Why does anyone listen to atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins when he talks about morality? As a full materialist—“the only thing that matters is matter”—he doesn’t have a basis to talk about morality. Morality of an ultimate nature does not exist for the atheist.

Given atheist assumptions about life after death, Richard Dawkins will suffer the same fate as Adolf Hitler. All the “good deeds” of Dawkins and the “evil deeds” of Hitler will amount to no end-of-life difference. They both will be worm food and nothing more. So any talk about what a person should or shouldn’t do is nothing but “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Of course, this is not to say that atheists are immoral; it’s only to say that given the foundational assumptions of a matter-only worldview there is no way ultimately to account for morality. One person’s “morality” is another person’s reason to further the evolutionary gene pool through genocide and eugenics. Who can say otherwise?

One bag of atoms raping and killing another bag of atoms cannot be discussed in moral terms given the operating assumptions of atheistic evolution.

Dawkins himself admitted as much:

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 (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.))

This brings me to the recent Dawkins firestorm. On Twitter he wrote:

X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.

People were outraged, but for the wrong reasons. “Twitter predictably went into convulsions,” Tim Teeman writes in the Daily Beast, “the central criticism made of Dawkins being that all rape and all pedophilia are bad, and seeking to draw distinctions in the way he had made Dawkins an ill-informed, insensitive bonehead.”

In the world of no-God and matter fighting for ascendancy over billions of years—“nature, red in tooth and claw”—who or what ultimately says that anything is bad or one thing is better or worse than something else?

Dawkins continued:

Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.

I’ll ask the same question: Who ultimately says? Certainly not those original primordial atoms that make us what we are today.

Not finished, Dawkins went on to write:

Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.

But in our long distant past, rape was a way of life. We are the result of “good rapes,” genetically speaking, if evolution is true and scientifically sacrosanct.

If animal behavior is a template for human behavior, then why can’t a case be made for rape by human animals? As hard as it might be to imagine, the connection has been made.

Randy Thornhill, a biologist who teaches at the University of New Mexico, and Craig T. Palmer, an anthropologist who teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia, attempt to demonstrate in their book A Natural History of Rape ((Randy Thornhill, and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).)) that evolutionary principles explain rape as a “genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection—a successful reproductive strategy.”

If there is outrage, it should be directed at the atheistic and evolutionary premises from which Dawkins has made a fortune selling to other gullible materialists who don’t understand the full implications of their fashionable worldview.