an attempt to refute the atheistic propositions of professor richard dawkins

1. In his most famous, oft used, and oft quoted, analogy Richard Dawkins answers the truth claims of all religions by saying: "Why believe in your version of God? Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster?" His answer rejects all truth claims for whatever religions without assessing any of them. Such blanket reasoning if applied to what we call science would mean rejecting all science without assessing it simply because of the vast array of scientific theories and scientific approaches of the present era and centuries past, which have proved bunkum.

2. Mr Dawkins claims that the prime determinant in any decision to believe in God through the lens of a particular religion is the geographical accident of a person's birth. This may be sometimes true but is clearly not always true. People convert to other religions than the one in which they were raised. People abandon religion altogether as Mr Dawkins claims to have done. There is a dignity in our choices beyond geography. He should recognise it.

3. The field of endeavour which we call science could not exist without the religious notion that truth is sacrosanct.

4. Science would not exist without the literacy and numeracy of populations which followed the dissemination of the holy books variously styled the Talmud, the Bible and the Quran.

5. The scientific method itself could never have existed without the Eighth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbour. The commandment against lying is the foundation of all civil discourse and all honest investigations into the nature of reality, including science.

6. Christians claim that Jesus said: "If you make my word your home, you shall come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free." The notion of the primacy of truth has come to science from religion not vice versa. It is believers in Jesus' words who have founded and spread the unversity systems of the West which in turn produced the principles and values of the field of endeavour we call science. The idea that the truth itself is liberating has never been surpassed in human thinking. This idea did not come from the tag line for The Prince Of Tides, Nor did it come from Sigmund Freud. Nor from Charles Darwin. It came from Jesus.

7. Darwinian Atheism provided the justifying foundational motivation and delineator for the ideologies of Soviet Communism and German Nazism.

8. Mr Dawkins atheism appears to hinge on the Darwinian assertion that all life began spontaneously by chance as a result of an undirected natural process. The British astronomer Fred Hoyle famously stated: "The chances of life beginning spontaneously by chance and evolving to what we are today are the same as the chance of a tornado hitting a junk yard and assembling a 747 Jumbo Jet." I can find no public record of Mr Hoyle taking a further step and accepting the existence of God. Nonetheless I tend to agree with his assessment of Darwinian claims about the origin of life. To wit: Darwin's claims and the claims of Richard Dawkins about the origin of life are not true. Where then did we come from? Fred Hoyle before he died suggested aliens might have seeded us. The mathematician David Berlinski commented drolly on this explanation: "Ah yes. For some people the aliens will do it every time. But this only puts back the question. Then we have to ask: How did the aliens come to exist?"

9. Mr Dawkins appears to be an adherent of speculative scientific postulations which advocate the existence of a limitless number of alternative universes in which everything that can happen, does happen, so that over an infinite amount of alternative time lines, the appearance of human life spontaneously by undirected chance becomes not improbable but inevitable. I would suggest that this theory of Mr Dawkins has more in common with the notion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster than does any actual religious philosophy of existence. It's pure voodoo.

10. God made the world and and everyone and everything in it. He did not make any mistakes.