FdD Notebook No. 11 – 4/16/25

Dawkins - Poetry - Van der Poel

Lire la version française.

Bonjour dear readers,

For the past few weeks, our son’s seventh grade history class has been covering the history of the Reformation. He finds that interesting enough, but he get frustrated when the discussion of religion provokes his atheist friend to hit him with little lines like, “Believing in God is basically the same as believing in unicorns.” The professor doesn’t say such things of course, but if I were Catholic, I might have been offended by the way the discussion of medieval monasticism was handled. In the university, it's worse. Students tell me about a psychology professor whose project is to explain the naturalistic origins of religious beliefs, and a philosophy professor who dedicates an entire course to refuting Christianity.

Apologetics is not a luxury for today's Church. Christians cannot allow themselves to be intimidated by attacks, but we need to know how to explain why Christ is the truth as well as the way and the life. It is my conviction that defending the truth of the gospel is a responsibility God has both placed upon us and equipped us for, and I am excited every day to be able to make my contribution to this great project.

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
2 Corinthians 10:4-5

Biology is Insufficient

Pace Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins has caught a lot of flak for not going with the flow on the issue of transgenderism. As a biologist, he simply cannot get away from the fact that the reality of the animal kingdom is that there are exactly two sexes: male and female. Since this is a biological fact, it is both nonsensical and dangerous to blur this distinction by calling biological males women and vice versa.

But I draw the line at the belligerent slogan, “Trans women are women”, because it is scientifically false, a downright debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

Dawkins is right, of course, and his article is an interesting read (Caution: language). There are only two sexes, and it is nonsensical and dangerous to deny the reality of that distinction which exists in our bodies. The problem for Dawkins is that the foundation he has chosen to stand on is not as secure as he thinks. Being an atheist, he appeals to “biological facts” rather than God’s design, however “biological facts” simply can’t bear the weight of a moral argument. Biology can tell us how things are, but it has absolutely nothing to say about how they should be. Biology can give us the facts, but it doesn’t tell us what to do about them.

It is, for example, a biological fact that hair grows on my chin. However this fact does not entail any moral obligation on my part to wear a beard. I don’t. I fight this particular biological fact every morning with a razor because a higher authority than biology has informed me that she does not care for beards.

More importantly, the biological decree handed down to me by my DNA determined that I should be born with club feet. The response of my parents and the doctors to that biological fact was to intervene surgically to make my feet point in a different direction than what my DNA prescribed. Now if Dawkins agrees that it’s reasonable “fight biology” in this way, what standard can he use to object to other people “fighting biology” when it comes to their sex?

The difference of course is that club feet are a deformity, and the purpose of the operations done on them was to restore them to the way they’re supposed to be. So-called gender-affirming surgery is exactly the opposite – an attack on healthy organs which were already functioning the way they’re supposed to. This distinction however depends on the concept of design. There is a design to the human body, and a way that it is supposed to work. Feet are supposed to point forward. Females are supposed to have breasts. The problem for Dawkins is that this design, this “supposed to” is not a biological fact. Biology tells us how things are, not how they’re supposed to be. Biology (or looking around the room) can tell us that most people have feet that point forward, but that does not prove that feet are supposed to point forward. If human beings are a simple accident of evolution, then there is no design. There is no standard, no rules for what organisms should or should not do with their bodies as they “dance to their DNA.”

Dawkins knows better despite himself. He knows the difference between deformity and design. He knows that there is a “supposed to” in nature, and that biological facts are not merely biological facts, but that they contain a revelation of God’s intentions for his creatures. He of course, would strenuously deny that his arguments depend in any way on the existence of God, but unconsciously bundled in to his appeal to biology is the presupposition that there is a creation order which we have no right to challenge. In so far as Dawkins is right, he is, whether he likes it or not, dependent on the truth of Genesis 1:27.

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

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pa·ce - With the permission of; with deference to. Used to express polite or ironically polite disagreement.

An “I am” poem

My son (12) came home with an assignment for his English class to write an “I am” poem. Apparently this is a poem in which the first line starts with “I am something,” and every line thereafter starts with “I this” or “I that.” Without commenting on how valuable I perceive this assignment to be for middle schoolers, I will simply share with you the poem that this format inspired me to write:

I am.
I am is his name and not mine.
I am from him for he is when
I was not, and he is when
I will no longer be. He is
I am and therefore
I am because he is.
I am, not as
I am, but because of
I am.
I am in
I am, from
I am, for
I am, because he alone is
I am.

Reading

My reading has slowed down recently. I’m still working through The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton and William Wilberforce by Kevin Belmonte.

Paris-Roubaix

It was a spectacular race on Sunday with the third consecutive victory by Mathieu van der Poel sealed by Tadej Pogačar’s missed turn at 38km to go.

Photo : paris-roubaix.fr/

This neat video introduces us to a historian with an infectious passion for Paris-Roubaix:

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God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Exodus 3:14