A Critical Investigation of Dawkins’ Naturalism

Richard Dawkins is one of the contemporary atheists greatly affected by Darwinism. As an evolutionary biologist, he has tried to justify all the complex phenomena of the world through his Naturalistic approach. He denies the relationship between ethics and religion following evolutionary ethics and strives to overrule the hypothesis of God as the Designer and Cosmic Mind. But the important thing is that despite the serious criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution, it still holds great significance and appears to have caused many conflicts between religious beliefs and science. To many, the conflict with religion is not due to the conflict between the content of science and religion but to the assumption that scientific methods are the only way to know and discover reality. In the present research, we intend to defend this stance – through a critical investigation of some of Dawkins’ Naturalistic approaches from the viewpoint of Alvin Plantinga and others – that a true agreement between science and religion can be found via a true interpretation of experimental science theories and attention to methodological issues in science, and finally can use the scientific methods for recognizing the world as ways of divine management and action.