“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow,” wrote Mary Shelley in her 19th century masterpiece Frankenstein. Would that the militant atheists of the 21st century had heeded her words, for they have brought to life a monster of their own.

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

The aging author of The God Delusion — somewhat surprisingly, perhaps — frankly declared, “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.” He explained:

I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense. … So I call myself a cultural Christian and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion.

What Dawkins perhaps fails to realize and certainly refuses to confess is that his entire life’s work has been spent doing just that: substituting Christianity for an alternative religion, relativistic atheism. Now that Dawkins and his ilk have had some success in their efforts, they find themselves rather terrified of the godless, amoral world that they have helped create. Professor Richard Dawkins, meet Doctor Victor Frankenstein. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: We Are an Easter People)

In Shelley’s 1818 work of fiction, the eponymous ambitious young scientist succeeds in realizing the goal with which he has become almost maniacally obsessed and brings to life a creature. Almost instantly, he is disgusted with his handiwork, repulsed by the ugliness of his creation. Just so, now that Dawkins has witnessed a decrease in Christian belief in the West and an increase in relativistic atheism, he finds himself horrified with the fruits of his labors. The single triumphant moment of achieving that goal has ended, and the scientist is now left staring into the blinking eyes of the monster he has made.

Even though he railed against it, labelling Christian faith “one of the world’s great evils,” Dawkins has now found that the culture he enjoys and the moral code from which he has benefitted cannot exist without Christianity. The rapid, rampant Islamification of Europe is to Dawkins as the scarred face and yellow eyes of the creature were to Frankenstein.

There is now no Christian League to defend Europe against the Muslims as there was at the Battle of Lepanto, there is no savage Vlad Țepeș to stop the equally-savage Muslims in their tracks, no Winged Hussars are coming to the rescue as at the Battle of Vienna. Dawkins and countless other little-minded secularists are now discovering that the Christian world which had once protected Europe and the West from the invasion of barbarians has, by their own hands, been suppressed, silenced, domesticated, and castrated. Too late, they realize that in pruning the branch they called Christianity, they have felled the entire tree.

Perhaps if Dawkins had spent a little more time reading the works of serious Christian thinkers and a little less time mocking and belittling them, he might have realized that Christians had predicted the very world he now so fears. Nearly a century ago, the author and apologist C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Abolition of Man about a world where the ideals of Dawkins would reign supreme, where might would make right because there would be no objective Christian morality to appeal to.

Dawkins’s own campaign for relativistic atheism has brought this world to life, as Frankenstein brought his monster to life. Without objective Christian morals — that is, without morals defined by God Himself — who will define morality? Lewis wrote of a class he called the “Conditioners,” who would shape the values of the masses based solely on their own whims. “All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them,” he explained. “But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism.… When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.… The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.”

Perhaps Dawkins and his ilk had imagined they themselves might be the Conditioners. After all, like Frankenstein, they labored long to bring their monster to life, and did things, as Lewis put it, “hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead.” Perhaps Dawkins’s “horror” is simply the horror of an effete intellectual who feels that some brute (Islam) has cheated him out of the title for which he has been scheming. (READ MORE: American Catholics Back Trump Over Biden)

Or perhaps Dawkins’s horror really is the horror of Frankenstein, witnessing the terror that he has helped breathe into existence. Shelley’s scientist committed the end of his days to hunting down and slaying the monster he created. Let us hope that Dawkins has at least the same integrity and commitment as his intellectual forefather.