Richard Dawkins Says We are Apes and Some Are Beginning to Act Like It
New Atheist Richard Dawkins has gone on the attack again. This time he is attacking Young Earth Creationists (YEC). It’s all a ruse since he despises any type of creationism. The idea of creation by God gets in the way of his own religion of materialism and the establishment of himself as a god-like philosopher king.
The idea of god is never abolished; it’s always transferred. Someone picks up the mantle.
Dawkins isn’t the first atheist to offer belligerent comments about creationism. Arthur C. Clarke, best known for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey wrote something similar in the foreword to James Randi’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.1
Randi uses his talents as a “magician” to expose people who claim to have supernatural powers. While Randi is critical of certain aspects of Christianity, Clarke did not feel Randi had gone far enough in his criticisms. Clarke writes :
“I am a little disappointed that Randi doesn’t deal with one of my pet hates C Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public. Though I am the last person to advocate laws against blasphemy, surely nothing could be more antireligious than to deny the evidence so clearly written in the rocks for all who have eyes to see!”
By this statement Clarke admits that evolution is a rival religion.
Clarke considered it blasphemous to doubt the doctrine of evolution. His bible consisted of “rocks.” Do these rocks speak of justice? Morality? Ethics? Do the rocks describe the uniqueness of man? The rocks tell us nothing. Like a ventriloquist with his dummy, the rocks say only what evolutionists want them to say.
Evolution is a matter-only religion. Adam Laats offers a good definition of the matter-only religion:
“Materialism, after all, in this sense, means the assumption that life and everything has purely material origins. Primordial soup somehow got a transformative spark, perhaps from undersea volcanic vents. Life came from non-life due to purely material causes. Similarly, life itself, though it may feel like it has transcendent spiritual meaning, is nothing more than biochemistry. When the switch goes off, the magic ends. Back to carbon.”
Belief in evolution is not a harmless enterprise. There are specific ethical implications to believing and applying the major tenets of the evolutionary religion.
Dawkins claims that “Modern monkeys are our cousins. We’re not descended from them. But we’re descended from ancestors which you could properly call monkeys,” Dawkins wrote. “We are African apes and we are descended (as are chimpanzees) from extinct African apes.” Really? How did our earliest ancestors acquire morality from “undersea volcanic vents” and “carbon”? Dawkins can’t tell us.
Richard Dawkins claims that humans are apes, and what if humans act like apes? Should they be held accountable? Apes aren’t.
Evolution strips humans of any dignity and the need to consider the rights of others. Barbara Reynolds made this point in a 1993 USA Today Article titled “If your kids go ape in school, you’ll know why”:
“Prohibiting the teaching of creationism in favor of evolution creates an atheistic, belligerent tone that might explain why our kids sometimes perform like Godzilla instead of children made in the image of God.
“While evolution teaches that we are accidents or freaks of nature, creationism shows humankind as the offspring of a divine Creator. There are rules to follow which govern not only our time on Earth, but also our afterlife.
* * * * *
“If evolution is forced on our kids, we shouldn’t be perplexed when they beat on their chests or, worse yet, beat on each other and their teachers.”2
Reynolds’ comments are reminiscent of what C.S. Lewis wrote: “We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”3
When men and men and women are stripped of the certainty that they are created in the image of God, we are shocked and surprised when they act like the beasts of the field.
Meet some of your ancestors according to Dawkins and their cannibalistic and murderous ways. It might explain some of what’s happening in the United States with biker gangs (“Mongols Forever, Forever Mongols”), acts of wilding, and multiple murders with no regard for morality. Are they really doing anything immoral? Are these chimpanzees?
- James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), xii-xiii. [↩]
- Barbara Reynolds, “If your kids go ape in school, you’ll know why,” USA Today (August 27, 1993), 11A. [↩]
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, [1947] 1972), 35. [↩]