Who speaks for God? It turns out a number of Darwinian biologists do. Center for Science and Culture Senior Fellow Stephen Dilley explores this curious phenomenon in his talk at the 2025 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. Dr. Dilley observes that luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne make claims about what God would or wouldn’t do as part of their positive case for evolutionary theory. But Dilley argues that these claims are thinly justified, simplistic, conflicting, and even self-defeating.
Moreover, Dilley notes that the problem isn’t limited to Dawkins and Coyne: problematic God-talk appears in everything from biology textbooks to flagship articles like Theodosius Dobzhansky’s, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” It seems that discussion of the divine is right at home in evolutionary biology. Watch: