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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CA602.1:

By providing a naturalistic explanation of biological origins, evolution promotes atheism. "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (Dawkins 1986, 6)..

Source:

Berlinski, David. 1996. The deniable Darwin. Commentary 101(6) (Jun). http://www.rae.org/dendar.html

Response:

  1. Naturalistic explanations of origins are not necessary for atheism. Nobody in the world can explain the origin of everything anyway. Leaving one more thing unexplained does not much matter. Dawkins's claim is the flip side of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy.

  2. Naturalistic explanations of origins do not make atheism mandatory. If God is the creator, it would make sense that he would be responsible for creating everything, including evolution and the laws that make it operate.

  3. Darwin was not alone in providing naturalistic explanations. Many people before him removed God from explanations for parts of the universe. Pierre-Simon Laplace provided a natural explanation for the origin and stability of the solar system. Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea, showing that there was no "vital" element in organic material. David Hume argued that design was not necessary for the origin of life. Darwin, by providing the mechanism, merely filled in one of the last gaps. It was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist even before Darwin (Gliboff 2000).

  4. There is nothing wrong with being an atheist if you want to be an atheist. That some people disapprove only shows that there is something wrong with religious bigots.

  5. Due mainly to its being rife with intellectual dishonesty, creationism also drives some people to atheism (Babinski 1995).

References:

  1. Babinski, Ed. 1995. Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
  2. Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton.
  3. Gliboff, S. 2000. Paley's design argument as an inference to the best explanation, or, Dawkins' dilemma. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31(4): 579-597.

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created 2000-9-30, modified 2003-8-8