Just before we get into the Word, a little comment from the news.
Have you heard of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion? He is a famous Oxford professor who’s a leading evolutionist and is noted for his strong attacks on the Bible.
He was interviewed recently on LBC by Rachel Johnson, who’s Boris Johnson’s sister. And, in the interview, he calls himself, quote, “a cultural Christian”. He says,
“We are culturally a Christian country and I call myself a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols and feel myself at home in the Christian ethos. I love the wonderful language of the Authorised version of the Bible. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam I would choose Christianity every time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion. In so far as Christianity can be seen as a bulwark against Islam I think it’s a very good thing. I like to live in a culturally Christian country.”
Richard Dawkins LBC Interview
So, that’s good, isn’t it? At the same time he said,
“I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith. I emphasise that the things that Christians believe are nonsense. Do you actually believe that Jesus had a virgin for a mother and that he rose from the dead? I do believe it’s nonsense.”
Richard Dawkins LBC Interview
Well, at least he admits that the Christian ethos is good for society and that he’d rather live in a Christian country. He likes to read the AV, so hopefully one day he might actually be convicted by the message and come to believe in Jesus. But it’s a long shot because he’s one of the world’s leading atheists and has made a big stand against Christianity and against God because his book, ‘The God Delusion‘.
And what’s interesting is that he says the Christian ethos or the moral teaching of the Bible may be good for society while he attacks the root of the faith, he attacks the faith, and says it’s nonsense.
David Wood did a good attack on this attitude on the internet, and he compared Dawkins to a man who likes apples but hates trees. According to Wood, he has a mission in the world to go down and chop down all the trees. And when he has chopped down all the trees, he then finds that there are no more apples in the shops. And he’s upset.
He likes the fruit, but he hates the root. And that applies to what he’s saying here about Christianity. He likes the fruit of Christianity, he sees it has a good influence upon people, sees that, basically – the teachings of Christianity, could be seen to the good of the human race, that it teaches us to be kind to our neighbours, to love one another, to work for the common good, etc., etc.
But he doesn’t believe the fundamentals of the faith. And the problem is: if you take away the fundamentals of the faith, there’s actually no reason to do the second part, which is to be kind and to love your neighbour and to do all the things which Christians are supposed to do.
Dawkins attacks particularly the ideas of the virgin birth and of the resurrection. Now, if you attack the virgin birth and you attack the the resurrection of Jesus, you actually attack the fundamentals of the faith. And if you attack that, then, really, there’s nothing to stand against all the things which he doesn’t want to come into society.
He says that these things are irrational and that if you don’t believe them, then you’re going to have a more rational and a reasonable society.
We live in a society which has for the most part rejected the Gospel, rejected the belief in Jesus as Saviour and Lord, and rejected the resurrection of Jesus as a result. Is our society becoming more rational and more reasonable?
I think not. We’re opening ourselves up to the things which he says he doesn’t want to happen: Islamization, the rise of what you might call the woke ideology, and all the kind of crazy things which are coming in with the LGBTQ+ agenda, which is being forced upon us, as well as all the other things which people believe, which are actually quite irrational and, some of them, quite unscientific.
So we have an issue there, and it comes down to what you believe about the resurrection of Jesus.