Richard Dawkins is the atheist that keeps on giving. Every time he opens his mouth, he spews out absurdities that allow me to write articles about them. The world renowned atheist is excited that there has been such a dramatic religious shift in the United Kingdom that religion is now “largely irrelevant.” The Christian Post reports:

“Despite the best efforts of church leaders and politicians to convince us that religion is still an important part of our national life, these results demonstrate that it is largely irrelevant, even to those who still label themselves Christian,” Dawkins said.

In an earlier news story, Dawkins told a crowd at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, “We don’t need to get morals from our religions … We don’t want to find morals from the holy books. We can have our own enlightened secular values.” These values, he claimed, could be found in his own holy book, “the Humanist Manifesto III, a document outlining the conceptual boundaries of humanism, published by the American Humanist Association, of which Dawkins was a signatory.”

Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists “are like the Irishman who preferred the moon to the sun, because the sun shines in the day-time when there is no need of it, while the moon shines in the night time; so these moralists, shining by the borrowed, reflected light of Christianity, think they have no need of the sun, from whose radiance they get their pale moonlight.”1

Dawkins and the other authors of the Humanist Manifesto III are living off the borrowed capital of Christianity while claiming that Christianity is not needed for morality.

There is still moral cohesion in the United Kingdom because of the nation’s long history of Christianity and the moral worldview that sprung from it. “Dawkins and his like-minded ‘new atheists’ are not just wrong about [there being no need for religious based morality]. Indeed, they are literally laying the naïve intellectual groundwork for the next secular genocide,” Craig J. Hazen, founder and director of the MA program in Christian apologetics at Biola University, added.

In his book The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization Vishal Mangalwadi shows how worldviews matter, and how it was the Christian worldview that created the idea of cultural exceptionalism. He begins by describing a conversation he had with a Sikh gentleman in 1982 who was returning to England after visiting his parents in a Punjab village in northwest India. He explained to Mangalwadi that doing business in England was easy and profitable. The man could not speak English very well, and yet he was a successful business man. Mangalwadi wondered, “How could someone who spoke such poor English succeed as a businessman in England?” So I asked, “Tell me, sir, why is business so easy in England?” Without pausing, he answered, “Because everyone trusts you there.”

Later in the same chapter, Mangalwadi tells the story of the time that he and his Dutch host went to a dairy farm to get some milk. There was no one to greet them or take their money. He and his host opened the tap, filled the jug, put the money in a jar, and took their change. Here was Mangalwadi’s reaction:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Man,” I said, “if you were an Indian, you would take the milk and the money!” [His host] laughed. But in that instant, I understood what the Sikh businessman had been trying to tell me.”

 Mangalwadi pulls all this together with an astute observation. “How did ordinary of Holland become so different from our people in India and Egypt? The answer is simple. The Bible taught the people of Holland that even though no human being may be watching us in that dairy farm, God, our ultimate judge, is watching to see if we obey his commands neither to covet nor steal. According to the Bible, ‘Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give an account’ [Heb. 4:13].”

In Dawkins’ world, no one is watching so nobody needs to given an account to anybody. If England follows the map drawn by Dawkins and his fellow atheists that God’s existence is irrelevant in constructing any worldview they will be setting their sails “for the island of nihilism. This is the darkest continent of the darkened mind — the ultimate paradise of the fool.”2

1. A. T. Pierson, The Second Coming of Christ (Philadelphia, PA: Henry Altemus, 1896), 35. [↩]
2. R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts That Shaped Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 171. [↩]