At Least He’s Consistent!

UK atheist Richard Dawkins caused outrage from many quarters due to some tweets he made last week.

The Independent in England reported it this way:

But after engaging in conversation with a number of users, his ethical values appeared to come a little unstuck.

“994 human beings with Down's Syndrome deliberately killed before birth in England and Wales in 2012. Is that civilised?” @AidanMcCourt asked.

“Yes, it is very civilised. These are fetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings,” Dawkins responded.

“I honestly don't know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma,” @InYourFaceNYer chimed in.

“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” he tweeted back.

So this report refers to Dawkins’s “ethical values.” Now I don’t deny that an atheist like Richard Dawkins may have a set of “ethical values”—but they are just his subjective opinions in his meaningless and purposeless universe with no absolute standards. As an atheist, he cannot claim that anyone else should have the same so-called “ethical values” as himself.

And that’s the important point we all need to understand here. Why should people who are not Christians and don’t build their thinking on the Word of God be outraged at all by his statement that if a woman found she was pregnant with a child with Down Syndrome, then she should “Abort it and try again” because “It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice”?

1. As an atheist who believes man is just an evolved animal, Dawkins is only being consistent in his thinking. Why shouldn’t someone be allowed to get rid of this animal that has a problem—after all, we get rid of spare cats, so why not spare kids? From the perspective of atheistic evolution, Dawkins is consistently applying his worldview.
2. When he states “It would be immoral to bring it into the world . . . ”—now he is being inconsistent. How can an evolutionary atheist impose his “ethics” on someone else? He can’t accuse someone else of carrying out an “immoral” act! How inconsistent can he get?
3. Secularists cannot help being inconsistent. They have to borrow in many ways (they have no choice) from the Christian worldview in their daily lives. Just talk with a professed atheist and you will find they will use words like good and bad and truth and so on. Now, they can determine what such words mean for themselves, but they can’t impose those meanings on others as they have no absolute basis to do so.

So why were so many non-Christians outraged by these recent remarks of Dawkins? It’s because they know in their hearts that God exists (Romans 1) and because God’s moral law is written on their hearts: "who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness" (Romans 2:15).

Here are two secular news reports—including one from our local TV station—on these statements by Richard Dawkins:

• “Richard Dawkins on babies with Down Syndrome: ‘Abort it and try again – it would be immoral to bring it into the world’”
• “Richard Dawkins: Abort babies with Down Syndrome, ‘immoral’ to let them live”

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken