7 God won’t go away: beyond the New Atheism
God won’t go away: beyond the New Atheism
Christopher Hitchens and I disagree on many things. I regard Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–97) as a remarkable woman who served the poor with a love and dedication I could never imitate but would love to emulate. As we saw in Chapter 2, Hitchens considers her a ‘fraud’ and a ‘bitch’, who made life worse for ‘millions of people’. What a pity, he remarked, that there was no hell for her to go to. But at least we agree on some things. One is that religion is not going to disappear. As Hitchens remarks, with an obvious sense of exasperation, it is ‘ineradicable’.1
He’s right. Things have changed since the 1960s, when I was growing up. The received wisdom of that bygone age was that religion was on its way out, both at the social and personal level. Back then, ‘the most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology’ were unanimously of the view that they ‘would live to see the dawn of a new era in which, to paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown’.2 A generation later this judgement can no longer be sustained. Faith is back in public life. Serious political debate in Western Europe – widely regarded as the most secular geopolitical region in the world – now increasingly concerns how best to work with faith groups and use faith to generate social cohesion and consolidate social capital.3
Why is faith still alive and well, despite routine predictions of its demise and ritual denunciations of its perniciousness? The answer Hitchens offers – following eighteenth-century precedents4 – is that human beings are intrinsically superstitious. They need to be weaned off such nonsense. Natural beliefs are wrong. They need to be corrected in the light of science and reason. Dawkins and Dennett are rather more up-to-date in their analysis, arguing that religion is essentially a by-product of the evolutionary process.5
There are, however, problems with the arguments leading to this conclusion, as well as in assessing its possible implications. Suppose it could be shown that human beings possess an evolutionary adaptation to seek the truth. Would this invalidate the quest for truth? Would people stop searching for truth because it is suggested that our evolutionary history predisposes us to do so? I hardly think so.
It’s not my intention to argue the case for the Christian faith in this short volume,6 yet I can hardly fail to point out that the common Christian understanding of human nature over the last 2,000 years is that we possess, and are meant to possess, a homing instinct for God.7 To use an image from the Renaissance poet Francis Quarles (1592–1644), our soul is like an iron needle drawn to the magnetic pole of God. God can no more be eliminated from human life than our yearning for justice or our deep desire to make this world a better place. We have a homing instinct precisely because there’s a home for us to return to. That’s one of the great themes of the New Testament. We are created with an inbuilt yearning for God, so famously expressed in the prayer of Augustine of Hippo (354–430): ‘You have made us for ourselves, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’ One of the reasons Christianity makes such a powerful appeal to humanity is its ability to make sense of our experience.
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett spend pages of their weighty New Atheist tomes speculating about why human beings are preconditioned to believe in God, generally passing off speculation as though it were the solid findings of science. Yet Dawkins and Dennett rather miss the point here. They seem to think that they discredit Christianity by offering ‘scientific’ explanations for religious belief. But while they may clarify the mechanisms by which we long for God, yearn to do good, eliminate poverty or defend the oppressed, such ‘explanations’ neither explain away nor invalidate these deep instincts. They’re part of who we are as human beings and serve to disclose the true possibilities that lie within us – and beyond us.
I cannot pursue this matter further here. Christian beliefs, like those of the New Atheism or any other world-view, ultimately liebeyond final rational proof. But they’re clearly of no small importance in understanding the current worldwide resurgence of interest in faith and its implications for more aggressive forms of secularism. The political philosopher Charles Taylor concluded his recent magisterial analysis of the emergence of a ‘secular age’ with an assertion that religion will not and cannot disappear because of the distinctive characteristics of human nature – above all, what the French philosopher and political historian Chantal Millon-Delsol calls a ‘désir d’éternité’.8 There’s something about human nature that makes us want to reach out beyond rational and empirical limits, questing for meaning and significance.
For Taylor the fundamental characteristics of human nature are such that there can really never be a totally ‘secular’ outlook.9 Religious beliefs and practices work with the grain of human nature. No account of human nature or aspirations can ignore this point – not even the New Atheism, which so clearly fails to address the obvious fact that most people experience religion as liberating and supportive.
The ironic fact is that New Atheist anger at the persistence of faith has inadvertently stirred huge interest in the whole God question. It’s made people want to reflect on the other side of the story . . .
I’d just finished giving a lecture in London early in 2010. A young man came up afterwards and asked me to sign a copy of my textbook Christian Theology: An Introduction. I asked him what had led him to study theology. He told me that he’d read Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion a year or so earlier and it seemed so unfair and one-sided that he felt he needed to hear the other side. So he started going to church. After a while he found he could not sustain his faith in the parody when confronted with the real thing. He converted to Christianity – joyfully and decisively. ‘Without Dawkins,’ he told me, ‘I would never have given God a second thought.’
As I signed the book the young man told me he had a theological question for me. Since The God Delusion had been instrumental in his conversion, should he thank God for Richard Dawkins in his prayers?
I’m still thinking about that one.