Why Richard Dawkins is on our church notice board
by Julian Mann, The Conservative Woman:
On our church notice board there is a quotation from the atheist biologist and campaigner Richard Dawkins. It is a shortened version of a now quite famous quotation from his 1995 book, River out of Eden, A Darwinian view of Life:
‘In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’
We of course are not an atheist church. The reason we have put that up is to invite people to think.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes, the Philosopher-King, sometimes sounds like an atheist with his repeated refrain about the meaninglessness of life: ‘Vanities of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’
But actually he isn’t an atheist, as our passage from Ecclesiastes 5 makes clear. He is a worshipping Old Testament believer in the Lord God Almighty, the sovereign creator of heaven and earth and the God who revealed his character and purposes for his chosen people, the people of Israel, in the Law of Moses.
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