Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

I watched your programme broadcast on 16th January on Channel 4. You expressed indignation that Christians and Jews should be allowed to teach their faith to their children. Does it ever occur to you that what you believe about the origin of life is equally a ‘faith’ which is to be accepted without question by millions of children and adults who are taught it in the education system and the media? Since none of us were there when life began everything we believe about it is an act of faith. You are reading back into time supposedly scientific conclusions, which are actually extremely questionable. I have never found a satisfactory explanation from evolutionists for some very basic questions about your theory. 1. Where did the matter which exploded in the ‘Big Bang’ come from? 2. If the Big Bang is the explanation for the existence of the universe, how did an ordered world come into being out of something which would have generated disorder (an explosion)? Our observation of explosions (e.g. a bomb going off) shows that they cause matter to move from order to disorder, not disorder to order. How can you explain our marvellous planet which has all the hugely complex parameters necessary for life (distance from the sun, atmosphere, water cycle, soil, plants able to provide food etc) coming into being by a random process? 3. Darwin himself had little to say about the origin of the first life form by the forces of natural selection. Since the discovery of DNA we now know that there are no simple life forms but every cell contains a huge amount of information. To believe that this could have come about by random forces is the equivalent of believing the information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica could have been put there in the same way. According to your belief not only did such incredibly complex matter have to arise by accident it also had to have the power to reproduce itself otherwise the arrival of life would have been no more than a very temporary blip on the evolutionary horizon. All reproductive systems are highly complex but vital to the survival of the species. 4. Darwin acknowledged that 'to suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection (evolution) seems absurd in the highest possible degree.' You are on record as saying that 'it would only take about 364,000 generations to evolve a good fish eye with a lens.' This does not explain how a creature which needs sight to survive managed to carry on living for all these millions of years without eyes. Hugely complex organs like the eye, the heart, the brain etc are all vital to survival. Even more vital are the reproductive systems of creatures. All creatures that reproduce sexually require a perfectly functioning male and female to produce the next generation. How can such a system have developed over millions of years of trial and error as must be assumed by evolution? If the system is not functioning in the first generation the species dies out. The Genesis record that God made all creatures able to reproduce after their own kind makes much more sense on this issue than the conclusion of evolution. 5. Darwin acknowledged the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record and in observable life forms. There is no problem in believing in variation within species (short beaked and long beaked finches etc). But there is absolutely no evidence of variation from one species to another taking place or in the fossil record. There are also huge problems with this theory. For example how did the first bird develop the power to fly? If wings evolved over millions of years during the time they were evolving they would have been an encumbrance not an advantage. What would stop cat eating bird before the bird developed its wings? In which case bird species dies out before it learns to fly! No doubt you have answers to these questions which satisfy you, but they do not satisfy everyone. You are asking people to believe that something could come out of nothing, that an explosion could create an ordered universe, that incredibly complex life forms could arise spontaneously out of non life and have the ability to reproduce and develop higher life forms. I don’t believe this! But you are allowed to teach this to our children and to ridicule those who don’t believe your theory on TV without giving them a fair opportunity to give a reasoned defence of your faith. The Christians you chose to interview were either on the very wacky end of the US evangelical scene like the man who agreed with killing those who work in abortion clinics or liberals like the Bishop of Oxford who agrees more with you than with what the Bible teaches. On the subject of the Bible, your highly selective use of quotations to pillory the God of the Bible as a sadist ignored context and the overall teaching of the book. The significance of the Abraham and Isaac story is that Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac. Child sacrifice was common in the pagan religions of the tribes around Israel at the time and is consistently condemned in the Bible. In our time child sacrifice has again returned as we sacrifice unborn children to our gods of convenience and lust. There is a deeper message about faith in Genesis 22 which is beyond the scope of this letter. The incident of the man sending his daughter out to be raped by the mob in Judges 19 is hardly held up as a model of practice in the Bible! As the Bible is a realistic book it tells it like it is and does not gloss over gross acts. The period of the Judges is summed up in the last verse of the book ‘Everyone did what was right in his own eyes’ – i.e. everyone did their own thing rather than doing what was right in the eyes of God – rather like today! Finally your view that supposedly scientific developments and the influence of evolution have always exercised a benign influence on the human race does not stand up to examination. Nietzsche, a disciple of Darwinism, wrote in his diatribe against Christianity, ‘The Antichrist’, ‘Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life’s disinherited and condemned.’ The Nazis took hold of this idea to justify eliminating what they considered to be ‘life’s disinherited and condemned’ in the Holocaust. On the other side of the same coin, the Soviet Communists used pamphlets like ‘The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’ written by Engels as the basis for their indoctrination of society with atheism and evolutionism. The end result was the gulags and the KGB and the persecution of non-believers in Soviet atheism (in particular believing Christians). Not many people would agree that we are doing as marvellously in the moral sphere in our present society as you concluded in your programme. In fact we are on the brink of a collapse of the whole social and economic order as drug taking and alcoholism, sexual immorality, pornography and the breakdown of the family, violence and debt spiral out of control. We are fouling up the only planet we can live on and creating weapons of destruction which threaten the whole survival of humanity. All these things happening can be seen as the result of a rejection of God and the salvation offered us through the Lord Jesus Christ, not the result of following Him. It would be interesting if Channel 4 or the like would be willing to put on a real debate on these issues, with Christians who know what they are talking about. Yours sincerely, Tony Pearce.