Is Our Problem Guns or a Godless Worldview?

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Oct 3, 2017

British evolutionary biologist and famed atheist Richard Dawkins sparked outrage on Twitter after he mocked Southern accents and the Second Amendment in the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas. He tweeted: “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah!” the 76-year-old tweeted Monday morning. “Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”

The tweet came just hours after a lone gunman opened fire on a crowd from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 others attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival.

Here’s the irony — Dawkins is making political and moral judgments that are totally inconsistent with his worldview. Here’s his official position: “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.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

In 2008, American theologian John Haught, God and the New Atheism (2008), gave seven summary statements as his conceptualization of the “vision of reality” held in the mind of the so-called “new atheists”, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, which — according to theistic scientist Michael Bunner (2013) — are representative of the embodiment of the atheist’s creed, or seven tenets of scientific naturalism, as Christian’s see things:

  1. Apart from nature, which includes human beings and cultural creations, there is nothing. There is no God, no soul, and no life death.
  2. Nature is self-organizing, not the creation of God.
  3. The universe has no overall purpose, although individual human lives can be lived purposely.
  4. Since God does not exist, all explanations, all causes are purely neutral and can be understood only by science.
  5. All the various features of living beings, including human intelligence and behavior, can be explained ultimately in purely natural terms, and today this usually means in evolutionary, specifically Darwinian terms.
  6. Faith in God is the cause of innumerable evils and should be rejected on moral grounds.
  7. Morality does not require belief in God, and people behave better without faith than with it.

Rejecting the transcendent moral authority of the Bible, which provides liberty with its necessary limits, with the immutable holy Creator as God, not man, the existential, objectively baseless morality of today’s political correctness has produced the most morally confused generation America has ever raised. If there is no God, and if, in the words of Dawkins, “at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”, then the sounds of the shots and screams in Las Vegas on Sunday were “only those of man worshipping his maker.”

A number of years ago, Steve Turner, a British journalist composed the following half-humorous, satirical poem that is so tragically indicative of the outcome of today’s postmodern relativism:

This is the creed I have written on behalf of all us. We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin. We believe everything is OK as long as you don’t hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before during and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin. We believe that adultery is fun. We believe that sodomy’s OK. We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything’s getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated. You can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in horoscopes, UFO’s and bent spoons; Jesus was a good man just like Buddha
Mohammed and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think his good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same, at least the one that we read was. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation sin heaven hell God and salvation.

We believe that after death comes The Nothing because when you ask the dead what happens they say Nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it’s compulsory heaven for all excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson. What’s selected is average. What’s average is normal. What’s normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament. We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. Americans should beat their guns into tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good. It’s only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions. Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him. Reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust. History will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds. And the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky and when you hear State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten (or Fifty-nine, while wounding over 500!) Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker. 

In 1983, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, speaking at the Templeton Forum said: “But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous (Russian) Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

Our problem isn’t guns, but forgetting and forsaking God!

Wade Trimmer has been in full-time Christian service since 1971, thirty-five of those years as a senior pastor. He pastored Grace Fellowship of Augusta for 30 of those years.

In 2008, Pastor Wade formed Training for Reigning Institute of Disciple-making, a non-profit organization, for the purpose of equipping leaders, especially in Third World countries in being more effective in carrying out the Great Commission (Visit website:TRIDM.org). The past 9 years have taken Pastor Wade outside the USA to more than 25 different nations.

He is the author of 46 books, a conference speaker and leader of international mission’s training. He is married to Anne and they have three grown children, five grandchildren, and five great grandchildren. They are members of Grace Fellowship of Augusta, Georgia and make their home in North Augusta, South Carolina.