is God. The first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” We must all take an active role in handing down this truth, and all other biblical truths, to the younger generations of Christians. Pauls said to Timothy, “And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). This is how we can stop people like Richard Dawkins from furthering their agenda.

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Constant Coulibaly