4 Is religion evil?
Religion is evil! When it is banished from the face of the earth, we can live in peace! It is a familiar theme. The God that Dawkins does not believe in is ‘a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully’.1 Come to think of it, I don’t believe in a God like that either. In fact, I don’t know anybody who does.
Dawkins at least has the graciousness to appreciate this point. The God whom I know and love is described by Dawkins as ‘insipid’, summed up in the ‘mawkishly nauseating’ idea of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. While some readers will take offence at this description, this is probably the mildest criticism of religion offered anywhere in this book.
Religion leads to violence
Dawkins is, I think, entirely right when he exposes and challenges religious violence. I am with him totally, and hope that the force of his point here will not be obscured by the ludicrous inaccuracy of much of the remainder of The God Delusion. It is clear that his ire is directed primarily against Islamist fundamentalism, particularly its jihadist forms.2 All of us need to work to rid the world of the baleful influence of religious violence. On that point, Dawkins and I are agreed.
Yet is this a necessary feature of religion? Here, I must insist that we abandon the outmoded idea that all religions say more or less the same things. They clearly do not. I write as a Christian, who holds that the face, will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth. And as Dawkins knows, Jesus of Nazareth did no violence to anyone. He was the object, not the agent, of violence. Instead of meeting violence with violence, rage with rage, Christians are asked to ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘not to let the sun go down on their anger’. This is about the elimination of the roots of violence – no, more than that: it is about its transfiguration.
The importance of this ethic can be seen in a tragic event in North America, which took place in October 2006, within a week of the publication of The God Delusion. Interestingly, the episode illustrates both the negative and positive sides of religion. A gunman with some kind of religious grudge (he was ‘angry with God’) broke into an Amish school in Pennsylvania, and gunned down a group of schoolgirls. Five of the young girls died. The Amish are a Protestant religious group, who repudiate any form of violence on account of their understanding of the moral authority of the person and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. When those unfortunate schoolchildren were murdered, the Amish community urged forgiveness. There would be no violence, no revenge – only the offering of forgiveness. The gunman’s widow spoke, gratefully and movingly, of how this provided the ‘healing’ that she and her three children ‘so desperately needed’.
Dawkins is nauseatingly condescending about the Amish. Yet I cannot help but feel that he misses something rather important in his blanket dismissal of their significance.3 If the world were more like Jesus of Nazareth, violence might indeed be a thing of the past. But that does not appear to be an answer that Dawkins feels comfortable with.
As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know about religious violence only too well. There is no doubt that religion can generate violence. But it’s not alone in this. The history of the twentieth century has given us a frightening awareness of how political extremism can equally cause violence. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have ‘disappeared’ as a result of ruthless campaigns of violence by right-wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated his millions in the name of socialism.4
The rise of the Soviet Union was of particular significance. Lenin regarded the elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and put in place measures designed to eradicate religious beliefs through the ‘protracted use of violence’. One of the greatest tragedies of this dark era in human history was that those who sought to eliminate religious belief through violence and oppression believed they were justified in doing so. They were accountable to no higher authority than the state.
In one of his more bizarre creedal statements as an atheist, Dawkins insists that there is ‘not the smallest evidence’ that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. It’s an astonishing, naïve and somewhat sad statement. Dawkins is clearly an ivory-tower atheist, disconnected from the real and brutal world of the twentieth century. The facts are otherwise. In their efforts to enforce their atheist ideology, the Soviet authorities systematically destroyed and eliminated the vast majority of churches and priests during the period 1918–41.5 The statistics make for dreadful reading. This violence and repression was undertaken in pursuit of an atheist agenda – the elimination of religion.
This hardly fits in with another of Dawkins’ creedal statements: ‘I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame.’6 Sadly, this noble sentiment is a statement about his personal credulity, not the reality of things. The history of the Soviet Union is replete with the burning and dynamiting of huge numbers of churches. His pleading that atheism is innocent of the violence and oppression that he associates with religion is simply untenable, and suggests a significant blind spot.
Dawkins’ childishly naïve view that atheists would never carry out crimes in the name of atheism simply founders on the cruel rocks of reality. One example will suffice. In his outstanding study of the Romanian Christian dissident intellectual Petre Tutea (1902–91), the Oxford scholar Alexandru Popescu documents the physical and mental degradation Tutea suffered as part of systematic persecution of religion in Romania during the Soviet era until the downfall and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu.7 During this period, Tutea spent 13 years as a prisoner of conscience and 28 years under house arrest. His personal story is enormously illuminating for those who want to understand the power of religious faith to console and maintain personal identity under precisely the forms of persecution that Dawkins believes do not exist.
Dawkins is simply in denial about the darker side of atheism, making him a less than credible critic of religion. He has a fervent, unquestioning faith in the universal goodness of atheism which he refuses to subject to critical examination. Yes, there is much that is wrong with contemporary religion, and much that needs to be reformed. Yet the same is also true of atheism, which needs to subject itself to the self-searching intellectual and moral criticisms that religious systems are willing to direct against themselves.
The reality of the situation is that human beings are capable of both violence and moral excellence – and that both these may be provoked by world views, whether religious or otherwise. It is not a comfortable insight, but one that alerts us to the shortcomings and dangers of identifying any one people-group as the source of violence and the ills of humanity. It may facilitate scapegoating; it hardly advances the cause of civilization.
The human abuse of ideals
Dawkins would, I think, protest that religious world views offer motivations for violence that are not paralleled elsewhere – for example, the thought of entering paradise after a suicidal attack.8 Yet this conclusion is a little hasty and poorly argued. The God Delusion is to be seen as one of a number of books to emerge from the events now universally referred to as ‘9/11’ – the suicide attacks on buildings in Washington and New York.9 For Dawkins, it is obvious that it is religious belief that leads to suicide bombings. It’s a view that his less critical secular readers will applaud, provided they haven’t read the empirical studies of why people are driven to suicide bombings in the first place.
As Robert Pape showed in his definitive account of the motivations of such attacks, based on surveys of every suicide bombing since 1980, religious belief of any kind is neither necessary nor sufficient to create suicide bombers – despite Dawkins’ breezy simplifications.10 (Remember, the infamous ‘suicide vest’ was invented by Tamil Tigers back in 1991.) Pape’s evidence is that the fundamental motivation is political: the desire to force the withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an oppressed people, who have seriously limited military resources at their disposal. This isn’t what Dawkins will want to hear, but it is an important element in reflecting on how this phenomenon arose, and what might need to be done to end it.
Dawkins, however, seems to have a rather different answer. Since religion is the problem, its disappearance will be to the general benefit of civilization. However, Dawkins seems more than a little coy about just how religion might vanish. There is a serious risk that criticism of a people’s religion might be misconstrued to represent (or encourage) hostility towards them as a social group. Legitimate criticism of religious ideas can all too easily give way to the rather more disturbing and dangerous vilification of a people.
The real issue is that religion possesses a capacity to transcendentalize normal human conflicts and disagreements, transforming them into cosmic battles of good and evil, in which the authority and will of a transcendent reality is implicated. Divine warfare is terrestrialized, its mandate transferred to affairs on earth. When this situation arises, the normal constraints and compromises that allow humanity to problem-solve potentially explosive situations are trumped.11
Yet Dawkins fails to appreciate that when a society rejects the idea of God, it tends to transcendentalize alternatives – such as the ideals of liberty or equality. These now become quasi-divine authorities, which none are permitted to challenge. Perhaps the most familiar example of this dates from the French Revolution, at a time when traditional notions of God were discarded as obsolete, and replaced by transcendentalized human values.
Madame Rolande was brought to the guillotine to face execution on trumped-up charges in 1792. As she prepared to die, she bowed mockingly towards the statue of liberty in the Place de la Révolution, and uttered the words for which she is remembered: ‘Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’ All ideals – divine, transcendent, human or invented – are capable of being abused. That’s just the way human nature is. And knowing this, we need to work out what to do about it, rather than lashing out uncritically at religion.
Suppose Dawkins’ dream were to come true, and religion were to disappear: would that end the divisions within humanity? Certainly not. Such divisions are ultimately social constructs, which reflect the fundamental sociological need for communities to self-define, and identify those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’; those who are ‘friends’ and those who are ‘foes’. The importance of ‘binary opposition’ in shaping perceptions of identity has been highlighted in recent years, not least on account of the major debate between different schools of critical thought over whether such ‘oppositions’ determine and shape human thought, or are the outcome of human thought.12 A series of significant ‘binary oppositions’ are held to have shaped Western thought – such as ‘male–female’ and ‘white–black’. This binary opposition leads to the construction of the category of ‘the other’ – the devalued half of a binary opposition, when applied to groups of people. Group identity is often fostered by defining ‘the other’ – as, for example, in Nazi Germany, with its opposition ‘Aryan–Jew’. At times, this binary opposition is defined in religious terms – as in ‘Catholic–Protestant’, or ‘believer–infidel’.
As is well known, the binary opposition ‘Catholic–Protestant’ came to be perceived as normative within Northern Ireland. Each side saw its opponent as ‘the other’, a perception that was relentlessly reinforced by novelists and other shapers of public opinion.13 Media reporting of the social unrest in Northern Ireland from 1970 to about 1995 reinforced the plausibility of this judgement. Yet this is a historically conditioned oppositionalism, shaped and determined by complex social forces. It is not a specifically religious phenomenon. Religion was merely the social demarcator that dominated in this situation. In others, the demarcators would have to do with ethnic or cultural origins, language, gender, age, social class, sexual orientation, wealth, tribal allegiance, ethical values or political views.14
This clearly points to religion, at least in theory, as a potential catalyst for rage and violence in some contexts. In concurring, Dawkins makes a significant concession in recognizing the sociological origins of division and exclusion. ‘Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language, or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not.’15 Yet even here, his anti-religious animus leads him to some problematic judgements. To give one very obvious example: vendettas rarely have their origins in religious concerns.16
The simplistic belief that the elimination of religion would lead to the ending of violence, social tension or discrimination is thus sociologically naïve. It fails to take account of the way in which human beings create values and norms, and make sense of their identity and their surroundings. If religion were to cease to exist, other social demarcators would emerge as decisive, some of which would become transcendentalized in due course. Dawkins has no interest in sociology, as might be expected. Yet the study of how individuals and societies function casts serious doubt on one of the most fundamental assertions of his analysis.
It is well established that prejudice and discrimination are shaped by perception and group identities.17 Gross simplifications about religion, exclusion and violence will simply delay and defer a solution of humanity’s real problems. The question of the future role of religion in Britain is far too important to leave to the fanatics or to atheist fundamentalists. There is a real need to deal with the ultimate causes of social division and exclusion. Religion’s in there, along with a myriad of other factors. Yes, it can cause problems. But it also has the capacity to transform, creating a deep sense of personal identity and value, and bringing social cohesion.18 Let’s skip the rhetoric, and cut to the reality. It’s much less simple than Dawkins’ stereotypes – but it might actually help us address the real social issues we face in modern Western culture.
Jesus and loving one’s neighbour
A criticism that is often directed against religion is that it encourages the formation and maintenance of ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’. For Dawkins, removing religion is essential if this form of social demarcation and discrimination is to be defeated. But what, many will wonder, about Jesus of Nazareth? Wasn’t this a core theme of his teaching – that the love of God transcends, and subsequently abrogates, such social divisions?
Dawkins’ analysis here is unacceptable. There are points at which his ignorance of religion ceases to be amusing, and simply becomes risible. In dealing with this question he draws extensively on a paper published in Skeptic magazine in 1995 by John Hartung, which asserts that – and here I cite Dawkins’ summary:
Jesus was a devotee of the same in-group morality – coupled with out-group hostility – that was taken for granted in the Old Testament. Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.’19
Many Christian readers of this will be astonished at this bizarre misrepresentation of things being presented as if it were gospel truth. Yet, I regret to say, it is representative of Dawkins’ method: ridicule, distort, belittle and demonize. Still, at least it will give Christian readers an idea of the lack of any scholarly objectivity or basic human sense of fairness which now pervades atheist fundamentalism.
There is little point in arguing with such fundamentalist nonsense. It’s about as worthwhile as trying to persuade a flat-earther that the world is actually round. Dawkins seems to be so deeply trapped within his own world view that he cannot assess alternatives. Yet many readers would value a more reliable and informed response, rather than accepting Dawkins’ increasingly tedious anti-religious tirades. Let’s look at things as they actually stand.
In the first place, Jesus explicitly extends the Old Testament command to ‘love your neighbour’ to ‘love your enemy’ (Matthew 5.44). Far from endorsing ‘out-group hostility’, Jesus both commended and commanded an ethic of ‘out-group affirmation’. As this feature of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is so well known and distinctive, it is inexcusable that Dawkins should make no mention of it. Christians may certainly be accused of failing to live up to this demand. But it is there, right at the heart of the Christian ethic.20
In the second place, many readers would point out that the familiar story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) makes it clear that the command to ‘love your neighbour’ extends far beyond Judaism. (Indeed, this aspect of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth seems to have resulted in people suspecting Jesus of actually being a Samaritan: see John 8.48.) It is certainly true that Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, gave priority to the Jews as God’s chosen people, but his definition of who was a ‘true Jew’ was radically broad. It included those who had excluded themselves from Judaism by intimate collaboration with Roman occupying forces. In the New Testament this group is variously referred to as ‘sinners’, ‘tax collectors’, and ‘prostitutes’ (for instance Matthew 21.31, 32; Luke 15.1, 2). One of the main charges levelled against Jesus by his critics within Judaism was his open acceptance of these out-groups. Indeed, a substantial part of his teaching can be seen as a defence of his behaviour towards them.21 Jesus’ welcome of marginalized groups, who inhabited an ambiguous position between ‘in’ and ‘out’, is also well attested in accounts of his willingness to touch those considered by his culture to be ritually unclean (for instance Matthew 8.3; 9.20–25).
Jesus’ attitude to Graeco-Roman gentiles as recounted in the Gospels is more cautious and ambivalent. In both accounts of the healing of such people by Jesus (Matthew 8.5–13; 15.22–28) he is described as being open to persuasion, and as both surprised and learning something from the encounters. (Yes – contrary to what Dawkins assumes,22 orthodox Christianity understands Jesus to have been fully human and not omniscient.) It is true that mass conversion of gentiles to the new sect within Judaism took place only after the death of Jesus, but it is not true that this was all due to the activity of Paul. Jesus’ intimate group of Galilean disciples, including Peter, John and Philip, was also involved. The disagreements that arose within the primitive Church concerned what initiation and cultic rites should be required of the gentiles who were converted, not the issue of gentile conversion itself.
Dawkins’ criticism of Jesus for promoting ‘dodgy family values’ is perhaps more understandable.23 Dawkins is right to identify a redefinition of family priorities as one of the radical demands that Jesus makes of his followers. Jesus in effect relocates and redefines the family in relation to himself, and – by the way – extends it to welcome ‘out-groups’. However, it must be emphasized that much of Jesus’ teaching upheld family values and relationships, including the restoration of family relationships through his healing ministry.
A few examples will illustrate this point. Jesus’ teaching about ‘corban’ (Mark 7.11) represents both a critique of a religious tradition that has lost its way, and an affirmation of family responsibilities. The idea of ‘corban’ (an offering to the temple) appears to have been misused, allowing a son to claim justification in not supporting his parents in their old age simply because he had designated his property (or a part of it) as a gift to the temple. This strongly affirms the importance of caring for one’s parents – a point reinforced by Jesus’ concern to ensure his mother was cared for after his crucifixion (John 19.26–27). This concern for family life is also reflected in Jesus’ insistence on the importance of marriage, and the need to value children (Mark 10.1–16). Many readers would also point out that the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11–24) presents a restored family relationship between a father and his son as a positive analogy for the themes of the gospel.
Interestingly, Dawkins believes that it is important that Western culture should not eliminate the Bible from educational programmes. ‘We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.’24 Why, then, does he misrepresent one of the most central, influential and ethically significant parts of that ‘treasured heritage’ – the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth? It does not require anything more than a basic familiarity with the Gospels to realize that Dawkins’ account of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is open to challenge. The cultural issue here is not whether what Jesus said is right; it is to be right about what Jesus said.
Christianity and the critique of religion
Dawkins’ failure to distinguish between ‘belief in God’ and ‘religion’ makes it difficult for him to understand one of the most important themes of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels – the critique of religion. One of the great themes of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures (not touched upon, by the way, in Dawkins’ excoriation of the Bible) is that Israel’s religion has become corrupted, and detached from the faithful obedience to a God who loves justice, mercy and personal integrity.25 The nature of God constitutes a standpoint outside ‘religion’ from which ‘religious’ practices may be judged.
This theme can be found in the prophetic writings dating from eight centuries before Christ, and is intrinsic to the nature of Old Testament religion. The prophetic tradition is predominantly (though not exclusively) in tension with the cult throughout the Old Testament, especially where the priestly cult and the king are seen to have lost the spirit of the law, and the powerful are exploiting the weak. In an important critique of the cult, the prophet Micah compares the cultic demands for ‘burnt offerings’ or ‘thousands of rams’ with God’s real requirement: to ‘do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6.6–8). The prophet Isaiah’s criticism was that Israel was so obsessed with cultic rituals that they had failed to ‘rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, or plead for the widow’ (Isaiah 1.12–17).
Dawkins is right when he argues that it is necessary to criticize religion; yet he appears unaware that it possesses internal means of reform and renewal. This is especially evident in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, where it often took the form of the criticism or flagrant transgression of cultic regulations or ritual practices, where these were coming between God and his people. The breaking of Sabbath regulations exemplifies this well. The phenomenon of religion is a provisional, human institution, which is open to reform and renewal. Jesus’ mission was to challenge the religious forms of his day and, in the end, that is what led to him being crucified.
On reading the Old Testament
From what has already been said, it will be clear that Dawkins takes a strongly negative attitude towards the Bible, based on a generally superficial engagement with its core themes and ideas, and a depressingly inadequate knowledge of the text itself. When Dawkins tells us that St Paul wrote the letter to the Hebrews, you realize just how bad things are.26
His highly selective27 discussion of the Hebrew Scriptures in particular is peppered with outrage and indignation, which it is possible that many of his readers will share. One can understand the bewilderment that Dawkins experiences in reading passages from the Torah that he holds to imply misogyny, vindictiveness to enemies, and an incomprehensible emphasis on such odd obsessions as blood sacrifice and ritual purity.
Of course, many modern Jewish and non-Jewish readers find many parts of the Hebrew Scriptures puzzling, perhaps appalling, through their cultural distance from a long-past era. Historically, it is important to appreciate that these ancient texts arose within a people who were fighting to maintain their group or national identity in the face of onslaughts from all sides, who were making sense of their human situation in relation to a God about whose nature their thinking became more and more developed in the millennium over which the material that makes up these Scriptures was being produced, orally and in writing. (Dawkins asserts they were ‘chaotically cobbled together’;28 the evidence is that they were carefully edited and re-edited over many years.)
The passages that Dawkins finds so shocking appear alongside other material in the Pentateuch which he ignores, dealing with forgiveness and compassion – the laws urging hospitality towards strangers (Deuteronomy 10.17–19), setting limits on acts of revenge (Exodus 2), prohibiting slavery (Leviticus 25), declaring a jubilee for debt (Leviticus 25), and forbidding infant sacrifice (Leviticus 18.21; 20.2). He also ignores the prophets and the wisdom literature, in which the heights of Jewish moral insight are expressed – insights that continue to shape and nourish the human quest for moral values.
So how are we to make sense of the Hebrew Scriptures? Dawkins rightly demands that there should be an external criterion for dealing with the interpretation of these texts.29 Yet he seems unaware of the Christian insistence that there indeed exists such a criterion – the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
Christians base this approach on the teaching of Jesus himself, who saw himself as having come to fulfil, not to abolish, the Jewish law (Matthew 5.17). Dawkins takes the view that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as wrong, requiring correction; Jesus, however, saw himself as fulfilling the Old Testament, thus transforming it. To use a familiar New Testament image, Jesus did not create the wine of the Gospels de novo, but took the water of the Jewish law, and transmuted it to something better. The Hebrew Scriptures are read and interpreted through a Christological filter or prism. It is for this reason that Christians do not – and never have – implemented the cultic law set out in the pages of the Old Testament.30
True to form, Dawkins ignores this inconvenience, insisting that to take the Bible seriously is to ‘strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anyone who chose not to’. Or to ‘execute disobedient children’.31 Dawkins knows this is not true; enough Christians have told him so. His repetition of this nonsense does him little credit, and simply suggests that he expects his readers seriously to believe that Christians are in the habit of stoning people to death. A reality check is clearly in order.
Religion and well-being
Until very recently, Dawkins persistently maintained that religion is bad for you. Over the last decade, there has been an accumulation of observational evidence indicating – I think it is unwise to use a stronger word – that religious belief and commitment may have a generally positive influence on human well-being and longevity. It must be stressed, in the first place, that much more work remains to be done in this field and, in the second, that this does not for one moment ‘prove’ that religion is ‘right’. (How could it?) Yet it does point to the growing importance of exploring the relation of spirituality and human well-being, unhindered by the ideological constraints of secular or religious polemics. And the evidence linking well-being to spirituality is growing. There are obvious implications here for public healthcare policy and practice. Why should spirituality be excluded from healthcare, when it clearly matters so much to patients? On any goal-centred approach, it would clearly seem to be an appropriate inclusion. It’s not what rampant secularists would like, but it’s the way the evidence leads us.32
I challenged the accuracy of the slogan ‘religion is bad for you’ in Dawkins’ God, drawing attention to the growing body of evidence-based studies that showed it was nothing of the sort. Yet while now apparently conceding this point, Dawkins is unwilling to modify his anti-religious polemics. His argument now seems to be something along the lines of ‘even if religion isn’t always bad for you, that doesn’t prove that it’s true’. Dawkins still persists in his representation of religion as characteristically, if not universally, malevolent. Yet, far from being based on objective scientific analysis, Dawkins’ discussion of the impact of religion on mental health is based on anecdote, hearsay, creedal statements and discriminatory stereotyping.
Consider this representative statement: ‘It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence.’33 This is a Dawkins’-eye view of things. I can’t make sense of this – so it must be wrong. But truth is determined, not by what Dawkins finds difficult to believe, but by what the scientific, empirical evidence indicates – whether Dawkins likes this or not, or chooses to believe it or not. Just where in The God Delusion is the full discussion one has a right to expect of the significant body of scientific literature on the relationship of harmful and healthy aspects of religion – as seen, for example, in the extensive research work of Kenneth Pargament and his colleagues?34 It’s yet another example of Dawkins’ pervasive cognitive bias, which accentuates the evidence he likes, and overlooks or discounts that which he does not.
Dawkins is also highly critical of various religious practices, which he regards as eccentric, pointless or harmful. He begins his list of examples of such objectionable religious practices with fasting.35 Yet the intentional self-deprivation of food is a common feature of human life, whether it is undertaken from a religious or non-religious perspective. In each case, one can identify ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ approaches, as the table below indicates.
Religious
Non-religious
‘Healthy’
Fasting according to recognized practice of group. Achieving religious experience or insight that is recognized as being beneficial.
Cutting down on sugar, saturated fats and processed foods, caffeine and alcohol. Achieving improved fitness, reduced blood pressure, feeling well.
‘Unhealthy’
Radical reduction in calorific intake, along with feelings of self-loathing focused on body image, supported by beliefs in or experiences of divine mandate. Achieving extreme weight loss, amenorrhea, heart failure, depression.
Radical reduction in calorific intake, along with feelings of self-loathing focused on body image. Achieving extreme weight loss, amenorrhea, heart failure, depression.
This shows that it is possible to consider the real difference between religious and non-religious as lying not in the behaviour itself, but in the meaning attributed to it and the goal to which it is directed. Furthermore, religious behaviour is neither intrinsically healthy nor intrinsically unhealthy.36
Dawkins may argue that it seems to him that fasting serves no useful purpose; yet this judgement arises out of a fundamental disinclination on his part to allow that religion can be valid, helpful or important, or that the achievement or enhancement of spiritual goals can be personally satisfying and conducive to well-being.
Let me conclude this section with a wise comment from Michael Shermer, President of the Skeptics Society. In exploring the contemporary resurgence of religion, Shermer noted that religions were implicated in some human tragedies, such as holy wars. While rightly castigating these – a criticism which I gladly echo – Shermer goes on to make a point that most atheists I know would endorse. There is clearly a significant positive side to religion:
However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go unreported … Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.37
Why do so many thinking atheists endorse Shermer’s comment? Because that’s exactly what the evidence shows.
Yet the pejorative and hostile spin relentlessly placed upon religion by Dawkins asserts that it is a universal, unambiguous evil, which is a dangerous threat to civilization. While Dawkins clearly regards Shermer as a competent and sympathetic authority, to judge from his appeal to him in The God Delusion,38 he is unwilling to adopt the balanced and judicious analysis that Sherman presents. Why not? I fear the answer is simple: because it doesn’t make for the slick and simple soundbites that will reassure the godless faithful.
It is this feature of the work which has led to its mauling by so many informed critics on all sides of the debate. As Terry Eagleton comments, with a sarcasm reflecting his obvious exasperation at The God Delusion’s risible caricatures of religion:
Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.39
Atheism must indeed be in a sorry state if its leading contemporary defender has to depend so heavily – and so obviously – on the improbable and the false to bolster his case.
Conclusion
Every world-view, whether religious or not, has its point of vulnerability. There is a tension between theory and experience, raising questions over the coherence and trustworthiness of the world-view itself. In the case of Christianity, many locate that point of weakness in the existence of suffering within the world. In the case of atheism, it is the persistence of belief in God, when there is supposedly no God in which to believe.
Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now, a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded, and seems set to exercise still greater influence in both the public and private spheres. The God Delusion expresses this deep anxiety, partly reflecting an intense distaste for religion. Yet there is something deeper here, often overlooked in the heat of debate. The anxiety is that the coherence of atheism itself is at stake. Might the unexpected resurgence of religion persuade many that atheism itself is fatally flawed as a world-view?
The God Delusion seems more designed to reassure atheists whose faith is faltering than to engage fairly or rigorously with religious believers and others seeking for truth. (One wonders if this is because the writer is himself an atheist whose faith is faltering.) Religious believers will be dismayed by its ritual stereotyping of religion, and will find its manifest lack of fairness a significant disincentive to take its arguments and concerns seriously. Seekers after truth who would not consider themselves religious may also find themselves shocked by Dawkins’ aggressive rhetoric, his substitution of personal creedal statements for objective engagement with evidence, his hectoring and bullying tone towards ‘dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads’, and his utter determination to find nothing but fault with religion of any kind.
It is this deep, unsettling anxiety about the future of atheism which explains the ‘high degree of dogmatism’ and ‘aggressive rhetorical style’ of this new secular fundamentalism.40 Fundamentalism arises when a world-view feels it is in danger, lashing out at its enemies when it fears its own future is threatened. The God Delusion is a work of theatre, rather than scholarship – a fierce, rhetorical assault on religion, and passionate plea for it to be banished to the lunatic fringes of society, where it can do no harm. None can doubt the visceral appeal that this book will make to a secular audience that is alarmed at the new political importance attached to religion, and its growing influence and presence in the public arena. Its dismissive attitude to religion will doubtless win plaudits from those who heartily dislike religion.
Yet others have been more cautious. Aware of the moral obligation of a critic of religion to deal with this phenomenon at its best and most persuasive, many have been disturbed by Dawkins’ crude stereotypes, vastly oversimplified binary oppositions (‘science is good, religion is bad’), straw men, and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. Might The God Delusion actually backfire, and end up persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant, doctrinaire and disagreeable as the worst that religion can offer?
Dawkins seems to think that saying something more loudly and confidently, while ignoring or trivializing counter-evidence, will persuade the open-minded that religious belief is a type of delusion. Sadly, sociological studies of charismatic leaders – religious and secular – indicate that Dawkins may be right to place some hope in this strategy. For the gullible and credulous, it is the confidence with which something is said that persuades, rather than the evidence offered in its support. Yet the fact that Dawkins relies so excessively on rhetoric, rather than the evidence that would otherwise be his natural stock in trade, clearly indicates that something is wrong with his case. Ironically, the ultimate achievement of The God Delusion for modern atheism may be to suggest that this emperor has no clothes to wear. Might atheism be a delusion about God?