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Letter to an Influential Atheist
Paternoster Lifestyle, 14th August 2003
Letter to an Influential Atheist is an open letter from Roger Steer to Richard Dawkins challenging Dawkins’ vigorously proclaimed view that the theory of evolution by natural selection explains our existence and makes atheism intellectually respectable. Richard Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. His books have been extraordinarily influential even in the minds of thousands of people who have never read them. Roger Steer decided to write his letter after reflecting on perhaps the most famous sentence Dawkins has ever written. Dawkins begins The Blind Watchmaker with these words: “This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.
Roger Steer is not a so-called “creationist”. He happily accepts that evolution by natural selection is a good description of the process which produces biological diversity. He has written the letter because Dawkins claims too much for evolutionary mechanisms. He tries to make them into a theory of “life, the universe and everything”, and a biological theory – even such a major insight as this – isn’t up to such Herculean tasks. It’s an abuse of science to take a good theory out of its scientific context and use it for ideological purposes.
Roger argues that Dawkins’ influential books distort his readers’ thinking in at least six ways. First, despite the striking and assured tone of his famous sentence, Dawkins does not actually believe that Darwin and Wallace “solved the mystery of our existence” as from time to time he honestly admits. Second, Dawkins misleads people by suggesting that Darwin and Wallace set out to solve the mystery of our existence: the truth is that the puzzle they sought to unravel was more modest. Third, by repeatedly linking the two men’s names in the way he does, Dawkins implies that they drew from the theory of natural selection the same philosophical conclusions as he does: in fact they did not agree in their estimates of the explanatory power of natural selection and neither man agreed with Dawkins. Fourth, Dawkins does not acknowledge how controversial the wider conclusions he draws from the theory of evolution by natural selection are among his own colleagues within the scientific community. Fifth, in vigorously proclaiming his view that the theory of evolution has made atheism intellectually respectable Dawkins misrepresents the story of Darwin’s alleged “loss of faith” and totally ignores Wallace’s insistence on the universe’s essential spiritual dimension. And finally, Dawkins either misunderstands or deliberately caricatures the nature of Christian faith.
In correcting Dawkins flawed history, and in discussing the complexity of the human mind, human possession of consciousness, our life in an orderly universe, and the Christian understanding of creation, Roger Steer presents a compelling and interesting case for belief in God.Read a critique of Roger's book by an atheist
Buy Letter to an Influential Atheist
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Guarding the Holy Fire
Baker, Grand Rapids, USA, May 1999
From Wycliffe and Tyndale, Cranmer and the prayer book, Latimer and Ridley, Hooker and Herbert, Whitefield and Wesley, Newton and Simeon in England - Devereaux Jarrett and Alexander Griswold, Philander Chase and Charles McIlwaine in America, to quite recent events in the Episcopal Church, and Lambeth 1998, and Archbishops Donald Coggan and George Carey, the story of Anglican Evangelicals is responsibly and even charmingly described. Roger Steer has a wonderful feel for the telling anecdote… this much-needed scholarly work (from a review by Bishop FitzSimons Allison of Georgetown, South Carolina).
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Find out how American evangelicals think
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