I have read many of the writings of men who supposedly hate religion so much that they dub themselves the New Atheists. One of the first things that caught my attention was the name, New Atheists. If atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods, can there be a new way to lack belief? New atheism seems to make as much sense as new nothing or new zero. Once you are able to get past this laughable nomenclature to read the writings of those self-described, you soon discover a very serious lack of any valuable intellectual content. Their claims about religion are infused with arrogance, petulance, a severely distorted historical perspective, and total absence of any serious engagement with centuries of scholarly works in theology, philosophy, and the development of western civilization. If these people are the best atheism has to offer, religion has absolutely nothing to fear. There could be no better ambassadors for religion than these so-called new atheists.
Two things I would like to say here. First, by religion, I mean Christianity. I am a Christian and I will only defend Christianity. Other religions would have to count on their own apologists; furthermore, Christianity receives the brunt of the new atheists' sub-scholarly dregs. They cannot go after Judaism with the same ferocity with which they attack Christianity because they would be immediately shot down with a universal outburst of anti-Semitism. No one wants to be associated with the evolutionary mindset that led to the Holocaust. With Judaism virtually untouchable, atheists either ignore Islam or gently thread on it because these cowards have learned the lesson of Salmon Rushdie.1 So Christianity remains the only intellectual piñada in town.
Secondly, the objective here is to expose the absurdity of the so-called new atheism by effectively demolishing the claims of three of these so-called new atheists: Sam Harris, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins. While it could be much revealing to discuss all the claims of all the new atheists, it would be mentally exhausting to deal with so much intellectual garbage.
Important to my choice of Harris, Weinberg, and Dawkins is the fact that they are men of science. In the description of Sam Harris’s official website (www.samharris.org/), he is described as a neuroscientist. Weinberg is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. In the common imagination, such a person should be a lot smarter than the rest of us. That, unfortunately, is not always the case as we shall demonstrate. Dawkins, on the hand, is an Oxford biologist (now retired) who seems more suited for Humanist of the Year than any valuable award in science. He is -well, was - a biologist at Oxford University; therefore, we must, at least, assume that he must know something about science. Their aggressive ridicule and vilification of Christianity betray an intellectual economy that is not fulfilling and is established on a huge deficit of decency and respect. Any human society that operates with this kind of deficit is doomed.
These atheists behave like little children who feign hunger so their parents would take them to McDonald's for the Happy Meal. As soon as these kids get the Happy Meal, they go straight for the toy and ignore the food. As the father of five, I have been the willing victim of this childish deception a good many times (of course, while they played with their toys, I ate their McNuggets.). With the Happy Meal, the child is happy about the toy and cares less about the meal.
Atheists, like Dawkins, say that atheism is intellectually fulfilling but they spend the bulk of their intellectual capital, what little it is, on an egregiously distorted view of religion. These atheists are dishonest intellectuals, what I call Happy Meal atheists or McAtheists. They pretend to be content with atheism, but all they do is make false, irresponsible, and reprehensible claims about religion. In McAtheism, there is a great deal of intellectual restlessness. In their writings, these publicity-seeking pseudo-intellectuals reference religion with so much venom that it seems, if given the opportunity, they would gather all people of faith and apply some sort of Nazi-like final solution to belief in God.
Sam Harris is very clear about his Nazi-like attitude towards people of faith. In a 2006 interview, he declared, “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”2 Really? Does one really have to be this morally bankrupt to be an atheist? The notion that rapists are better for society than religious people is the sort of intellectual garbage that glowingly overflows from the dumpster intellects of these McAtheists. These depraved minds are so delusional in their depravity that they are convinced that they have the solutions for the betterment of society. They can gloat in their delusion because they are cheered on by the liberal media. When I read such garbage coming from men who are supposedly well informed, I can only marvel at the depths to which the Western intellectual enterprise has fallen.
Would any decent society prefer rapists to religion? Rapists are not always just rapists. More often than not, these sexual predators are also kidnappers and/or murderers. In December 2010, the jury brought a guilty verdict against Brian David Mitchell. Mitchell kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her bed in her own home. He raped her repeatedly for nine months until he was caught. At his trial, Mitchell feigned insanity; but the jury did not buy his scam. He was convicted of kidnap and rape. In May 2011, Mitchell was given a life sentence because a decent society does not want people like him in its midst. It must have been a sad day for Harris to see religious people roam the streets while a rapist is sent off to prison. America, behold your intellectual!
If Harris is among the best of the new atheists, he is all the evidence we need for mandatory religious education. If being an atheist means having a mindset that prefers rapists to religion, I am certain that most members of a decent society would take a pass. If one has to be this morally bankrupt in order to be an atheist, Christianity has nothing to fear. One lesson the world has learned from the experience of the Nazis is that those who, engrossed in their false sense of superiority, wish to exterminate others are usually the ones who don’t deserve a place in any decent human society.
In the current environment in which sexual harassment is no longer tolerable, American society has absolutely nothing to gain from someone who prefers rapists to religion. In other words, when it comes to creating a human society governed by rules of decency, America does not want to hear from Sam Harris. He can do humanity a great favor by keeping his social commentary to himself while he continues to make his insignificant contribution to neuroscience. At least, he can always take pride and joy in calling himself “neuroscientist”.
In the case of Weinberg, I want to show that even a Nobel scientist can demonstrate a magnificent display of the absurd when he ventures outside his area of expertise, especially when his perspective is filtered through the deluding lenses of atheism. Weinberg claims:
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”3
When I think about human dignity, I recall the work of Mother Theresa who labored among people whom society had stripped of every semblance of dignity. Because of her religion, Mother Theresa gave these people what little dignity they had. I don't see how this can be insulting. I am not aware of any atheist individual or organization that works for the betterment of those who have been marginalized by society.
What makes atheism attractive is that all of its edifying influences are found only in words, empty useless words found in books that enrich the authors. If I were dumb enough to be an atheist, I would do the same thing too. Gain fame and fortune by writing books that excoriate religion. After all, atheist books about religion have the same intellectual content as late-night infomercials about making millions in real estate with no money, credit, and job. You don’t need money but you need $10,000.00 for their elite boot camp. Anti-religious bigotry sells. Not only is it lucrative; but with media accolades and cult-like following, it is also a source of fame and prestige. So atheists stick to writing about religion.
Weinberg's claim, that Religion is an insult to human dignity, is absolutely baseless, ridiculous, and totally absurd. In typical McAtheist fashion, Weinberg made this claim not for its veracity but for its shock value. It's a shameful but sad proof that, blinded by atheism, even a Nobel laureate can sink into making absolutely absurd claims. A counter-argument to Weinberg's claim is offered by another Nobel laureate in physics, Albert Einstein, as he commented on Buddha, Moses, and Jesus:
Our time is distinguished by wonderful achievements in the fields of scientific understanding and the technical application of those insights. Who would not be cheered by this? But let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the inquiring and constructive mind.
“What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.”4
I use Einstein for the singular purpose of demonstrating that a scientist who is held in much higher esteem and considered much more brilliant than Weinberg, Dawkins, and other McAtheists disagrees with their slanted and repulsive views on religion. In other words, these happy-meal atheists cannot hide their anti-religious bigotry behind the veneer of science because more brilliant scientific minds don't share their anti-religious bigotry.
Einstein is a big problem for the McAtheists, and he is not alone in rejecting those who are dismissive of religion. Francis Collins, former Director of the Human Genome Project and now Director of the National Institutes of Health, declared:
“Science cannot be used to justify discounting the great monotheistic religions of the world, which rest upon centuries of history, moral philosophy, and the powerful evidence provided by human altruism. It is the height of scientific hubris to claim otherwise.”5
Weinberg may enjoy his hubris, but he will be deluding himself to think that a Nobel Prize gives him a free pass to act like an intellectual thug.
Now, let me be very generous in not trying to judge Dr. Weinberg on the basis of one sentence. Religious people are already accused of acting on blind faith and not reason, so let me not be unreasonable. Maybe I, as a religious person, may never be reasonable; but let it not be because of failure to try. Let us take a look at Weinberg's next claim: With or without it (religion) you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. This is a claim that is falsifiable philosophically and has been falsified scientifically.
Since Weinberg is a scientist and not a philosopher, there is no need to dwell on the philosophical absurdities his claim entails; furthermore, the scientific evidence against his claim is so overwhelming that the philosophical evidence would be overkill. I am almost certain (although I could be totally wrong) that as a physicist, Weinberg is very careful about his statements concerning the universe. It would be prudent for him to exercise such caution in his claims about religion. So far, his claims about religion do not reflect a level of intelligence worthy of a Nobel physicist. It is so sad to see such an otherwise intelligent man succumb to the folly of new atheism. Now, let's look at his final claim.
Weinberg asserts that for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. When an educated person makes a statement that is false and absurd, it is not enough to point out that the statement is false and absurd. It is necessary to produce the evidence that makes the statement false and absurd. Many scientific experiments have discredited Weinberg’s statement. Let’s consider two of these experiments, starting with the first and most famous of all – the Stanley Milgram Experiment.6 Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, was concerned about the one common excuse many of the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trial gave: they were just following orders from authority. Could people really ignore their consciences, follow authority, and do incredibly evil things to other people? After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram wanted to find the answer to this very disturbing question.
“Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair."
Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment.
The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -- a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going.”7
Milgram found his answer, and it was a disturbing reflection on the human capacity for evil.
"To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels of shock to their counterparts. This was as true among the first set of his test subjects (Yale undergrads), to subsequent "ordinary" participants as described by Milgram ("professionals, white-collar workers, unemployed persons and industrial workers"), to test subjects abroad, from Munich to South Africa. It was also as true for women as it was for men (although female subjects reported a higher degree of anxiety afterward).
In Milgram’s experiment, race, class, gender, culture, educational level, and religion did not make a difference in people's response to authority. In other words, for Weinberg's “good people” to do evil, it does not take religion. It takes authority, even if the authority is a scientist wearing a lab coat. This is what the scientific evidence indicates. If Weinberg has a problem with the scientific evidence, that is his problem, not mine. He is the scientist - I think.
In August 1971, Stanford University psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, headed what is called the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment demonstrated how authority can be used to lead people to cruel behavior. In other experiments, such as the BBC Prison Experiment of 2002, and the ABC News Experiment of 2004, the outcome conclusively confirmed Milgram's results.9 There is, however, one other experiment, the Hofling Hospital Experiment,10 that drives home this point more poignantly.
Psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling conducted an experiment in which more than 20 nurses at a hospital were ordered by unknown doctors to administer a deadly dose of a fictional drug to patients. All the nurses had three reasons to reject the doctors' orders: (1) The recommended dosage was unsafe, (2) nurses were not supposed to take orders from unknown doctors according to the hospital protocol, and (3) the fictional drug was not on the list of approved drugs. In spite of these safety measures, only one nurse failed to follow the order. Of course, the other nurses were stopped at the patients' doors before they could do any harm.
Does it take religion for good people to do evil? No, and this is exactly what the experimental evidence suggests. Weinberg’s claim is completely false. It is all part of the ridiculous trend among McAtheists to ratchet up offensive claims against religion. This is an appalling display of poor judgment for someone who wants to be seen as acting from the enlightened position of science and reason. Apparently, once atheism is embraced, no fortress erected in the name of science, reason, academic degrees, raving book reviews, and endowed offices with walls of accolades can shield one from positing absurdity as scholarship or intellectual discourse. It seems like atheism is some sort of undiagnosed mental ailment that causes otherwise very intelligent people to make complete public fools of themselves by engaging in false and offensive claims about religion. It's a shame that Weinberg has been victimized by this mental disorder.
Since Weinberg’s comments on religion miserably fail to demonstrate the intellect which brought him a Nobel Prize, are we to assume that his Nobel Prize is one of those Dawkinsian random evolutionary events, that is, someone was bound to get a Nobel Prize in Physics and it just happened to be Weinberg? For he comes across more as the idiotic playground bully who casts aspersions with total disregard for the facts. This is extremely unfortunate for a man who has so much to offer science. If atheism blinds on to facts, even verifiable scientific facts, I don’t see how it can be good for any society. Again, another attempt to disparage religion proves the uselessness of atheism.
Finally, let us now consider Dawkins's claim about religion. Richard Dawkins, the doyen of delirium who never misses an opportunity to register his dislike for religion, lives with this stupendously false dichotomy that science and reason are allies in a battle against religion. In this Dawkinsian fantasy, science and reason are good and religion is bad. In his speech accepting The 1996 Humanist of the Year award (Some useless award given to anyone willing to be a public fool for atheism), Dawkins remarked:
“Given the dangers of faith – and considering the accomplishments of reason and observation in the activity of science – I find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, ‘Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn’t it?’ Well, science is not religion and it doesn’t just come down to faith. Although it has many of religion’s virtues, it has none of its vices. Science is based on verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.”11
Albert Einstein is reported to have said that "A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."12 Who is a more credible representative of science- Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who espouses a pseudo-scientific theory with more holes in it than a soccer net or Einstein, a man universally esteemed for his brilliant scientific mind? This is probably the most ridiculous question I have ever asked. To put Einstein and Dawkins in the same sentence is an insult to Einstein. Dawkins may get away with making false claims about evolution, but false claims about religion will not go unchallenged.
The McAtheist glorification of science and reason is colored by a very jaundiced perspective of the European Enlightenment, a superstitious perspective that is oblivious to the historic atrocities guided by Enlightenment thinking. This glorification of science and reason is one of the worst transgressions of the pathology of atheism. The European Enlightenment, a catastrophic development for most non-European cultures, was established on many false claims intended to avoid the need for God. The two most common of these unscientific claims were methodological naturalism and an eternal universe.
In the name of science, it was claimed that the natural, physical world was all there is; therefore, everything must have an explanation from our material universe. This is the metaphysics of materialism. If this was true, then supernatural places like heaven and hell did not exist. No heaven and hell, then there is definitely no God. While any claim that supported materialism was vigorously promoted, any belief in the supernatural was ridiculed.
The second unscientific but popular claim of the Enlightenment is the eternal existence of the universe. It was claimed - that’s all it was, a claim - that the universe did not have a beginning because it had always existed. Just like evolution, this claim had its own place of honor in science. It was called the steady state theory. If the universe always existed, then there was no creation. No creation, then there is no need for Creator. Again, God is avoided and the biblical creation ridicule as the myth of an ancient people. Of course, the Big Bang theory has put an end to that nonsense.
Once the European convinced himself that there is no God, he became his own god and declared himself superior to all other people; thus, one of the excesses of the Enlightenment was cultural narcissism which eventually manifested itself in the form of scientific racism. It is not often recognized or admitted in Western history that prior to the period referred to as the Enlightenment, racism did not exist in theory or practice. Also, there is no evidence that the association of racism with the Enlightenment is primarily coincidental. Racism, as a matter of fact, developed not in spite of but because of the European Enlightenment.
While the superstars of rationalism were decrying the myths and superstitions of religion, they were basking in a myth of their own, the out-of-India origins of the Europeans. The myth was based on an academic superstition (talk about an oxymoron) that the ancestors of the Europeans came from areas east of the Caucasus Mountain. This is why the Europeans got to be called Caucasians.13 As the myth goes, these European ancestors, who predated the Old Testament, carried into Europe the principals of advanced society from the ancient East. These ancient Europeans were, according to the myth, the Aryans.14 Now you know where Hitler got his Aryan nonsense from – European Enlightenment narcissistic mythology.
This myth was intended to achieve two objectives. First, it was intended to falsely credit the Europeans with the development of social progress. Instead of Mesopotamia (the Middle East) being the cradle of civilization, eastern Eurasia became the cradle of civilization. Secondly, it was intended to justify one of the oldest of European vices – anti-Semitism - by excluding the Jews from any contribution to European progress. That is why according to this myth, the Caucasians arrived in Europe before the time of biblical Abraham. The myth of the Aryan race accomplished both. The Enlightenment became the catalyst for solidifying this myth. With the Caucasians assured of their superior social skills and the inferiority of Jews, the superstars of the Enlightenment began to extend their appalling narcissism to the Africans.
With its rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the only source of human equality, the Enlightenment opened the floodgates of European ethnocentricity characterized by pseudo-anthropology and racist philosophy. Every philosopher was an anthropologist and a biologist. The European victimization of other peoples was about to ensue in the name of the glorious enterprise called science. Voltaire held that the Africans were greatly inferior15 and nothing more than animals.16 Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment's so-called “moral philosopher” wrote that "The Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish."17 To call Kant a moral philosopher is like calling North Korea a democracy. Yet, you can't read about the Enlightenment without finding some second-rate scholar calling Kant a moral philosopher.
British Geologist, Charles White, asserted a British academic view that was prevalent at the time, that the supposedly larger size of the African penis was anatomical evidence of African inferiority.18 Maybe because I am an African who is supposedly so graciously endowed that I fail to see the connection between the size of the male reproductive organ and cerebral function; but neither my “Third World” high school biology nor my American college biology courses established a connection between genitalia and intelligence. If there was an inverse relationship between penis size and intelligence, then how could one determine the intelligence of women? Or the intelligence of women did not matter because all women were supposedly intellectually inferior? It is and was absolute nonsense to infer any intelligence from sexual organs; but since the conclusion supported Enlightenment racism, it went unchallenged. After all, the Aryans, the Enlightenment’s mythological superior race, needed some “scientific” explanation for their physiological disadvantages.
The godless anthropology of the Enlightenment set the stage for the degradation of people with African features. To simply have inferior peoples was not enough for the Enlightenment's pseudo-anthropologists. Just like Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, these atheists needed scientific justification for genocide. It was very easy to come by. While philosophical evolution established human inequality, Malthusian eugenics would justify genocide of every kind.
From his study of plants, John Malthus postulated that poverty was not the result of economic factors but of a hereditary predisposition to producing more offspring than one could provide for. This hereditary tendency could lead to over-population and ruin civilization. Malthus concluded that society should not subsidize its own ruin by caring for the poor, but "it is imperative that the bloodlines of the wealthy and powerful be maintained."
Only from a godless metaphysics could one even conceive of the notion that society has no obligation to care for the poor. This, in itself, is pure evil; but leave it to Dawkins to hold on to his intellectual garbage that only religion is the root of all evil. Malthus was strongly against any form of governmental and/or charitable assistance for the poor, believing that the poor, not being “fit” for society, should resign themselves to their eventual fate. Society’s only obligation to the poor was to eliminate them by ensuring their mortality.19 This may explain why there are no atheist charities but no shortage of atheist books lamenting the evils of religion.
Long before the Origin of Species was published, the British were already carrying out the “Malthusian solution” on the Tasmanians, the dark-skinned Australian natives who were considered animals.
“Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included riding out on horseback to shoot them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poison flour where they might find and eat it. Shepherds cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. At a hill christened Mount Victory, settlers slaughtered 30 Tasmanians and threw their bodies over a cliff. One party of police killed 70 Tasmanians and dashed out the children's brains.”20
What could have caused one group of humans to be so evil to another? “Evolution,” says Lubenow.21 Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a philosophical evolutionist who helped popularize the theory before the 19th Century. When Charles provided the “scientific” basis for this philosophy, it took off like wildfire and became the bases for the extermination of the Tasmanians.22
Science without God turned the European into a beast and the rest of humanity paid a horrendous price. This is the wonderful world that science alone will give humanity. When Dawkins states that science does not have any of the vices of religion, he is absolutely right. The vices of science without God are worse than the vices of religion. If the Origin of Species took God out of science, then The Descent of Man smeared racism into science, descending humanity into inhumanity. With the British genocide of the Tasmanians as the backdrop, in Chapter VI of The Descent of Man, Darwin provided the “scientific” justification for race-based extermination.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. 23
Race-based genocide is the only prediction of Darwinian evolution that has come to pass. The Tasmanians, Africans, and European Jews can testify to the exterminating power of evolutionary thinking. Human rights is not a concept that can be derived from evolutionary biology but racism and race-based genocide are justified in evolutionary thinking as progress in science. This scientific progress would be possible because all people evolved, but not as equals. The concept of human equality, considered a creationist nonsense by the enlightened westerner, is, therefore, both unscientific and anti-evolutionary.The evolutionary claim of human inequality is expressed in the scientific concept known as polyphyletic evolution or polygenesis. This claim was well articulated by the Nazi evolutionist, Hermann Klaatsch:
“Klaatsch, a prominent German evolutionist, concluded that human races differ not only because of survival factors, but also for the reason that they polyphyletically evolved from different primates. The blacks came from the gorillas, the whites from the chimpanzees, and the Orientals from the orangutans, and it is for this reason that some races are superior. He concluded that ‘the gorilla and the Neanderthal’ have a close biological affinity to "a large number of the living African blacks . . .’”24
The general exultation of Darwin and evolutionary biology by atheists seems to be based on total ignorance of Darwin's views. Evolutionary biology clearly endorses the view of racial inequality to the point where it predicts the extermination of inferior races. Yet, leave it to Weinberg to credit the moral improvement of humanity to science.25
That Dawkins could not and can not see the evils of human inequality deeply rooted in his evolutionary biology is a sad tribute to the arrogance and delusion of Enlightenment rationalism. Human equality is definitely not in Darwin's Descent of Man, the original “scientific” text on human origins. Darwinian biology provided the scientific justification for racial cleansing, a euphemism for genocide of the Nazi type. To credit this science and its rationale with human moral improvement makes just as much sense as crediting the Ku Klux Klan with creating racial equality in America. While Christianity proclaimed human equality on the basis that we are all created by God and in God’s image, Enlightenment science was proclaiming human inequality on the basis of separate evolutionary origins.
I never imagined that an Oxford biologist could be so ignorant of or oblivious to the history of science. Atheism-inspired race-based science is directly responsible for an amalgam of spurious facts which were used to prove the alleged inferiority of some people. The ideological foundation had been laid for the unspeakable horrors that the world was about to witness. Leading scientists, actually lab coat racists, in England, France, Germany, and the United States began to show off their new-found enlightenment by positing theories on human racial differences with the people of African descent, in every case, being labeled the lowest class of humans.
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, postulated that intelligence was inherited and environment had little to do with it. He argued for society to engage in evolutionary progress by selecting the intelligent and eliminating the unintelligent. Galton became the undisputed expert on human intelligence. Darwin said this of his cousin:
“Sir Francis Galton, with whom the study of human intelligence really began, believed very strongly that intelligence was mainly hereditary. He was also convinced there were profound differences in mental ability between the races. He regarded Negroes as barely human at all.‘The mistakes the Negroes made in their own matters,’ he wrote in Hereditary Genius, ‘were so childishly stupid and simpleton - like as frequently made me ashamed of my own species.’”26
As eugenics gained momentum in Europe, the Americans were not going to be left behind in the race for racial glory. Scientists at prominent American universities were lending their voices to the false science of eugenics. The following views of Columbia University’s Henry F. Osborne and Princeton’s Edwin Conklin could have been attributed to almost any American scientist of the early 20th Century:
“The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolians as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characteristics, but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens.”27
“Comparison of any modern race with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types shows that all have changed, but probably the Negroid races more closely resemble the original stock than the white or yellow races.”2
“Every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races, for the longer this is maintained, the greater the preponderance of the white race will be.”2
Now that European and American scientists had established “scientifically,” with evidence from penises and other body parts, that Blacks and other non-Caucasian humans were inferior to Whites, the eugenics movement became a worldwide phenomenon. The race was on to achieve racial purity of the “superior” races: Russians wanted Slavic purity; Germans wanted Aryan purity; British and Americans wanted Anglo-Saxon purity. Germany’s final solution is well known; and much is also known about the complicity of the scientific community in the heinous event known as the Holocaust. No one with basic human decency can read Edwin Black’s book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, and not be nauseated and terrified about the evil inherent in science without God.
From the beginning of the atheist Enlightenment in late 1600s up to the computer revolution in the late 1900s – a span of about three hundred years – evolutionists of all stripes (scientists and philosophers, dictators and mass murderers, journalists and academicians, skinheads and Klansmen) had assured us, backed by the “objective” discipline of “peer-reviewed science”, that all humans came from different animals and that we were not created by God because there is no God. Our different origins, they claimed, accounted for our differences. Our differences, their science assured us, put Caucasians on top of the superiority ladder and Blacks at the very bottom. Racists – politicians and apologists – they opined, were simply intellectuals of the Enlightenment. For three hundred years, their philosophers and scientists provided the intellectual fertilizer for the orchards whose fruits were some of man’s worst inhumanity against his fellow man: enslavement of the Africans, extermination of the Tasmanians and Native Americans, colonialism and apartheid in Africa, racial discrimination and segregation in the United States, the Holocaust and two world wars in Europe, and the silent genocide of American minorities. Yet, Dawkins says science has no evil. Is he really that ignorant of the history of science or is he just another racist who sees nothing wrong with science?
How could anyone, not to mention an Oxford biology professor, host a BBC program with the title that implies that religion is The Root of All Evil? Dawkins demonstrates an appalling lack of intellectual integrity in his comments about religion. John Polkinghorne, a Christian and a physicist observed:
“When I read the writings of some of the high-profile scientific proclaimers of atheism, I find a degree of ignorance of the intellectual content of serious biblical study and theological reflection that is not altogether different from the scientific ignorance displayed by those who send in papers with titles such as 'Einstein was wrong.' If scientists are to reject religious beliefs, they should do so with their eyes open and after a proper consideration of the serious intellectual effort that has been exerted in theology over many centuries of careful enquiry.”30
Polkinghorne is absolutely correct; but as long as there is money to be made and accolades to claim from the ridicule of religion, there will always be this profusion of intellectual garbage from the McAtheists. To everyone who believes in the sub-scholarly rantings that equate religion to evil, just remember that the racism which almost obliterated Europe and continues to be a blight on American society, is only a very small contribution of atheism to the West. If atheists like Harris, Weinberg, and Dawkins want to see the root of evil, it is a very simple matter - let them look in a mirror. Their ignorant-based absurd rantings against religion would not suffice nor be allowed to stand unchallenged. Given all the atheist rantings about the evil of religion, one fact has been demonstrated many times in history; and that fact is this: In the hands of atheists, science has been a tremendous force for evil.
Western civilization has become so morally bankrupt that the element of shame has become extinct. Like pimps, prostitutes, and criminal gangs, atheists ought to be proud of their atheism instead of resorting to idiotic claims about religion. Given the enormous efforts atheists exert in denigrating religion, it must be that they do not have anything good to say about atheism. If atheism is not intellectually satisfying, that’s understandable. After all, atheism is not philosophically sustainable, it is not the basis of any moral code, it has no basis in science, and its adherents seem capable of only the most ridiculous parody of religion.
When reading any of the works of the new atheists, one wonders if it is a parody of atheism masquerading as a criticism of religion. Their claims about religion are so easily falsifiable that even a high school student could not get away with such lazy work. I don’t know what this says about the western academic enterprise that some of these new atheists are (or were) university professors; however, one thing is certain: if this degree of arrogance, petulance, insensitivity, and ignorance is what is required to be an atheist, religion has absolutely nothing to fear because there could be no better ambassadors for religion than the new atheists.
1. Salmon Rushdie, a British writer, wrote Santic Verses, a book some Muslims considered to be an insult to the Muslim Prophet, Mohammed. The Iranian leader. Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, a death decree against him. Rushdie went into hiding for more than a decade. The West had been put on notice not to offend Islam.
3. Goldman, Robert N., Einstein's God—Albert Einstein's Quest as a Scientist and as a Jew to Replace a Forsaken God.. New Jersey: Joyce Aronson, Inc., 1997, p.88
4. Collins, Francis S. THE LANGUAGE OF GOD – A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, p.169.
5. Segura, Liliana. Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments. http://www.alternet.org/story/126492/. Accessed on December 31, 2010
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Dawkins, Richard. Is Science a Religion? The Humanist, January/February 1997. Found at Http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html. Accessed on 01/13/2010.
11. Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium (1941) chapter 13
12. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism . Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981. Chapters 2 &3, Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, Edmund Howard, trans.New York: Basic Books, 1974, Chapter 9.
13. Ibid.
14. Kekavmenos, George. Voltaire and the Blacks -The true, repugnant face of the “Enlightenment”. An internet publication found at http://www.antibaro.gr/articles/theory/enlightenment.html Retrieved on 6/10/2010
15. Ibid.
16. David Hume, cited in Brendan O’Flaherty and Jill S. Shapiro, Apes, Essences, and Races: What Natural Scientists Believed About Human Variation, 1700-1900. New York: Columbia University, 2002, p.18.
17. White, Charles. An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables and from the Former to the Latter. London, 1799, p,61.
18. Grant, George . Killer Angel (Franklin, Tennessee: Ars VitaePress, 1995), 50. The quotation is taken from The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans. By Tanya L. Green. Found on June 14, 2017 at http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/special_issues/population/the_negro_project.htm
19. Lubenow, p.150
20. Ibid.
21. Monaghan, David. ‘The body-snatchers’, The Bulletin,November 12. 1991, pp. 30–38. (The article states that journalist Monaghan spent 18 months researching this subject in London, culminating in a television documentary called Darwin’s Body-Snatchers, which was aired in Britain on October 8, 1990.) Quoted by Carl Wieland in Darwin’s body-snatchers: new horrors: People deliberately killed to provide ‘specimens’ for evolutionary research. Found at: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i2/bodysnatcher.asp. June 2007.
22. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relationto Sex. 1871 edition. (Sorry, I got this quotation from an internet edition; so pages could not be verified. However, others have cited this passage as belonging on pages 241-242).
23. Klaatsch. Hermann, 1923. The Evolution and Progress of Mankind, Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, translated from the German by Joseph McCabe, p. 105. Quoted in Evolution and the Origins of the Biological Race Theory. By Jerry Bergman. CEN Tech Journal Vol. 7(2)1993:155-168 as excerpted in Darwinism, Evolution, and Racism. Found at: www.biblebelievers.net/creationscience/kjcol1.htm. June 12, 2007
24. Cohen, Daniel, 1974. Intelligence-What Is it? M. Evans and Company Inc., New York, p. 115. Quoted in Evolution and the Origins of the Biological Race Theory. By Jerry Bergman. CEN Tech Journal Vol. 7(2)1993:155-168.
25. "Free People From Superstition". Title of acceptance speech given by Steven Weinberg for his "Emperor Has No Clothes" award. Freethought Today, April 2000 http://www.ffrf.org/legacy/fttoday/2000/april2000/weinberg.html Accessed 1/24/11
26. Osborne, Henry F. "The Evolution of Human Races," Natural History, January/February 1926, p. 129.
27. Conklin, Edwin. The Direction of Human Evolution. C. Scribner's Sons. New York, 1921.
28. Ibid., p.53.
29. Sanger, Margaret. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentano, 1922. (All quotations are taken from an unpaginated e-book copy produced by The Project Guttenberg – [February 21, 2006 Ebook #1689
30. Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology – An Unexpected Kinship. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007. p.xiii
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