August 07 +Graham More on Dawkins and Religion

Dawkins, the passionate atheist, hates religion of every kind. In The God Delusion he says that religion is not open to reason and that many evil things have been done in its name, for example, children have been indoctrinated, in fear of judgment if they do not believe. He supports his argument from the more fundamentalist forms of religion, such as the religious ‘right’ in America (he calls them the American Taliban!).

The criticism is valid of certain forms of religion. However, Dawkins forgets that the rational enterprise which he loves has come out of the centuries of Christian Faith. It was belief in the good providence of God which gave a security to life so as to encourage travel, art and science. We are not, as in Greek and Roman times, anxious about offending the gods. But if we continue to throw away our belief in God, we will fall back into fear of the world. Contrary to Dawkins we Christians would argue that reason plays a vital part in a mature Christian understanding and that children should certainly be taught to think.

Dawkins claims that organised atheism has not been harmful; yet he makes no mention of the insistence on atheism as practised in China, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block countries, an enforcement which was greatly harmful to healthy human development.

As I wrote in the article in the June NEWS, for Dawkins the principle of natural selection is the filter by which to interpret the world. It is, therefore, surprising that he cannot see that religion developed (or was selected) because of its positive benefit to human life and survival. He chooses rather to say that it is a child-like desire to find a cause for things and have an imaginary friend, along with a desire for comfort and security, a pattern which stubbornly persists in adult generations. It would, of course, be equally easy to find convenient reasons for an atheist’s belief, a belief which is just as much a ‘faith’ as is belief in God. Postulating possible motives for either theism or atheism does not get us very far.

However, it is when he comes to his treatment of Jesus that Dawkins completely loses sight of his evidential basis. No amount of eye-witnesses would convince him that Jesus was raised, (and there were plenty of eye-witnesses). In his view, it cannot happen; psychology has other explanations - it has to be just illusion and hallucination. He says just the same for all religious experience. So the Holy Spirit’s coming at Pentecost and the appearance of Jesus to St. Paul, although movingly described in the book of Acts, would all be brushed aside as fiction.

Ignoring over a century of highly critical historical Bible scholarship, much of it finding good evidence that Jesus was authentic, and confirming the core of the gospel story as we know it, (as the present Bishop of Durham shows) Dawkins has prejudged that the only good Bible scholars are those who treat it all as fiction. If similar attitudes of disdain were taken to his biological science, he would be affronted. The sadness is that by treating Bible scholarship so badly, Dawkins is able to ignore Jesus, who is, of course, the strongest reason for believing in God and the greatest challenge to atheism!

+Graham Dow