Imagine All the People…

Some atheists imply that the only way to have a Happy Christmas and Peaceful NewYear is to ditch the Christmas message. When asked what difference September 11^th made to the world, Richard Dawkins sagely opined that it was time to exercise some tough love on the religious.

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!”[i]

Presumably Dawkins knows this is nonsense. He has to overstate the dangers of revealed religion; if he believed that Christianity was a harmless delusion, people might wonder why he spent so much time condemning it! He has to detect some hidden danger to justify all those public attacks. He also has to ignore a glaring contradiction in his worldview – all his righteous indignation has as much significance as a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Elsewhere he says:

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” [ii]

There is no room for respect or righteousness in Dawkins worldview. In The God Delusion Dawkins sounds like a mystical theologian revelling in paradox, describing morality as a “blessed, precious mistake”; however, if morality is a mistake, he cannot help himself to value judgments like “blessed” and “precious”. A person can say “sometimes it seems as if moral values are real and important, but I know this is an illusion.” A person cannot expect others to take him seriously if he says, “I believe that moral values are real and important, and I believe that that belief is false”.

We’re sure that Richard Dawkins is a very nice man who cares deeply for children, old people and kittens. However, he cannot explain why he ought to act like this all the time. As a matter of fact, if he is correct about the origins of the moral rules, then from time to time it might be prudent to break them. In a universe without a purpose we can have no moral goal to pursue. In Dawkins pitiless and indifferent world, where morality lacks transcendent value, morality is merely a pleasant and useful delusion.

Religion, by contrast, is a nasty delusion –  or at least “revealed faith” is. Dawkins has a bold hypothesis – the unwarranted certainty of the faithful is the primary cause of violent conflict – but this isn’t tested against any body of evidence. Dawkins simply asserts that the faith of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury is lethally dangerous nonsense which teaches enmity to outsiders and compels Quakers to acts of outrageous violence.  Furthermore, religious certainty did not produce the atom bomb, the Gulag or the Killing Fields.

Humans have always been capable of perverting the loftiest ideals to the bloodiest ends. The causes of violence reside in human nature, not revealed religion. The Gospel not only commands us to love Richard Dawkins; it allows Christians to respect him as he pursues meaning by rejecting God. God gave him the burden of free-will, the capacity to reject everlasting love and the right to dare damnation. We cannot compel Dawkins to have faith by force of arms. We can only reason with him, preach to him and pray for him. We have no choice but to practice tolerance.

But then, Dawkins’ has a remarkable capacity for blind faith. He simply accepts, uncritically, the Enlightenment myth that peace on earth, and good-will to men can only come when religious differences have been transcended. Or, if not “transcended”, naturally, at least obliterated. But any attempt to remove the beliefs that make us different might make a lot of people a irritable.

This leaves us a little worried that somewhere, someone, might take Dawkins rhetoric seriously. He claims that our faith is, after all, a dangerous delusion. It is a source of terror and evil; an insidious form of abuse. There is no room for respect in Dawkins universe, few grounds for religious freedom and not much reason to take morality seriously. Abandoning Christianity and Christmas might not be the best plan if we really wish each other a peaceful and happy New Year.

Graham and Peter