Dear Dr. Dawkins

Each time I see you in the media, you seem to look ever more stressed and troubled, and not without reason.

As a Christian, I share your horror that millions of children and even adults are being brainwashed with false religious ideas and radicalised into mindless zealots.

I suspect that it was false religious teachings of a different variety that drove the desperate Charles Darwin to revive the ancient theory of evolution, because he could not bear the evangelical preaching of the day that would consign his atheistic relatives to an eternity in hell fire. You evidently understand, on the grounds of common human decency, that such preaching was misguided, but did you realize that your view is supported in the Bible, in the famous account of the resurrection of the “dry bones”, where the sinners of Israel rising from their graves cry out in alarm that “Our hope is lost!”. But their hope is not “lost” at all, because God then fills them with the Holy Spirit (Ezekiel 37:1-10).

Incidentally, I suspect also that Darwin knew from the start that his theory was also misguided – and that the accumulation of small differences, or DNA copying errors as you would describe them, simply cannot start to begin to commence to explain the astonishing “complexity within complexity” of life on earth, not even a single cell – let alone mind, emotion, instinct and beauty No wonder he trembled when contemplating the miracle of the human eye with its binocular colour vision and auto-focus lens. Little wonder he suffered so many psychosomatic afflictions.

I imagine he was also troubled by the adult human body itself, which, having grown from a single ovum, contains some 60,000 miles of blood vessels and a heart that not only pumps blood through that network, but even to itself as it beats in response to coordinated electrical impulses. How incredible!

But on a more basic level, you yourself, I understand, are puzzled by the very existence of male and female sex organs in humans and animals. How could the accumulation of random DNA copying errors ever explain the “evolution” of the male penis, testicles, erectile mechanism and sperm in men – and, quite independently, the development of a complementary vagina, ovaries, womb and the whole birth mechanism in women. And ditto in all mammals. That simple common sense fact alone blows evolution to absolute smithereens.

I suspect you must also understand Darwin's key schoolboy error of extrapolating the limited variation, seen in breeds of dogs and cats and cattle, to infinity – so that, given enough time, new species might have “evolved” from a common ancestor by the accumulation of small differences. Need I remind you of the terms “micro-evolution” (a fact of life known to breeders thousands of years before Darwin) and “macro-evolution” (a myth). As Genesis says, organisms reproduce “after their kind”, but no further. So that dogs produce dogs and roses create roses, and always will.

As Darwin was honest enough to admit, of course, the only real proof of his theory would be the discovery of the fossils of zillions of failed and unfit intermediate forms, composing the finely graduated organic chains of continuous development evolution theory requires. As you know, even over a century later, that proof is lacking – despite the “cladistics” cop-out whereby evolution is now simply assumed to be true, so that any small similarity between two organisms then “proves” they shared a “common ancestor”. So that every single organism is then regarded as a intermediate form. As I heard a top Cambridge professor frankly admit – “It does not work”.

It seems ironic to me that despite his theological training Darwin failed to perceive the metaphorical nature of God's creation, that the evil he abhorred in the earth's ecology was actually designed by God to demonstrates the path of greed, competition and violence that Adam and Eve foolishly chose when they rejected His guidance in the Garden of Eden. No wonder we speak of the loan shark, the greedy pig, the snake in the grass, the low life under stone, the leech, etc., etc.

But it's not just living things. It is no accident that warmth and cold typify love and hate, for example, or that water typifies the live-giving and cleansing power of the Holy Spirit – and that each single day depict our whole life, each night we tire then metaphorically die , “sleep” , and are then resurrected to new life next morning. Please think on these matters.

How much longer can this juvenile evolutionary nonsense carry on posing as serious science and hoodwinking college professors, boards of education and courts of law, let alone deluded Christian ministers?

Forgive me, Richard, but you do remind me of the zealous Saul, the highly educated persecutor of the Early Christian Church, who later became converted and was renamed Paul. One of these days, you too I feel will turn from denying God our Creator and become one of His greatest advocates instead.

Very best wishes for the new year, and as you ponder these matters I pray your path will take a diversion towards “Damascus”.

Sincerely,

John Thomas

P.S. Although media use of the term “creationism” has narrowed in recent decades to mean “young earth creationism”, which foolishly asserts that the earth and universe are only six thousand years old, I urge you to take another look at the oddly neglected “gap theory” teachings of “old earth creationism”, as promoted decades before Darwin by the Rev. William Buckland, Oxford's very first professor of geology. A good place to start would be at http://www.GapTheory.info or http://www.GapTheory.net