The God Conclusion

By John L Leonard

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has sold more than three million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books promoting atheism of all time.

Now John Leonard systematically dismantles the argument in The God Delusion point by point, leaving the reader with very few questions as to which worldview is more logical. After he has dispensed with Dawkins, Leonard makes a powerful argument for intelligent design that should eliminate any lingering doubts in the mind of the reader about whether supernatural intelligence exists.

The God Conclusion provides the most comprehensive and logical answer to our existential questions.

God exists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Each Voice Publishing
• Release date: Jul 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781732874497

John L Leonard

The author has written a number of articles for the online publication American Thinker and was interviewed on the Dennis Miller radio show.Divine Evolution is his first book. He has also written short stories for an anthology about animals and recently published his first detective novel, Coastal Empire, under the pen name of Rocky Leonard. John is the Atlanta Creationism Examiner for the online new source examiner.com.John holds a BBA from the University of Georgia and worked as a computer programmer for more than twenty years before becoming a writer. His writing has also been influenced by shorter stints working as a bartender, real estate investor and landlord.He has been married to wife Lisa for twenty-two years. John is the proud father of two and grandfather of three, as well as pack leader for several wonderful dogs and one crazy cat.Born in Savannah, John has spent most of his adult life in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. The local color in his writing is equally authentic whether the setting is a Georgia beach, downtown Atlanta, or the Appalachian foothills in north Georgia.

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INTRODUCTION

On March 26, 1941, Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. His father was a civil servant with the British Colonial Service. When Richard was eight years old, the family returned to England from Africa after Richard’s father inherited a country estate in Oxfordshire and became a commercial farmer. Richard attended English public school and then studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1966.

After a brief stint teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Dawkins returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 to become a lecturer and became a reader of zoology in 1990. In 1995, Dawkins was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position created by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft Corporation with the express intention that Dawkins be the first holder of that professorship. Dawkins is an accomplished, talented writer and the author of numerous books on evolution and atheism, including The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The Ancestor’s Tale, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, Outgrowing God, and of course, The God Delusion.

Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion in 2006. The book quickly became a New York Times bestseller and sold more than two million copies. I own one of them. I read it cover to cover, and then I read it again. Initially, the book shook me up because it seemed like Dawkins had anticipated every conceivable objection I might offer to his atheism and made a preemptive strike against the Christian faith. Furthermore, it appeared to be very well-written and organized.

Highly intelligent, Dawkins has a sneering contempt for people who hold religious beliefs, comparing those beliefs to a pernicious virus. Creationists don’t know anything, Dawkins once blustered. In an interview with journalist John Harris. Dawkins said, If I met God, in the unlikely event after I died, which one are you? Are you Zeus, are you Thor, are you Baal, are you Mithras, are you Yahweh? Which God are you, and why did you take such great pains to conceal yourself and hide away from us? ¹

The title of his book is The God Delusion. It is not called The Yahweh Delusion, The Jesus Delusion, or The Allah Delusion. The criticisms in his book are directed at the Christian God because Christianity was the religion Dawkins knew as a child. If no God exists, why does the identity of God matter?

That is the crux of my argument: scientific evidence tells us whether it is reasonable to believe any God exists. If we can be sure no God exists, it doesn’t matter if we call him Zeus, Thor, Allah, or Jesus, because we are only talking about an imaginary entity. However, if we can establish a reasonable probability of believing God exists, it makes sense to go further and attempt to discern the identity of God. If God can be shown with evidence to be fictitious in the generic sense, it makes no sense to worry about which specific God we should focus upon. 

Even though I am certainly not God, I believe I can answer Dawkins’ question about why God took pains to hide irrefutable evidence of His existence, and my answer is free will. If atheism is simply the lack of belief in the existence of God, atheism is refuted by clear and incontrovertible knowledge that God exists. Everyone is free to judge from the evidence whether God exists. If we claim to be atheists despite reasonable evidence for God’s existence, then we might categorize ourselves as spiritual rebels or even Satanists, but not true atheists. 

Later in the same interview, Dawkins said,

Science is wonderful. Science is amazing. The fact you could understand why you exist—who could not be turned on? Who could not be excited by that? Who would ever want to live in a world where you live your life, you go to work, you go to the office or wherever it is, you go to the football match, and this goes on year after year, and then you die? And you don’t have any understanding of why you were there in the first place. That’s desiccated. That’s dry. What is not dry and desiccated is coming into the world as it were awakening in the world and awakening in the fullest sense. Of seeing the universe, seeing the stars, seeing down a microscope, seeing what’s inside every single cell, and seeing what’s inside the brain. And marveling at this wonderful gift of life that we have, albeit temporarily, marveling at this gift of understanding of why we exist and rejoicing in it for as long as we do exist. ²

He's right, at least partially. Science is fantastic and awe-inspiring. And as for understanding how we came to exist, that’s easy enough to grasp—our fathers had intimate relationships with our mothers. However, the world Dawkins describes as desiccated and dry is a world dominated by an atheistic worldview, not a theistic one. In an atheistic world, the universe wasn’t created for any purpose, and life came to exist without purpose and by accident. Likewise, there is no reason or meaning for our existence. We just live and die, nothing more than that to the end of time, complex containers of protein-coding chemicals.

An atheist might read the previous paragraph and object vociferously, but the argument is easy to defend. A designed universe (created by God) would be made on purpose, but an unplanned and undesigned universe could only be created by accident. Therefore, the only meaning our existence could possibly serve would be some artificial meaning we concoct for ourselves, and we should assume death is a permanent end to life. As for the bags of chemicals that code for protein suffering from a delusion of self, that comes directly from the teachings of Susan Blackmore, a prominent atheist professor of psychology. 

TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design, and Dawkins once gave a TED talk before publishing The God Delusion in which he said,

I want to say something nice about creationists. It’s not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. I think they’re right about one thing. I think they’re right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I‘ve already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they are deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now it may sound as though I’m about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that is not what I’m going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. But that is putting it too negatively. If I was a person who was focused on preserving religious faith, I would be terrified of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science in general, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic. Now the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design—complexity is another word. In the standard creationist argument, there is only one. They’re all reduced to this one, which takes off from statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance. Therefore, they must have had a Designer. This argument, of course, shoots itself in the foot because any Designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex Himself. ³

It's a point Dawkins has made repeatedly and makes again in The God Delusion, the fact that a designer capable of designing something complex must be even more complex than the design. Forgive me for asking an obvious question, but so what? I’m happy to concede that God must be more complicated than His creation because it doesn’t reduce the probability of God’s existence. I’ll further stipulate that God’s presence should be considered somewhat improbable, given that no one has ever seen God. However, that doesn’t make the alternative (no God) any more probable than God.

On October 7, 2009, Richard Dawkins was at Berkeley, California. When asked if any one sentence might convince creationists to abandon their faith, Dawkins gave a curious reply:

The single most convincing fact or observation that you could point to would be the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes using modern DNA techniques actually looking at the letter-to-letter correspondences between genes. Compare the genes of any pair of animals you like, pairs of animals or pairs of plants, and then plot out the resemblances, and they fall in a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. And the only alternative to it being a family tree is the Intelligent Designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhanded and devious manner. Moreover, the same thing works with every gene you do separately, and even pseudogenes that don’t do anything but are vestigial relics of genes that once did something. I find it extremely hard to imagine how any creationist who actually bothered to listen to that could possibly doubt the fact of evolution, but they don’t listen. ⁴

Oh, but I do listen, and I ask difficult questions such as, what about pairing a plant and an animal, Mr. Dawkins? By the exact same processes, sexual reproduction, you’ve claimed that plants and animals are related, so why not compare the genome of the corn plant with a corn snake, or the cotton plant with a cotton rat to see evidence of this perfect family tree? Why is deception assumed on the part of the Intelligent Designer?

As a former software developer, I can speak from experience that it is efficient and intelligent to reuse and repurpose information rather than reinvent it out of whole cloth. The same set of instructions can be used in numerous places within an application. It is isolated into a function or procedure that can be called repeatedly, much like hox genes provide a set of instructions to construct specific body parts like heads in numerous organisms.

Since Mr. Dawkins will probably insist that we choose two animals or two plants, how about a whale and a bat? Both are mammals. If evolution is true, both evolved from an animal roughly the size of a modern shrew with neither flippers nor wings, and within the last 100 million years, give or take.

Mr. Dawkins claims that an Intelligent Designer sets out to deceive us in the most underhanded and devious manner—how exactly? As the reader will learn in the final chapters, I’ve provided several solid arguments for Intelligent Design based on scientific evidence that are pretty clear and straightforward. The deception is from the evolution contingent. Dawkins even admits that we cannot think logically or trust our own eyes when looking at the evidence. So instead, the evidence must be interpreted for us by experts. Dawkins likes to say that an atheist is just someone who feels about Yahweh as any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the Golden Calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one God further. ⁵

Like many of his arguments, it’s kind of silly. In my case, the view is ineffective because the God my perspective attempts to justify is an abstract God and not specifically associated with any given religion. I’m not arguing that you should believe in the Christian God, but I am making it clear that I do. However, the scientific evidence does not give the God of my argument a name. In theory, his name could be Odin. Although I believe in Yahweh, my argument will stop short of providing evidence that He exists. 

How does Dawkins respond to a fierce debate in favor of an anonymous God independent of any religion? He doesn’t because he can’t and doesn’t have to respond. As Dawkins says himself, it wouldn’t look good on his curriculum vitae. If Richard Dawkins can refuse to debate his intellectual equal in William Lane Craig or Stephen Meyer, there is little or no chance he would ever condescend to engage in conversation with someone like me. The risk outweighs any potential rewards. But not everything Dawkins says or writes is ingenious. In an interview with The Guardian, Dawkins ironically suggested that an article he wrote titled Atheists for Jesus included the claim that Someone as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he’d known what we know today. ⁶ With all due respect (okay, maybe not all due respect), Mr. Dawkins, Jesus would never have been an atheist, not in a million years. Not even in the realm of possibilities. As C.S. Lewis suggested, we only have three options: Jesus is a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord God. What he could not have been, yet Dawkins suggests, is honestly mistaken.

In 1989 Dawkins told the New York Times, It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that). ⁷ But his analysis is unkind as well as untrue. I may not be right about everything I’ve written in this book, but the fact I’ve been able to write it should prove I’m neither ignorant, stupid, or insane. In fact, I’m a voracious reader. As for being wicked, I will confess to being a sinner, For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23) However, I don’t think I’m particularly wicked or evil because I reject the idea that monkeys make men, as Darwin famously wrote, or doubt that monkeys and men share a common ancestor. I just believe they share a common Creator.

I’ve looked carefully at much or most of the evidence and learned that it leaves quite a bit to be desired. However, it isn’t and has never been my goal to convince you, the reader, to believe everything I believe. Any individual part of my argument may be categorically rejected, and the rest of my presentation remains intact. I can understand how someone could read The God Delusion and find it persuasive. The first time I read the book, I found it compelling even though I had become convinced that God existed before reading The God Delusion. Dawkins was claiming all the scientific evidence supported his worldview and did not support mine, which created a few new doubts and some consternation on my part due to ignorance.

Once upon a time, I was what I would now call an apathetic agnostic. I didn’t know if God existed, and for the most part, I didn’t care. Like many adolescent Christians, I grew up attending a Christian (Lutheran) church but stopped going right after college, after learning just enough science to conclude the Bible was probably a work of fiction. I was married in my late twenties and immediately began raising a family. My wife had a daughter from her first marriage and our son within a year. I decided God was probably as real as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny and became obsessed with the more material aspects of life, such as houses, cars, clothing, and childcare, after becoming Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to my own children.

I was taking the family to church once a week to hedge my bets because the Bible taught the father had a parental obligation to do so. I’d rather sleep late on Sundays because I worked so many hours during the week (forty-hour work-weeks were a rare luxury I was seldom afforded by my own drive to succeed in business) and felt the need for some down time on Sundays to recuperate from the work-week.

More importantly, I wasn’t buying what the church was selling anymore. I didn’t believe in God and was just going through the motions. Frankly, whether humans evolved from ape ancestors or came to exist somehow didn’t matter to me because it wasn’t relevant to my job and wouldn’t help me make money. It was just information I once had to learn for biology class, and I hadn’t been in a biology class in decades.

After deciding to become an atheist (mostly so I wouldn’t have to get up and take the family to church anymore), I gave God one final opportunity to prove He existed. That was big of me, wasn’t it? That also happened to be the first opportunity for God to reveal Himself because I’d never asked before.

Now that I reflect on that fateful night, I never expected anything to happen. After all, I knew just enough science to be dangerous. I believed in the Big Bang and an old universe. I may not have been sure Time solved all problems stemming from descent with modification, but I didn’t care. Logic was my life’s work, and existential logic had begun to trouble me. If God existed, I knew my attempts to fool Him wouldn’t work, and if He didn’t exist, I was wasting my precious, valuable free time when I had better things to do, like sleep late.

As P.T. Barnum famously once said, There’s a sucker born every minute, and I didn’t want to be one of the suckers. I’ll say two things about that night: I became a sincere Christian, and you should never ask for something unless you’re fully prepared to get it. That fateful night I had been lying in bed, wondering if Jesus was part of the greatest hoax ever perpetrated when it occurred to me that I should be able to find out for myself. If it was a hoax, it was a hoax that had fooled billions of people over the past two thousand years into believing unbelievable stories of a man healing disease, performing miracles, and ultimately being resurrected from the dead.

Two Bible verses I had memorized as a child popped into my mind: Matthew 7:7, which reads, Ask, and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you, and Revelations 3:20, which says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he with me. There seemed to be a common denominator in those two verses about opening the door to your heart. So, I invited Jesus into my heart. After a while, my bedroom filled with light much too bright to look at directly. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of peace and tranquility that is extremely difficult to describe, so I won’t even bother trying. That night, I saw the Light.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me what you believe about my experience. I will concede that if that night had been my one and only experience with supernatural phenomena, I probably would have been able to convince myself that the incident hadn’t been authentic. However, that wasn’t my first paranormal experience. Years earlier, I had numerous encounters with what I shall call ghosts, for the lack of a better term. Whatever it was, the entity in question was intelligent and invisible to the naked eye. These other supernatural experiences will be described in greater detail in Chapter 3, but for now, suffice it to say I had reasons to believe in the supernatural before I realized I had reason to believe in the existence of God.

After my rather intense personal encounter with Jesus, not much changed initially. I never felt the need to brag about my experience or start thumping my Bible. The only differences the experience made in my life were that I no longer looked for excuses to skip church on Sundays, and I lost my ability to hate other people. The changes in my life were gradual and subtle. I continued to work hard at my job. My wife and I taught Sunday School for a while, but that was about it until I read The God Delusion, which changed my life.

I’ll never forget the night I first learned who Richard Dawkins was and about his book from an episode of The Colbert Report, entirely by accident. I was trying to help a friend who was starting a new business and had the television on in the background, hoping to create some white noise while I crunched numbers into a spreadsheet. Somehow, I had gotten involved in helping him develop the business plan. I wasn’t paying much attention to the television when Dawkins said something remarkable during the interview: he claimed objects like cars and computers were intelligently designed, but the human body was not. That got my full, undivided attention.

I couldn’t believe I had heard him correctly, so I backed up the video and watched it again. And again. I became so obsessed with The God Delusion that I eventually changed careers and became a writer. This book will be organized in the following manner: The God Delusion has ten chapters. The first ten chapters will each provide a synopsis and brief analysis of the corresponding chapter from The God Delusion. The eleventh chapter of my book will begin my arguments for God using existential scientific evidence and elementary logic. The twelfth chapter includes scientific evidence of supernatural or paranormal phenomena. The thirteenth chapter presents a brief statement in favor of intelligent design. The fourteenth chapter contains a brief moral argument, and the final chapter has a concise summary of the previous chapters.

Be my guest if you want to believe that humans, sharks, mosquitos, and oak trees share a common ancestor via sexual reproduction. The reader is neither required nor expected to agree with my entire argument. I humbly request the reader only accept those parts of my opinion that make the most sense. Although I do not personally believe humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor any more than I think sex, luck, and time explain the relationship between bees and flowers, that shouldn’t stop you from believing in Darwinism if it makes you happy.

One of the few points on which Dawkins and I agree entirely is that the theory of descent with modification to the point of origin of new species could theoretically involve a supernatural creator and be described as theistic evolution. Frankly, I don’t believe the best interpretation of the evidence supports Darwinism. A fair evaluation of the total body of evidence concludes that neither a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible nor a secular explanation fully describes the world's reality. The earth could be around four billion years old or much younger.

Life cannot evolve until it exists. Before Darwin’s theory of evolution can ever become a potential topic of consideration, at least three miraculous events must have already occurred: the Big Bang, inflation, and abiogenesis. Four miracles if we count the emergence of consciousness. Why believe in evolution without a God when you can’t get to the point where change even becomes possible without some sort of divine intervention?

Dawkins claims that Darwinian natural selection is a proven fact, and everything that precedes Darwinism can be safely assumed. However, you can’t have life without a fine-tuned universe capable of supporting and sustaining it, and we happen to live in such a universe. Not only does our universe exist and life exist, but a rich ecosphere of diverse living organisms occupies virtually every corner of our planet. Organisms complement each other.

Was our universe created by accident or on purpose? Those are our only two real choices. The universe popped into existence due to pure luck, or we can believe it was specifically created for some unknown purpose that includes supporting human life. There doesn’t appear to be a third option possible—there are no planned accidents. If a plan exists, it isn’t an accident.

Much attention was paid to IBM’s Deep Blue defeating world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match. However, it took a mainframe computer with very sophisticated programming that could learn from past mistakes to beat the grandmaster in what basically amounted to a publicity stunt on its second try. It took an entire team of chess experts and software developers to devise a program able to beat one player. While it was a significant accomplishment for the computer to finally defeat a human being, Deep Blue was useless except for playing chess. Deep Blue couldn’t answer the telephone or carry on a conversation. The team that built the computer consisted of multiple grand masters working on the software for more than a decade before finally defeating Kasparov in their 1997 rematch.

Human technology is fantastic, but even the most advanced technology has limitations. For example, three-D printers are incredible; they can produce anything from a hammer to a prosthetic device. However, they cannot create even the simplest living organism, so they aren’t that great.

The best computers can emulate certain aspects of the human mind and even learn from mistakes. Nevertheless, an object with a sophisticated design should not be based on an undesigned or poorly designed entity. For example, ships and submarines use sonar modeled after echolocation navigation observed in bats, whales, and dolphins. But, of course, bats, whales, and dolphins are all creatures and thus natural objects, which, Dawkins claims, cannot be the product of intelligent design.

But how can a sophisticated design successfully emulate a lucky design?

Humans don’t really create anything. We steal all our best ideas from nature. We aren’t nearly as clever as we’d like to think. I can’t prove the arguments I’m about to make are factual because proof is limited to the world of mathematics, but I will come as close as I can get. The arguments cannot be disproved, either. They may be accepted or rejected based on logic, reason, or personal prejudice, but not because they have been proved false.

For the record, telling you about my personal experiences with God or ghosts is not to convince you they really happened but to explain why I believe what I believe with so much conviction. I will not be making up evidence to prove my point or telling unprovable anecdotes to state my case. Instead, I will be presenting scientific evidence I’ve learned from reading and research, taken from books by experts in their respective fields. This was not a trivial pursuit.

Many of these experts would probably object to the conclusions I’ve drawn from careful analysis of their evidence. However, they cannot argue against the evidence because they are also the source. Many of the opinions I have expressed will not be unique to me. I’m mainly adding value that comes from assembling all the puzzle pieces into one consistent and coherent Big Picture. To understand why we exist, we must first understand what existence means. We must begin in the beginning and work our way to the end, from the Big Bang to this moment. Assuming the evidence for natural selection is an actual, proven fact and then half-heartedly working our way back toward the beginning is not an ideal method of seeking truth.

Life exists. You exist, and I exist. We are not figments of the imagination, or some hallucination conjured by a brain in a box. We represent reality in its purest form. The most difficult questions a human being can contemplate are existential in nature. Inevitably, when those questions are posed, the question of whether a supernatural God might exist must be asked and answered.

Some people may read this book and remain unconvinced, but it won’t necessarily be because my argument against atheism failed to persuade. Instead, my opinion has been formed to present a carefully constructed worldview relying almost exclusively on scientific evidence to posit the existence of a supernatural creator. However, some critics will reject my ideas because a commitment to atheism was previously made in that critic’s life.

Because free will exists, anyone can choose to believe