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Creation and Science

The piece below provided critical background work for the sermon series on Genesis and creation (particularly on the issues of belief in God, science and faith, and creation and evolution), examples of which can be seen in “sermon of the month” entries for September, October and November 2008.
The paper itself provides an academic treatment, prepared for a group of Baptist ministers and theologians, and read in August 2008.

The Significance of Richard Dawkins’ Atheism for Christians and Others Today

Introduction

First, two caveats. Though I retain an interest in the issues science raises for theology, philosophy and social comment, and have read a certain amount of Astrophysics, I am certainly not a trained scientist. I leave the assessment of Dawkins’ scientific work to others.
Secondly, I will not provide a hatchet job on Dawkins’ The God Delusion, though I will make a few comments. I do not intend to develop an anti-Dawkins rant to match Dawkins’ own venomous attack on God and on believers in God. If you want a demolition job on Dawkins’ work, others have attempted that. Alastair McGrath’s book is the best account I have read so far – though I would have refrained from the rude title, The Dawkins Delusion. Kathleen Jones’ Challenging Richard Dawkins is worth reading, but has far too many glitches and errors. The Dawkins Letters by Scottish minister David Robertson is surprisingly good. But I will not aim at a knock-down response, as my main purpose is to listen to what Dawkins is saying, and interpret its significance in our contemporary context.
If any of you have attended this paper in the hope that I will again provide theological reflection on science fiction, well, calling Richard Dawkins’ work ‘science fiction’ is a bit too cheap, even on the most arguable points. But before we enter the main arena, here’s a morsel. Richard Dawkins is an atheistic icon in contemporary culture. In the most recent episode of Doctor Who he appeared as himself – well almost himself, as he seemed more astronomer than biologist. Meanwhile, the same series has included a major affirmation of Dawkins’ quirkiest contribution to science, the meme, in the 2005 episode, The End of the World, by designating the sinister androids, “The Adherents of the Repeated Meme”. The ‘meme’ was a word invented by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene to conceptualise the adaptation of Darwinian natural selection to the cultural arena, cultural replicators imitating in the development of culture natural selection in the genetic realm. Whether this is a helpful extension of Darwinian thought, or the reification of an overblown metaphor is contested. I suspect the latter.
Positively, then, this paper will fall roughly into three parts. The first will make a number of observations about Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. It may not be a simple demolition of his arguments, but I will make a few observations about some of the limitations and weaknesses in Dawkins’ approach.
But my main purpose, which will dominate the second half of my paper, is wholly different to polemics, but cultural analysis. Not the arguments but the context into which they are placed: why has Dawkins has devoted the time of a busy scientist to present his long-held contempt for theism in the strongest form he can muster? Why now? I will argue that we should place this contribution in the current context of the debate within secularism, post-9/11. Then if I am correct to set this in the post-9/11 ferment about the place of religion in our increasingly globalised culture, what does Dawkins contribute to this debate?
1. Dawkins’ The God Delusion – Incidental Responses
I did burst out laughing at several points in reading this book. One of them was on page 318, where Dawkins says, “I seem somehow to have acquired a reputation for pugnacity towards religion.” Maybe it’s got something to do with comments like the one at the start of chapter two:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (Dawkins 2006/7, p51.)
a) Academic Rigour
In the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins adds a comment on Fred Hoyle, describing him as “an eminent astronomer” and great science fiction writer, but decried his comments on Darwin as “misrepresenting”. He then states:
Publishers should correct the misapprehension that a scholar’s distinction in one field implies authority in another. And as long as that misapprehension exists, distinguished scholars should resist the temptation to abuse it. (Dawkins 1976/99, p.278.)
Unfortunately, in The God Delusion, Dawkins trashes his own advice. While humbly admitting in 1976, regarding our state of consciousness, “I am not philosopher enough to discuss what this means” (Dawkins, 1976/99, p.50), he is now confident enough to pose as philosopher of religion. However, if you are looking for the most intellectually robust promotion of atheism, you must look elsewhere. Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian is much better and far, far briefer. Joachim Kahl’s The Misery of Christianity was also a better – far better informed and argued – atheist polemic against Christianity. Dawkins’ arguments are extraordinarily flawed. But it is the atheist event of our decade.
Dawkins is guilty is reckless abandonment of academic rigour outside his own sphere of biology. My own personal belief is that academic integrity requires one to tackle philosophical, scientific, or indeed religious opinions or phenomena in their strongest form. The genuine academic will take things in their strongest form, while a journalist will aim at revealing things in their most entertaining form.
I believe that the greatest fault in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is on this count. Antony Flew, the greatest philosophical atheist in the generation since Russell, but now a believer of sorts in God, has taken Dawkins to task on precisely this point, accusing him of becoming what he had thought impossible – a “secular bigot”. He challenges Dawkins’ “scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form.” (Flew 2008). Flew takes Dawkins on Einstein as his example, where Dawkins missed the strongest version of Einstein’ssupport for a “Divine intelligence”, and in relation to the comments Dawkins made about Flew, which are expressed with characteristic contempt, but which did not include any letter of enquiry to Flew to check Flew’s real views. He concludes: “Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means. That would itself constitute sufficient reason for suspecting that the whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt – an extremely successful one – to spread the author’s own convictions in this area.”
Dawkins has crossed the line from academic rigour into journalism. Actually, it is worse than that, if his treatment of Flew can be taken as typical (which I think it can), because even journalists, when reporting attacks on an individual, usually seek comment from the person under attack before publishing. Dawkins is so determined to demolish people who stand in the way of his case, that even the limited courtesies of journalism are jettisoned.
This is no small problem. Dawkins states: “…what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.” (Dawkins 2006/7 p.347.) Keith Ward notes:
…thinkers like Richard Dawkins hold that, while materialism is based on painstaking research and rational thought, religious views are based on ‘blind faith’, some sort of leap in the dark, and so are plainly irrational and unthinking. Since ignorance is morally reprehensible, religious belief is not only based on falsehood and deceit, it is morally wrong. (Ward 2006, p.90.)
Ward almost despairs of the wilful ignorance displayed: “Has Dawkins never read any philosophy?”
Dawkins denounces shortchanging the truth in hostile terms but is guilty of the same. Indeed, he glories in being ignorant about theology and much else. There’s no point in knowing anything about such nonsense, he protests.
b) Science
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is not the work of a cool, dispassionate scientist, but a hot passionate polemicist. Of course it can be argued that even in his scientific works, Dakwins is not the model of the cautious, prudent, pragmatic investigator determined to pull his punches unless on the firmest of ground. He is, rather, something of a populariser of science. That he shares with Stephen Hawking. (Incidentally, he tries to cite Hawking as an ally in atheism [pp.34f., 40], talking of ‘God’ purely poetically. He must unaware of Hawking’s church-going, a common attender at St Andrew’s St Baptist Church when Michael Quicke was minister there in the early 1990s, for example.) As for their writing, unlike Hawking, Dawkins has a propensity to press cases in an idiosyncratic and passionate and somewhat ideological way. He is a biological chauvinist, pressing the claims of biology over against other sciences.
He certainly believes that astrophysical cosmologists need to adopt the biological paradigm of Darwinian natural selection. Discussing the approach some in that field take towards the anthropic principle, in particular the acute precision of various astrophysical constants, which if set only marginally differently would have made the sustaining of the Universe difficult. He suggests they note how the biological paradigm shows how to solve the problem: “…many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability.” (Dawkins 2006/7 p. 172.) He commends physicist Lee Smolin’s “Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory” (ibid., p.174), and concludes, “A mischievous biologist might wonder some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.”(ibid., p.175.)
He has similar imperialistic intent in relation to social anthropologists and cultural historians. This can already be seen in The Selfish Gene, where he uses a new word, the meme, as a parallel within the realm of human culture to the gene, to articulate a Darwinian take on history, culture, society, and indeed religion and God. This has provoked a little controversy – “the infamous ‘memes’,” the otherwise broadly sympathetic Ed Sexton calls them. Dawkins commented that “the idea of God...arose in the meme pool...[as a] superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next.” (Dawkins 1976/1999, pp.192f.) This is a very old-fashioned argument, which should have died after Freud’s self-defeating use of it. Through this ruse, Dawkins’ provides a Darwinian interpretation of life, the Universe, everything and of course, God. I rather like Robertson’s take on this supposed explanation of the ubiquity of religion, as “a ‘science of the gaps’ just making things up as you go along in order to fit everything into your all-encompassing evolutionary theory.” (Robertson 2007, p.79)
Kathleen Jones describes Dawkins’ meme theory as “a very ingenious explanation for [Dawkins] ignoring history, geography, philosophy, theology and other subjects that might broaden his experience.” (Jones 2007, p.15.) We do not have time to pursue this further.
Dawkins’ argument ignores Polanyi’s insights, and depends on the myth of scientific detachment, such that Dawkins, unlike all religious people, just because he is a scientist, is supposedly immune to the same argument: i.e., the idea of human autonomy, or science, arose in the ‘meme pool’, and is a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests we can deal with injustices caused by religion in this world, by abolishing God in the next! Neither the religious nor anti-religious form of this argument works: neither invention of God, nor proof of God, can be found in the gene pool or the ‘meme pool’. They are expressions of belief. Nor, for that matter, can morality be found by the scientist. Commenting on Dawkins, Ed Sexton reminds us that trying to concoct an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – even if the ‘connexion’ is made by the most up to date scientist – was already demonstrated by Hume asa fundamental error, 250 years ago (Sexton 2001, pp.4f.)]
More to the point, Dawkins’ writing about God takes him far from science not simply in the sense that it is a different context, but that he is no longer operating in a way that a scientifically minded person characteristically does. He does not follow the path taken by social anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and others, where evidence must be examined without blinkered prejudice. The social anthropologist, observing the rites, practices and beliefs of a tribe takes it upon himself or herself principally to try to understand how such a society operates, the psychologist, to understand the thought processes of the people. The sociologist may, like Durkheim, reckon to provide something of a clue to the social nature of religious belief, and the psychologist may, like Freud, reckon to explain primitive neuroses underpinning religion as a result of his analysis of the same societies. Something of their atheistic assumptions and beliefs comes through clearly. But they do not take it upon themselves to vilify the believers in totems and gods, or indeed these gods in the way Dawkins does. Dawkins’ book is not just a departure from the field of science but its spirit.
To my mind, there is a debate within science about belief in God, with physicists and biologists tending to go in opposite directions. John Weaver talks of a “fascinating irony… that biologists… are moving towards a hard materialistic view of life… while cosmologists… are increasingly speaking about a ‘purpose’ that goes beyond equations.” (Weaver 1994, p.67.) In the last generation, increasing numbers of physicists have come towards a greater openness to the idea that astronomical data point to the reality of an element of deliberate design in the Universe, with a corresponding Designer. This is suggestive to a number of physicists of Deism if not Theism. Meanwhile, biologists are the most strongly influenced by the persuasive power of evolution as argued in the tradition of Darwin. The biological forces of evolution seem to need to no God to proceed. So it seems that biologists like Dawkins typically remain less convinced about a Designer. Dawkins believes that Darwin’s theory is so powerful that biologists should invade and take over physics: “although Darwinism may be directly relevant to the inanimate world – cosmology, for example – it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.” (Dawkins 2006, p.139.)
In sum, Dawkins’ surprising biological territorial expansionism into astrophysics, social anthropology, theology and much more is deeply flawed, and much of Dawkins’ approaches are vulnerable to challenge on the grounds of confusing different ‘language games’ – to use Wittgensteinian terms.
c) Philosophy
In the second chapter of his book, Dawkins takes on God, most especially the God of the Old Testament, but also every other god. But does he simply engage in ridicule or reasoned argument? He oscillates between the two. Dawkins clearly sees himself as following in the British empirical tradition, certainly in the analysis of religion, following Bertrand Russell, and Russell himself was certainly not averse to a bit of ridicule of religion. Satire in this context works if it illustrates a strong argument. That is how Russell uses it. The danger, which I feel Dawkins is far more vulnerable to, is in sacrificing intellectual rigour for the sake of an entertaining joke at the expense of religion. His ridiculing of agnosticism as PAP is just one example.
His attack on what he calls NOMA is another. NOMA is a typical Dawkins tag, a bit like the tag Norman St John-Stevas gave to Mrs Thatcher, by quietly calling her “TINA,” mocking her repeated slogan “There is No Alternative!” It had a faintly ridiculous ring, and robbed Mrs T of one of her most effective lines. She was livid. NOMA similarly stands as a faintly ridiculous stricture by some of Dawkins’ critics: “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”. Science and Religion are supposed by wholly separate, so science can’t touch religion. He disposes of that Aunt Sally easily, pointing out how Christianity inescapably overlaps with science, in claims of virgin birth, miracles, resurrection and so on. Clearly (if hypothetically), if some new DNA evidence were to prove the virgin birth, would Christian fundamentalists keep quiet about it, declaring it “NOMA”? Of course not!
All this is simple enough. But Dawkins falls for the ‘fallacy of the excluded middle’. Are science and religion always completely separate with no overlap? To disprove that does not prove the opposite that science and religion always completely overlap. The excluded middle remains, that they sometimes overlap. Dawkins’ stricture is clumsy. The argument is not whether there are areas beyond the reach of science that religion and God can safely hide in, the so-called “God of the gaps” that Charles A Coulson decried in his book Science & Christian Belief.
The argument often as not relates for example to literature, and in particular to the Bible, and especially to Genesis 1-3. Do these chapters provide an account of the historical origin of the Universe in strict competition with the accounts of scientists? Some, the creationists, notably, argue that it does. They argue their case. Actually, they are with Dawkins in seeing complete overlap between science and religion. They simply dispute his belief in science, and claim truth in the arena of science from the infallible Bible. They buttress it by a variety of odd arguments both scientific and theological. But that takes us away from our theme, right now. But to look at the Bible as literature and to say that that misunderstands the purpose of Genesis 1-3 conflicts with Dawkins’ approach in a way he overlooks. To say that these chapters in the Bible are more concerned with the questions Who and Why than those of How and What, and that the former are questions of faith and religion, the latter the questions of science seems to walk right into Dawkins’ trap. Ah, he says, you separate science and religion. But you can’t do that without rejecting virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, effective prayer and just about everything else you hold dear. Gotcha! No he hasn’t. He’s missed the point entirely. The question is not about whether the origin of the stars and the dating of their first appearance as before the origin of vegetation on earth is properly a question to be answered by science, rather thanbeing dated differently as the fourth and third days of creation by reference to Genesis 1. The question is whether Genesis 1 is and should be read more a work of scientific prose, or more a work of religious poetry, the language or worship. When, in similar vein, we sing with Graham Kendrick, “hands that flung stars into space”, we are not engaging in a competitive analysis of creation with the scientists, nor are we engaging in NOMA, declaring that the scientist cannot state whose hands flung those stars, God’s, chance, or natural selection, we are engaging in worship. And the language of Genesis 1 is similarly couched in worship. If the scientist is to tackle the issues raised in Genesis 1, the sort of science principally needed is not astronomy or biology, but religious literary analysis.
d) Experience
Dawkins’ third chapter deals with the arguments for the existence of God, both the classic ones, and more recent ones, where the most important question is attempted, but fails.
The classic arguments are easy enough and well-worn territory. Most of these arguments are long dead, and never played a serious practical rôle in facilitating real faith even in their heyday. No one seriously believes that Anselm was seriously troubled by atheism until he hit upon the ontological argument as the support he needed to retain his faith! It was an expression of his faith. As philosophical conundrum it is a well-worn piece of celestial mathematics good to encourage philosophy students to cut their teeth on. Of the classic arguments, only the teleological argument has some renewed bite, because of the belief of a number of physicists that the statistical probability of a universe lasting long enough for sentient life to emerge is, appropriately enough, so astronomically small, that we have to think in terms of there being built into the fabric of reality a genuine purposiveness. There is purpose in the Universe; there is design – and that seems to point to a Designer. Strangely, Dawkins does not deal with this as thoroughly as we might expect, as that is the only classic argument for God which fellow scientists are presenting in numbers and significance. To my mind this teleological argument, the argument from design, is a battle-ground between the physicists and biologists. As I have indicated, a number of scientists are deeply impressed by the anthropic principle – that the Universe must be understood, recognising that it has lasted long enough for people to emerge within it asking why we are here. And physicists point to factors like the precise balance of the Hubble Constant, the equipoise in the expansion of the Universe which prevents it from straying even very slightly towards collapse or entropy. They’ve done the maths, and calculate the odds of sentient life emerging as astronomically unlikely. Meanwhile biologists are just as equally impressed by the explanatory power of evolution. Life once started is tenacious. Individual life is of course notoriously fragile and vulnerable. But life on the planet survives, thrives and evolves whatever seems to be thrown at it. To them it seems no extra explanation is needed beyond the explanatory power of the theory of evolution. Dawkins is of course a passionate evolutionary biologist and is with the biologists in this matter.
But few if any people are drawn to belief even by this astronomical case. Instead they become Christian (or Muslim, Hindu etc) because of their own experience. So it is where Dawkins leaves the classic arguments and takes up the more informal modern ones relating to beauty and experience that he touches on the real reason people are Christian. Unwittingly perhaps, he follows a similar course to Don Cupitt, whose Taking Leave of God similarly had a section where he (more briefly) makes his own case for rejecting the traditional proofs – the three best known anyway (pp.21-29), before moving on to some more recent arguments. Cupitt also discusses the argument from religious experience, but his others appeal “to the foundations of knowledge, and to morality” rather than to experience of beauty.
Cupitt’s version of the argument from religious experience (pp.29-31) and his response to it is worth examining here as it provides some interesting contrasts with Dawkins’ approach. In sum, Cupittconfines himself to two types of experience: the experience of mystics, and the experience of the numinous. His reason for examining mystical experience is no doubt explained by his comment that “At this point philosophers traditionally consider the suggestion that religious experience is acquired by an extra sense which some people have and others lack.” The blind cannot critique sight, the colour-blind cannot critique colour. Could it be that non-mystics cannot critique mystical experience, as mystics have genuine access to a perception of God not available to their critics? It is an epistemological argument, and as such is peculiarly interesting to philosophers.
Cupitt’s response is to argue that it would only work if mystics made a common report such as the sighted could to the blind, “but visionaries do not agree”. Furthermore, rather than telling us the “population of the supernatural world” mystics typically provide “highly metaphysical beliefs to the effect that reality is one, that time is unreal and so on.” (p.30) He then takes the case a little further. He differentiates two contrasting types of mystical experiences, variously denominated, for example as ‘introvertive’ and ‘extravertive’.
For the latter, he instances an experience that, though written in the third person, seems to recall his own personal experience in 1955 of seeing a great wisteria plant, seeing “in blazing sunshine … a vast wall of teeming azure blossom.” The blue suggested eternity to him, through which the blue flowers “became a symbol of eternal life or of heaven.” At the time, Cupitt was an evangelical, or only beginning to move on from evangelical Christianity. But by 1980, now post-theistic, in Taking Leave of God, he made the point that “the experience was theory-laden”: there is no simple raw experience. Rather, “the interpretation generated the experience.” He believes that his “symbolic equation of the blossom with eternal life” came first, and then the experience was interpreted accordingly. This is in line with a long-standing sceptical approach to religious experience illustrated by his comment that “Buddhists have visions of the Buddha, Catholics have visions of the Virgin Mary.” There is no sixth sense organ here.
For the introvertive type, again presumably writing autobiographically, this time in 1953, he talks of the subject experiencing inner warmth for several weeks, interpreted at the time as feeling ‘the presence of God’, by 1980 this is described as “cognitively extraordinarily undifferentiated.”  By this time Cupitt feels he has made his case that prior interpretation guided his feelings about the nature of the experience.
As for the experience of the numinous, experiencing “God as other as a holy and sovereign will that calls, commands” and so on. He simply comments, “it seems to be no longer an authentic religious possibility”. (p.31). He later comments that this experience is no longer experienced that way. But if he were “we would have to reject him” because we are now morally autonomous (p.85).
I have gone into this in some detail because it should be clear that this does not cover the full range of religious experience. These examples seem important to Cupitt to deal with because they seem to imply an experiential special knowledge, for which a special epistemological dispensation would apply. But religious experience is wider than this, and its significance for belief in God is far wider.
Dawkins’ approach is different to Cupitt’s. He takes a particular case of a student and his girlfriend allegedly hearing the voice of the devil when camping in the Scottish Isles, which so unnerved the student that it was one factor leading him to be ordained. Dawkins later recounted this to some zoologists, who roared with laughter. “’Manx Shearwater!’ they shouted in delighted chorus.” (p.112)
In general, Dawkins’ argument is rather less sophisticated than Cupitt’s. “You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you.” He then goes on to take the Yorkshire Ripper, George Bush, and asylum patients who think they are Napoleon as his examples. Dawkins has characteristically ridiculed, without reallyexamining religious experience. Having asserted that all such experience are delusions and hallucinations, he then goes on to describe how such misguided impressions can happen: our brains “construct a continuously updated model” of what we perceive as reality. “To simulate a ghost or an angel or a Virgin Mary would be child’s play to software of this sophistication.” (p.115) He also provides two examples of personal experience, of which the first was as a child, fearing he was hearing a ghost, then suddenly as the “software” in his head corrected the mistake recognising it as wind. He reckons that prior to this recognition, his brain reconstructed “a model of male speech”. And he adds, “Had I been a more impressionable child, it is possible that I would have ‘heard’ not just intelligible speech but particular words and even sentences.”
And that is it. As far as Dawkins is concerned, you may be impressed by your religious experience, “don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.” (p.117)
The simple response to this is that of course people can be mistaken about perception. But they are not always mistaken about all perceptions.
The fact is that in addition to 2 billion Christians, another 3 billion affirm a different religious affiliation. These 5 billion people all have different experiences. Why is it that people become Christian? Or remain Christian, despite so many of those atheistic arguments about the problem of suffering and the like? (Or indeed why do people become or remain religious believers in other faith traditions?) They have experiences which prove helpful. In the end, recognising this properly is what made The Today programme presenter, John Humphrys what he called a “failed atheist” (Humphrys 2007/8). His take, as an agnostic, is that the atheists have the better of the arguments. But that doesn’t end matters, because faith survives all those onslaughts, and it does so for a reason: it helps. People have experiences. Dawkins, Cupitt and others fail to understand the so-called argument from religious experience, because it is not a uniform philosophical argument, it is five billion different expressions of real life.
e) Trilemma
Dawkins’ next argument takes C. S. Lewis to task for his famous trilemma, much beloved in the Alpha Course, and also appearing in the Y Course. This is the ‘Jesus, mad, bad or God?’ question. Dawkins comments, “A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case … there is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.” (p.117)
As it happens a year before Dawkins’ book came out, I already published my response to these same fourth and fifth answers to Lewis and Gumbel (Thacker 2005). As one who uses both the Alpha Course and the Y Course, courses which are very ready to open up a degree of free debate, these questions are ones which naturally arise in the course of debate, if not clearly, then by implication. I felt it my duty to articulate these fourth and fifth responses to the question of Jesus, and recognise was strength and weakness they had.
In sum, these alternative answers are that ‘Jesus was wrong’, and that ‘the gospels exaggerated what he said’. My article notes how these answers arise for a generation no longer honouring Jesus and the gospels. They fade if enquirers for other reasons start turning to God, and as a result now respect his teaching in the gospels.
In that article, I noted that Lewis’ argument really works with those who accept hidden extra assumptions, that Jesus’ teachings are true and should be followed. Many, particularly in Lewis’ era, would have taken that for granted. For them, the challenge to take the recorded teaching of Jesus about himself in the gospels just as seriously as the Sermon on the Mount comes as a genuinely awkward challenge. But those who dismiss the teaching, or relativise it, escape the horns of Lewis’ trilemma. Dawkins’ fifth ‘answer’ was my fourth – thathistorical critical analysis of the Bible provides the possibility of suggesting, as Dawkins does, that Jesus never made a claim to divinity. As I put it, this answer suggests that this claim is “exaggerated” in the New Testament; it argues that in the ‘time-lag’ between Jesus’ words and their transcription in the gospels much has changed, as shown by generations of scholars using source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and the like. Even in an Alpha group, particularly if like me on occasion, you have RE teachers in the group, this question can easily arise. However, Lewis’ argument still has a small resonance for such people if they are strong supporters of Jesus’ teaching. For the time-lag argument fatally undermines Jesus’ teaching generally. The Nineteenth Century belief that the true teaching of Jesus could be faithfully reconstructed has long drowned in the waters of historical scepticism. Now in more recent decades, unbelievers and the unchurched generally ignore Christianity unless something obliges them to think again. For them the trilemma doesn’t oblige them – not unless they take that first step of looking properly at Jesus and genuinely respecting his teaching. What causes such people to look afresh is not the historical arguments, and what causes them to stop such a fresh look is not the difficulties of the time-lag argument. In the article, on this point, I concluded: “In the end, the answer to the time-lag argument is not that scepticism is logically impossible, but that it fails to answer the really interesting questions: not, ‘Is it possible to doubt Jesus said what the gospels report?’ but, ‘Why does the Jesus of the gospels have such an impact on people’s lives through history and today?’” (p.54)
The other take, in Dawkins’ words “that Jesus was honestly mistaken” I discussed under the rubric that Jesus was “just plain wrong”. This answer comes naturally to a generation which “no longer instinctively respects Jesus as the greatest religious teacher in history.” They may think Jesus was simply wrong about several other things.
To make such a response does not represent a simple defiance oflogic, Lewis and Gumbel notwithstanding. What’s more whether articulated clearly or not, it will be the natural response of many hearing the trilemma presented. Don Cupitt once noted another example in history, an Islamic mystic al-Hallaj, crucified in 922 for blasphemy for declaring “I am the Truth” – which in the Islamic context amounted to a claim to be God. Al-Hallaj was not mad, bad or God. And if without being illogical, Christians can say he was just “honestly mistaken” then non-Christians can similarly argue that Jesus was also mistaken. Of course, we find the example of al-Hallaj intriguing, because otherwise we have not heard of him. It shows a person could claim to be God without being right, or being evil or insane. But there is a vital difference in these two cases. Al-Hallaj is not generally remembered, while Jesus has followers from that day to this. Jesus’ claim to divinity is not simply based on what he said then, but what does now. He inspires and changes lives. In practice many people in Alpha courses and the rest may initially respond like Richard Dawkins, unconvinced or untouched by Lewis’ trilemma. But if they continue, and start praying and experiencing God as a real presence in their lives, start attempting to take Jesus seriously, and then hear Lewis’ argument, they can find themselves challenged by it.
Richard Dawkins is simply trying to remove one popular argument for the existence of God, and in that context of unbelief it’s very easy. But this does not mean the argument has no force in a context of emerging faith.
f) Who made God?
I do think Dawkins and the atheist polemicists are often using their own inversions of the classic arguments for belief in God. There’s an atheist inversion of the ontological argument, which runs like this: The atheistic inverse runs something like this. God is the greatest reality imaginable, but it is greater to be omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect than anything less than these, and that it is therefore greater to create a world in which there is no suffering (at least by the innocent). However, there is suffering, the innocent do suffer, therefore such a God cannot possibly exist. The problem with this line, especially as an inversion of the ontological argument, is that it presumes (at least potentially) that God by definition can do the  impossible.
Dawkins uses a reverse version of the argument from design: The Universe as we know it looks too designed. The appearance of order is so widespread that it demands a designer. However there is a natural cause, natural selection, therefore it cannot possibly have been caused by God.
The first cause argument in atheist hands becomes: Everything has a cause, therefore if God is conceived as a cause of the Universe, as everything must have a cause, so must God. It’s the child’s “Who made God?” response. Dawkins and Wolpert both utilise this strange reply as their centre-piece. One of the more amusing chapters in my book, A Closer Look at Science Fiction answered this (Thacker 2001, pp.93-103).
A lot of these atheistic arguments that run on these lines, whether deliberately or unintentionally, assume a finite “God”, God as a hypothetical supernatural creature. To be sure, if sure a fantastic creature created the Universe, we could legitimately ask, “And who made that ‘God’?” God, as believed in by Christians is not such a creature, but transcendent.
2: Contextual Responses (Dawkins’ Atheism in Today’s Context)
a) 9/11
Shortly after 9/11, Richard Dawkins was interviewed on the radio, and presented his well-formed atheistic view in the new, dramatic context. The carnage at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was all the effect of religion, he explained. Such horrors were due to religion, and we need to see through the delusions of religion. It’s a common enough opinion: wars are due to religion; if only people could grow out of religion, wars would cease. But here was a top scientist arguing the same.
How should we interpret 9/11?
Some people interpreted it politically – it was due to alienation of the people of the region, whose religion provided the local context to express that alienation. Many commentators continue to note that in the autocracies that are common in the Islamic world, political, radical Islam provides the characteristic grass roots opposition to local tyranny. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt provides one example. Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? provides a clear example of this political interpretation. In his discussion of Al Qa’eda, he concludes, “The beliefs of Al Qaida are unequivocally evil” and yet are religious: “There are some unequivocally evil religious beliefs.” (Ward 2006, p.35.) But he is firm in concluding politics not religion as the context: “What makes beliefs evil is not religion, but hatred, ignorance, the will to power, and indifference to others.” (ibid.) And again, “Al Qaida is a religious organisation founded on hatred, ignorance, the will to power, and indifference to God’s creation.” (Ward 2006, p.39.) His case is strongest when he looks to the background to the mindset of Al Qa’eda in Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood, with his 1965 book, Milestones on the Road. This manifesto declares that all societies are not properly Islamic, and all need to be overthrown, so that all societies are run absolutely on the basis of Shari‘a. He sees this as “uncannily reminiscent of Lenin’s What is to be Done?” and concludes that the similarity is more than accidental: that Qutb’s radical Islamism presents us with a Leninist mindset in an Islamist context.
Back in 1991, Gilles Kepel’s interesting book, The Revenge of God, pointed to the surprising resurgence of fundamentalist varieties of religion, including radical Islam in the generation after 1960s secularists predicted and promoted its final demise. His outline both of Qutb and the influence of Marxism-Leninism in the post-colonial era up to 1973 helps us see something of the outline of this.
Marxism made several connexions with the Arab world at this time.First, some governments in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Algeria styled themselves as socialist, and included communists in government. Several governments attempted to imitate the Soviet model of developing heavy industries. But these failed financially, and increased an alienated working class. Discontent rose, and groups inspired by Marxism grew in the Muslim world. Qutb was executed in 1966, and his successors fought over what the implementation of his ideas meant. Meanwhile, the loss of the Six Day War in 1967 shattered the authority of Nasser and other leaders. Until 1973, Marxism-Leninism was ascendant. A number of the strongest Palestinian groups in this time-frame were clearly Marxist. Secularists were similarly ascendant. But the 1973 war was more ambiguous. Though Israel won it, it did so ambiguously, and the power of oil began to change everything. All this changed the stakes, and oil-rich, conservative countries like Saudi Arabia, with their desire to promote conservative Islam gained prominence. As Kepel puts it, “This ‘petro-Islam’ was the real victor in the war of 1973.” (Kepel 1991/94, p.22) By the end of the decade, the “revolutionary torch [passed] from the Marxists to the Islamists” (ibid., pp.22f.), with the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Kepel relates how after the Iran-Iraq war the focus shifted back to Sunni Islam, and to a more grass roots (“from below”) approach. This is what has motivated Muslims in Britain for example.
More people interpreted 9/11 within the context of Islamic jihadism. The uncomfortable debate, awkwardly surfacing, concerns whether the confrontations of Al Qa’eda represent a bizarre aberration within Islam, and the idea that the proper response would be to strengthen mainstream Islam, so that Muslims could easy provide their own repudiation and defeat of Al Qa’eda, or whether it represented a radical, even extreme, but authentic form of Islam. That debate is still very much current, and if anything strengthening at this point in time. This has for example played a major role in provoking the debate about whether multiculturalism is the proper aim for our society, or for example integrationism or some other way of enabling Britain’s varied sub-cultures both to thrive and to get on harmoniously. It also illustrates a degree of faltering of postmodern nerve, as we shall see. This debate clearly affects Christians. Those taking the former interpretation working hard at inter-faith relations, for example, for which Rowan Williams’ much pilloried comments on permitting an element of localised Shari‘a in Britain give us one illustration. Those taking the latter approach see Al Qa’eda as an extreme but far too common expression of Islam, and believe the others are too naïve. Pope Benedikt’s equally pilloried comments on the mistakes of medieval Islam – and the riots and murders provoked in Pakistan and elsewhere – provide painfully colourful commentary on that. As for Baptists, there are those who are more sympathetic to inter-faith work, through Joppa and other agencies, but probably more who would support agencies like the Barnabas Fund, which tend to home in on the record of persecutions of Christians in Muslim countries.
By contrast with those who interpret 9/11 politically, or in the Islamic context, Dawkins was concerned to take this question within the context of all theistic religions. It is his contribution to the current debate about the health of society. 9/11, 7/7 and the rest demonstrate unhealthy factors in our world, and the cause of such horrors is religion – that the people perpetrating these crimes actually believe in these deluded and dangerous things. On 9/11, he follows Sam Harris, “men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe.” On 7/7, he takes up Muriel Grey’s comment, “The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself…” (Dawkins 2006, pp.343f.).
b) The secular debate
To me, the interesting thing about The God Delusion is not the contributions it makes to the study of the credibility of theism. I think that atheistic arguments have been presented more convincingly by Bertrand Russell, Freud and others. The same verdict is true of Christopher Hitchens, who notes “four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” (Hitchens 2007, p.4.) These four are not new arguments but can be traced back to Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, and those who have developed their arguments.
Dawkins, Hitchens and the others in the resurgent combative atheists are most interesting not in the obvious context of the battle between belief and unbelief, but in the contribution they make within the context of unbelief. First and foremost, it is a cry for the soul of secularism – if I can put it whimsically. This is the debate within secular society. The 1990s in Britain was dominated within secular circles by the belief that the best way to respond to religion as unbelievers was to welcome all to a multicultural society. Let me illustrate this personally.
As a minister in Oadby until 2006, I have been affected by the way this has changed civic services held by the local Council of Oadby & Wigston. By the mid 90s Oadby had a fast rising set of ethnic minorities. By the 2001 census calculated at 26% of the population, with slightly more Hindus than Sikhs and slightly more Sikhs than Muslims, but otherwise in roughly equal numbers. The rest of the borough was less ethically diverse, though Wigston has significant ethnic and religious diversity. I was mayor’s chaplain in 1993-4, as the Mayor was a member of my church. I got to know the deputy mayor well, and he was a secular humanist. Civic services form a high profile part of any mayor’s year, as mayors routinely attend each other’s services, so he would have to host one. He did not want to follow those who would simply ask the local Anglican to be chaplain and put on the civic service, feeling that would be hypocritical. He decided to set up an inter-faith service in a secular venue. To the secularist, this seemed like the perfect solution. One or two of the local inter-faith people, including a retired Methodist Minister who was a passionate supporter of inter-faith worship, could do the networking to ensure that a sympathetic Muslim, as well as Hindus, Sikhs and reformed Jews could pitch in with prayers, readings and the rest, to set up a full-blown inter-faith Civic Service. That would cover the non-Christian faiths, none of whom had (or even now have) any places of worship within the borough. But the 25 churches would all be invited to send supporters. This naturally divided churches, and provided a challenge within Oadby. Broadly, half the churches were more Liberal and supportive with or without reservations, while the the Roman Catholics and evangelical churches like ourselves had far greater difficulties. I will just discuss our local solution, before returning to the broader debate, which Dawkins has in a way contributed to.
To the atheist mayor, there was no real problem, and much to gain. Religious differences were not as important as getting people of different faiths to work together – which provided a wonderful example of community harmony. It was a win/win solution for him. Christians comfortable with inter-faith worship also had no problems. But not all Christians are comfortable with overt inter-faith worship!
For me there was also a second problem. I did not want Christians to appear to unnecessarily bickering in response to the civic community. I managed to help us find a solution – something we could all agree on, and something which would work for the civic community as well. I managed to get Lesslie Newbigin the former bishop of Madras to come along to network with our ministers across the Borough. With his invaluable help we secured an agreement. In sum, there are no problems for Christians, however evangelical, in praying for the authorities, as the Bible enjoins us to do so. Those uncomfortable with worshipping other gods would not be obliged to do so. Meanwhile those on the other side of this divide affirmed that they were not actually seeking to institute inter-faith worship. This left space for the agreement: rather than having inter-faith worship, we would attend the place of worship of the mayor, and pledge that we as Christians would be praying for him or her. Two years later, I duly attended the Synagogue when a Jewish Councillor was elected mayor, and like the people of other faiths, we greeted the new mayor and pledged to pray for him. Meanwhile, when the Civic Service came to the Baptist church in 2004, we invited the wide variety of religious faith leaders to greet the mayor and affirm that their communities would be praying for him.
But I return to the main issue. This example I take as typifying the approach of secular-minded people in the 1990s: religion was not to be opposed, as for example it had been by atheists in the 1960s. Today’s atheist in the 90s would welcome all faiths and religions, in the interests of promoting a multicultural, harmonious society. Instead of aiming at suppressing religious difference and expression in the interests of integrating sub-cultures into the mainstream, sub-cultures would be encouraged to flourish in their diversity.
In contrast to this, Dawkins’ approach represents the resurgence of the older atheistic blanket opposition to all religions of all cultures. To be sure, Dawkins’ book represents a challenge to religious belief. But it represents just as much of a challenge to secularists.
His characteristically ad hominem attempt to dismiss Flew illustrates this. Flew’s change of view came because he believes in following the evidence, and drew the Deistic conclusion of a real Creator starting the Universe, without any positive affirmation of any particular revelation. But Dawkins is determined to rule out Deism and Agnosticism as weak substitutes for the real intellectual rigour of atheism. Agnosticism, as we have seen, he derides as “PAP”. On Deism, he comments, “Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.” (Dawkins 2006, p.40). But Flew reminds Dawkins that he doesn’t provide a definition of what he means by Deism, and that Jefferson, whom he frequently quoted with approval was actually a Deist.
The fact is that Dawkins is not alone in his arguments, and in proclaiming them loudly. There has been a flurry of such books since 2005. Lewis Wolpert is another biologist on his side, and A. C. Grayling is a philosopher ploughing a broadly similar anti-religious furrow. Dawkins is merely the most high profile atheist amongst many who have ‘come out’ as it were, with their intense dislike of religion. Others like Christopher Hitchens, and some others are journalists, and it is no accident as far as I am concerned that the vast majority of the many citations of support for Dawkins at the start of the paperback edition were penned by journalists. The book is a media event, and a major contribution to topical debate; but it is not a major contribution to the philosophical debate about God.
c) W(h)ither multiculturalism?
Today, there is a growing debate in secular circles as to whether the appropriate response to religion is to relativise it by embracing all faiths and none in a multicultural society, or whether to attempt to undermine religious faith and promote atheistic belief positively. The centre of gravity of this debate shifted in this decade. In the 90s the assumption was that positive affirmation of all faiths and none was the right approach by the secularist; Dawkins and others are increasingly successful in pressing the contrary argument. But the arguments are only just starting. To add the name of another journalist contributor, John Humphrys has pressed his case for agnosticism as the best response by the intelligent but uncommitted observer of religion and atheism.
Of course my repeated use of the word multicultural will have prompted awareness of another dimension of this debate. In recent years severe doubt has been cast on “multiculturalism”. The controversy centres on whether Britain is, as Trevor Phillips colourfully put it, “sleepwalking towards segregation”, with the potential of racially and/or religiously segregated ghettoes in our cities. Those affirming multiculturalism tend to see it as a positive affirmation of different cultures and sub-cultures, including the different religious communities, in fostering a patchwork society. Instead of maximising integration or conformity to some norm, all communities have a contribution to make.
In the 1990s those supporting multiculturalism were ascendant. In the last three years or so, the voices of sceptics have grown. The 1990s may have seen the dominance of the right in economics after Thatcherism, Reaganomics and the collapse of Soviet Communism and capitalist metamorphosis of China, but it saw the dominance of the liberal left in social policy in a raft of changes especially in the sphere of sexual ethics. Homosexuality was an obvious change. In 1979, tabloid accusations of being gay ended political careers (Maureen Colquhoun and Jeremy Thorpe), but by the 1990s even Tories like Alan Duncan could ‘come out’ with no discernible political loss. A widespread movement to ostracise racism, sexism, homophobia and much else became normative. Part of this opposition to prejudice included opposition to Islamophobia and other forms of hostility to people of other faiths. Opposition to Islam was seen for example as a covert form of racist hostility to Pakistanis and others.
Since 9/11, the place of radical, resurgent Islam has provided the critical difficulty here. If a sub-culture is committed to the forcible overthrow of that society and its replacement, how should the rest of society respond? It is the Achilles Heel of democracy. For example, when the Nazis were elected as the largest single party in Germany, how should other Germans, and neighbours of Germany respond? The contemporary comment of The Guardian concluding however uncomfortably that the Nazis should be allowed to govern in the hope that government would soften and democratise them, proved fatally naïve.
In a way, Dawkins and his fellow campaigning atheists are speaking up now, not because they are worried by the impact of Rowan Williams or even Benedikt XVI, but because of that of bin Laden and his supporters and imitators. Dawkins’ atheism long predated Al Qa’eda, but his campaign expressed in his book has been precisely fired up by it. It is to my mind no accident that the sudden upsurge in atheist publications ridiculing all religions should appear now.
To that extent, it is appropriate to ask about the usefulness of Dawkins’ contribution to the current challenges the world faces. To what extent might he contribute to a world free of global terrorism? If his ideas really took hold not only in the West but also in the Islamic and Hindu societies, would the world change, and would it – as his supporters claim – change for the better? Many critics accuse Dawkins of being an ‘atheist fundamentalist’, a tag he and other atheists dismiss, on account of their love of scientific evidence. But he is in serious danger of becoming the very thing he loathes. Flew’s challenge of secularist bigotry is harder to refute. Because he refuses to examine openly inconvenient evidence, he follows too many elements of the mindset of the fundamentalist, and even more of the bigot. His call for an all out battle against religion matches the intemperate language of Crusade (Bush) and jihad (bin Laden). I certainly agree with Keith Ward at this point. After discussing radical Islamist Qutb, he comments, “It is a dangerous religious view. But what could be done about it? One of the worst recommendations would be to eliminate Islam and Muslim belief.” (Ward 2007, p.60.) This absurd proposal is that of Dawkins and his many companions. As Ward writes, it plays straight into the hands of the fundamentalists. Dawkins’ own version of a war on terror – admittedly only a war of words – is counterproductive. The proper solution, to remove successfully the attraction of jihadist Islamism so it can fade away is, as Ward recognises, hard. But I’m sure he is right about the outlines of the proper course of that solution. It includes addressing the political grievances of the Muslim world, in which finding, promoting and sustaining a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbours is probably the single most important element; second, fostering and encouraging education in religion, so that the voices of mainstream Islamic scholarship are heard loud and clear in the Islamic community. With Dawkins and other atheist campaigners in mind no doubt, Ward adds, “This is another reason why, incidentally, attacks on religion by those who think it is all blind and thoughtless provide support for the fundamentalists.” (ibid., p.61)
Multiculturalism is now being seriously challenged as a blind avenue, a cul-de-sac for Britain. Trevor Phillips’ challenge to this previously dominant set of assumptions was widely reported. As Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission since 2006, and before that Chair of the Commission for Racial equality, his words carried weight, and shocked many. But it is part of an increasing critical reaction to multiculturalism. This has developed in different countries with variations depending on local experiences. Holland has seen a particularly high profile form of this debate, with the Pim Fortuyn phenomenon. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the film writer whose film on the Islamic oppression of women saw its director Theo van Gogh assassinated by an Islamist. She puts it pithily: “Human beings are equal; cultures are not.” The case against multiculturalism argues that fostering diversity has led to radical Islam being unfettered and increasingly radicalised; it has led to the growth of cultural ghettoes in which ignorance and fear and bigotry can flourish. A different model must be sought.
To my mind, this whole debate illustrates a faltering of nerve in our postmodern culture. Affirmation of all views as having their own validity provides a postmodern approach. Rejection of certain views as just plain wrong turns back from postmodern sensitivities, and picks up on the old modernism. ‘There is truth,’ the old atheist of the 1960s and earlier asserted, and ‘it is true that religions are wrong.’ Bertrand Russell provided the sharpest example of that old modernism. In the mid 90s it seemed so strangely dated. While 1960s secularists stated that all religions were wrong, in the 1990s, secularists stated that all religions were true. Now, Dawkins and his fellow-travellers are pressing their case for a resurgence of the old, scientific, secular modernism.
As for Dawkins himself, he has made clear his distaste for multiculturalism, and his despising of postmodernism. On p.368 he quotes with approval Nicholas Humphrey concluding a comment on how scandalous it was to see a TV programme marvelling at the spiritual commitment of an ancient Inca girl, preparing to be a human sacrifice, sarcastically dubbing it, “another jewel in the crown of mutliculturalism”. As for postmodernism, homing in on the unwise phrase (an own goal) “this book fills a much-needed gap”, he relishes the unthinking use of this absurd phrase to describe a poststructuralist book: “It seems deliciously appropriate that this avowedly superfluous book is all about Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other icons of haute francophonyism” (p.388).
Atheistic humanism did not originate after 9/11; but the upsurge in atheist polemics has been prompted by it. The liberal, secular consensus has broken down, or at least it is seriously weakened. The old postmodern attitudes of the 1990s, seeing all religions as equally true (subjectively), are under serious attack. But can the return to modernist critiques of the 1960s, which Dawkins and others propose to reintroduce as replacement succeed?
My case is that this shrill, hostile attack on religion has a main aim – to convince secularists to return to a modernist attitude to life and religion, and shun postmodern approaches. Atheists should have no truck with inter-faith services, like my 1990s mayor, they should simply treat all religion as the enemy, and ‘come out’ as atheists. If they are mayors, let them have an honest atheistic humanist “civic service”.
But the questions raised by the postmodernists cannot simply be ridiculed away, any more than those of religion can be.
As for Christians, we need to hold our nerve, not be intimidated by the increasingly strident bullying of atheist rhetoric. The Dawkins solution to the problem of jihadist Islamism of hostile derision is just as counterproductive as President Bush’s “crusade” against Al Qa’eda. It is incendiary, and adds fuel to the fundamentalist fire. What is needed is a much more temperate attempt to foster global harmony, recognising that for the foreseeable future, several global visions will remain in contention for the hearts of people in our globalised world, where we experience these competitive cultures. These will include Western secularism, but they will also include Islam, Christianity, the vision rooted in Hinduism, Buddhism, and expressed in New Age developments, and others. Dawkins’ attempt to evangelise the whole world, including the Islamic community for his atheist vision provides a brand of atheism too dangerously similar to the neo-con delusions that have already dangerously destabilised the world.
3. Fundamental Responses
Finally, what about more fundamental responses? Can there be a strong, full answer to the questions being put in the increasingly shrill manner by Richard Dawkins and so many others?
John Humphrys, the Radio 4 Today programme presenter thinks not. He promotes the agnosticism of his answers in face of both Dawkins, Wolpert and Hitchens on the one side and religious believers whether fundamentalist or moderate on the other. We cannot answer the question. The big Why? remains unanswered.
But can there be a more fundamental answer to Dawkins?
Here I place tentatively a few thoughts. Some, better placed than me, will be able to tell if they are original, or follow a well-worn path.
Dawkins, Wolpert and others ask the question in a biological and evolutionary context. Religion may not be universal to every human being – certainly not the same measure. But it is universal to societies. Dawkins is asked to provide an explanation, and feels he has done so: it is a Darwinian error, a mis-step, an epiphenomenon, a cul-de-sac. Or else it is a virus of the mind, the imagination, the heart.
These explanations are seriously inadequate, and I suspect Dawkins knows it. But it’s all he has right now, and I’m sure he prefers to stick with a selection of seriously inadequate answers than abandon his paradigm, or even modify it. But it is seriously at odds with his Darwinian paradigm to urge us to believe that such a powerfully pervasive drive has no serious or adequate Darwinian explanation.
It is even more obviously false that all religion will one day disappear. Dawkins follows John Lennon and Gene Roddenberry in imagining a future “with no religion, too”. Roddenberry’s religionless vision in Star Trek could not be sustained, as my 2001 book illustrated: later adaptations, exploring more closely future societies, felt obliged to explore religious beliefs. These ideas of a religionless future go back to Comte, with an assumed evolution from primitive polytheism, through sophisticated monotheism, on through metaphysical speculations into true scientific godlessness. But as we shall see, religion cannot be imagined away so easily. Religion and its gods are not going to disappear, however loudly Dawkins and Hitchens protest.
Religion is ubiquitous but not universal – and so are many other features of human life and society. It is clearest to see this with music and art. Not everyone is musical. or artistic, or writes poetry or tells stories. But as far as I am aware, all societies have some form of music, art, story-telling. An individual can live his or her entire life without ever singing a song or telling a story, and certainly without inventing one, but it seems as if our societies do not exist without these phenomena. And art, at least, we know goes back tens of thousands of years, and artistic sculpture much longer – as far back as religious sculpture, perhaps.
You can probably make a similar case for mathematics, logic, scientific enquiry and technological activity, not to mention sport, tourism and other cultural activities. An individual may be able to conduct his or her entire life without personally engaging in mathematical ratiocination. Some individuals cannot successfully do maths. But it is hard to imagine a whole society with no one engaged in any mathematical work at all. I doubt if any is known.
The same could be said of much else, e.g., logic, enquiry, and the use of technological tools, whether extremely basic and largely unchanging, or complex and rapidly changing, as today.
It would be a signal failure of imagination to invite us to “explain” all these factors as Darwinian mistakes, epiphenomena, and an even greater failure of insight into what human beings are, to invite us imagine a world with no music too. Flippantly I imagine a third verse to Lennon’s Imagine where he asks to imagine a world with no science, no art, no maths, and then at the words “no music, too” has to stop playing his piano, and stop singing the words. But then again, as one of the wealthiest men on the planet asking us to imagine a world with no possessions he had already stepped beyond parody.
Of course some closed societies have attempted to control and suppress such phenomena. Pol Pot tried to abolish cities. Less ruthlessly Stalin tried to control music and art through the limitations of socialist realism. But although the result was a great deal of state-approved kitch, some great art and music got through anyway – the music of Shostakovich and Vainberg, the poetry of Akhmatova and Yevtushenko, the novels of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Islamic societies since about the eighth century have not permitted representational art – but the artistic spirit has not disappeared; it continues through elaborate artistic abstractions.
Some closed societies have attempted to abolish religion – most obviously communist societies. But a closer look not only shows religion continuing in the underground religious movements, but also amongst the ordinary Soviet citizens. People with their portraits of Stalin and his successors would treat their leaders in a religious way, not merely venerating them, but even praying to them. I have spoken with people who did that. Their communism had a religious expression. One Muscovite I spoke with had his pictures of each leader up in the most special place, and it was the object of a religious devotion, including, as I have said, some kind of prayers. He is not old enough to remember Stalin, and I don’t know if the first portrait he had was Khrushchev or Brezhnev – probably the latter, but he had them all up to but not including Gorbachev. For a strange thing happened. For many years the USSR was run by a gerontocracy, and each leader was duly crowned so to speak, only to fade from view with ill-health shortly afterwards, and die within a year or two. For this man, the idols were tottering. By the time Gorbachev was appointed, he didn’t bother to get the portrait. The idols were no longer worthy of venerating.
Actually he was having a kind of religious experience: disillusionment – the toppling of idols. And it is, strikingly enough, an experience many of the atheist and agnostic critics of religion have had themselves. Lewis Wolpert, Christopher Hitchens, John Humphrys, all tell you of the time their religious idols fell. The false god (as it seemed to them) has been toppled. It is really a delusion to assume from this experience, that the religious spirit will disappear. It carries on in the next generation, or two. Lewis Wolpert’s son Matthew actually goes to a fundamentalist church in London. It also carries on in disguised form in the individuals themselves. It’s easy enough to see in Dawkins. His religious spirit is expressed in his love of nature and natural selection as a powerfully explanatory paradigm. He has a strong fervour towards this faith. The god is no conventional deity, of course. It is a god of nature. He has his saints – well Darwin at least, and the whole scientific community to a lesser extent. He has his orthodoxy to defend. It is this religious zeal, this evangelical fervour that has led so many of his critics to label him as an atheist fundamentalist.
If I am right, the impulse to worship is a bit similar to the impulse to sing, to paint, to tell stories and the rest. Worship will not disappear, and there will be a focus for all future worship, just as music and art will continue, and there will be struggles to express beauty, even if it is a fractured beauty. Without realising it, Dawkins is actually only arguing for a change in focus for worship.
What we, as Christians, must certainly do, it to resist the grotesquely mistaken simplicities of fundamentalism, whether of the religious or atheistic varieties. (And I am using the word ‘fundamentalism’ in its popular sense of a determination to hold to one’s world-view and faith by suppressing all awkward questions, with a kind of “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with inconvenient facts” stance.)
The flurry of books expressing atheist polemics since about 2005 is expressive of a new atheist evangelism, “like Spitfires leaving the assembly lines in 1939” (Humphrys 2007/8, p.11). It is a call to a new religion, a religion without God. Its tendency to hostility towards all rivals has a flavour of religious fervour. Its devotees see themselves as the cutting edge of our secular society, as the clear-sighted prophets, with the true vision, pointing the way forward. Its denigrations of all who see things differently, and whose experiences raise inconvenient evidence reveal more than a tinge of fundamentalism, and certainly of doctrinal intolerance towards heretics, who believe in what they denounce as false gods. This atheist resurgence is strangely coupled with a growing parallel hostility to postmodernism.
Fundamentalist religious visions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and elsewhere have also grown, and their growth preceded this atheist backlash, as Gilles Kepel has shown. They reject not just the alternative religious and non-religious alternatives, but the global context of diversity in favour of a strident affirmation of their own faith as true and all others as dangerously wrong, to be opposed root and branch.
The multicultural society may be undergoing a process of challenge and rethink in our Western secular societies. But we cannot escape our multicultural world. And in our increasingly globalised world, the world is a multicultural society, complete with both pluralistic ventures and ghettoes. We will not abolish the world, however shrill the atheist critics, fundamentalists, neo-conservatives or jihadists get.
We must not be bullied when bad journalism overtakes scientific enquiry in the search for truth and integrity. Integrity and the honest search for the truth – including the honest recognition in the limits in our search will win out in the long run against the deliberately blinkered simplicities of those who refuse to face the awkward questions.

Bibliography

Cox 1994/1996:          Harvey Cox: Fire From Heaven (1996 edition: Cassell)
Dawkins 1976/99      Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene (1976; 1999 edition: Oxford [same as 1989 edition in new covers])
Dawkins 2006/7        Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion (2006; quotations from 2007 Black Swan edition)
Hitchens 2007          Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great (London, Atlantic, 2007)
Humphrys 2007/8     John Humphrys: In God We Doubt. Confessions of a failed atheist (London: Hodder, 2007; 2008 paperback edition)
Flew 2008:                 Antony Flew: Online book review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, to be found within www.bethinking.org
Jones 2008:                Kathleen Jones: Challenging Richard Dawkins (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007)
Kepel 1991/94           Gilles Kepel: (originally: La Revanche de Dieu, 1991), quoted from ET : The Revenge of God (Cambridge : Polity, 1994/2004 reprint)
McGrath 2007:        Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath: The Dawkins Delusion (SPCK, 2007)
MacMurray 1932/68 John MacMurray: Freedom in the Modern World (London: Faber 1932; 1968 edition)
Roberston 2007       David Robertson: The Dawkins Letters. Challenging Atheist Myths (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2007)
Sexton 2001              Ed Sexton: Dawkins and the Selfish Gene (Icon Books UK; Postmodern Encounters series, 2003)
Thacker 2001           Anthony Thacker: A Closer Look at Science Fiction (Bournemouth: Kingsway, 2001).
Thacker 2005           Anthony Thacker: ‘Jesus – Mad, Bad or God?’ – Revisited’: Epworth Review (Oct 2006, pp.51-56).
Ward 2006                 Keith Ward: Is Religion Dangerous? (Oxford: Lion, 2006)
Weaver 1994             John David Weaver: In the Beginning  God (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 1994)