The Dawkins delusion
I was sitting across from someone at the coffee shop yesterday who was reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It reminded me that I have been meaning to read it myself, sort of in the same way that I have been learning more about the beliefs of religious fundamentalists: I disagree with both, but I feel that it’s wise and appropriate to be knowledgeable about their central arguments so as to understand where they’re coming from.
I have suggested here before that Christian fundamentalists and scientist, absolutist atheists are basically just two variations of the same kind of closed-mindedness. This basically comes down to a complete lack of humility or perspective: I am right, all who disagree with me are wrong, and can’t they see that I am just trying to save them?
Actually, while searching for something unrelated this morning, I came across Dawkins’s website and was fascinated by the slight similarities in his rhetoric to that of evangelical fundamentalists in one of his posts:
Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people […] need religion. I want to cultivate more respect for people than that. […] On the contrary, I am tempted to say “I believe in people …”On the face of it, I can see this is a fair criticism of those who say “people need religion” or “like it or not, religion is here to stay.” By the same token, I’ve heard the same sort of thing spun by Christians regarding (say) premarital sex. You think sex is just part of who we are, that it’s always going to be a problem? Well, we think better of people than that. We are capable of anything through Jesus….
Back to Dawkins:
[Some say,] I’m an atheist, but you are only preaching to the choir. What’s the point?
There are various points. One is that the choir is a lot bigger than many people think it is, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out.
This is the line of thinking that spawned the term “Moral Majority” (and, even more appropriately, equally misleading, but admittedly less related to religion, “silent majority” as applied to supposed Vietnam War supporters).
Actually, hardline atheists are a very, very tiny minority in this country. I recently attended a lecture where the presenter (discussing the lack of atheists on fiction TV) recalled survey data indicating just how tiny a minority this is — and also that Americans would rather have a gay president than an atheist president. (Stop and reflect on that for a moment.)
I’m not saying that’s evidence that atheism, as a belief, is wrong, just that Dawkins’s approach to proselytizing atheism seems eerily familiar to me.
Of course, I also have personal concerns — both practical and theological — about the validity of his (and Sam Harris’s, and Christopher Hitchens’s) mission.
The practical concern is quite simple, and rests on a rejection of their core assumption that “religion poisons everything” (to refer back to the title of Hitchens’s book). Here I refer briefly to a short, smart piece by Lee Harris, reflecting back on a time when the author was asked: “Are you for or against religion?”
Suppose I had answered by saying that I was for religion. Would this imply that I approved and admired the blood-thirsty rites involved in the worship of the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochti? On the other hand, what if I had said that I was against religion. Would I thereby commit myself to condemning the ethical teachings expressed by the prophets of ancient Israel, with their stern injunction to protect the weak and defend the downtrodden?Harris’s specific example of the latter involves Christian fundamentalists who aided Jewish people during the Holocaust because they felt it was their religious obligation to do so.
I could go on and on regarding my practical concerns with the “religion poisons everything” argument, but really, you only need one good counterexample to disprove a claim involving the word “everything.”
As for my theological concern with Dawkins’s argument, I refer back to the post I was quoting before. At one point, he quotes (and notes agreement with) Nicholas Humphrey, who suggests how we would be rightly outraged if a television documentary celebrated Inca human sacrifice:
“The message of the television programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention – another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism … […] How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?”
The key word in there at the end is “immoral.” If there is no God, no truth in religion whatsoever, how can we explain anything metaphysical as universally human? If we can agree on nothing outside of human invention as universally moral, then can’t any human culture invent its own morality? And if so, where does Dawkins get off saying that anyone else’s action is immoral?
Of course, I personally agree that human sacrifice is wrong. But if this reflects some real, universal morality, if it isn’t just an arbitrary cultural standard or a meaningless quirk of biology — a common social product of natural selection — then what is it?
I suppose that is the question I keep returning to as I write here. I suspect some philosopher or theologian or another has pondered this for me, but I don’t really know where to look to think on it further.
