Gunning for God (13 page)

We read the New Atheists in vain to find even a hint of awareness of this “huge volume of research”. It would seem that their blind faith that they are right trumps any evidence. Their vaunted commitment to science is not quite all that it seems.

Sims raises a further important psychological matter that has been ignored by the New Atheists. He points out that “delusion has become a psychiatric word and always has overtones of mental illness”. He deduces: “The statement that all religious belief is delusion is both erroneous and innately hostile.” He gives an example of that hostility: “The suggestion that faith is delusional does not help psychiatric patients for whom their religious faith may be very important.” Sims concludes with the observation: “Although the content of delusion may be religious, the whole of belief, of itself, is not and cannot be a delusion.”
⁴⁴
What now of the “God delusion”?

AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES THAT AFRICA NEEDS GOD

The well-known
Times
columnist Matthew Parris, an atheist, is convinced of the positive value of Christianity and says so in no uncertain terms. In a widely discussed
Times
article he wrote: “As an atheist I truly believe that Africa needs God: missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem — the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset.” Parris explains:

Travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding — as you can — the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it.

Parris concludes:

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.”

And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
⁴⁵

Parris, self-confessed atheist that he is, thus reaches a very different conclusion from that of the New Atheists. Yet Parris’s article is credible. It has the ring of truth.

By contrast, Christopher Hitchens missed an obvious opportunity to point out that not all Christians are evil. He tells us that he cannot pass the White House or the Capitol, “without thinking of what might have happened were it not for the courage and resourcefulness of the passengers on the fourth plane, who managed to bring it down in a Pennsylvanian field only twenty minutes’ flying time from its destination”. What he omits to say is that one of the leaders of that brave group of passengers was Todd Beamer, an evangelical Christian.

Is all religion really the same, as the New Atheists allege? Are they going to classify the Todd Beamers of the world with suicide bombers? Keith Ward writes:

If there is a root of evil that became a terrifying force that almost brought the world to destruction in the first half of the twentieth century, it is the anti-religious ideologies of Germany and Russia, North Vietnam and North Korea. It takes almost wilful blindness to invert this historical fact, and to suppose that the religions that were persecuted and crushed by these brutal forces are the real sources of evil in the world.
⁴⁶

Air-brushing out the considerable evidence for the positive contribution of Christianity, and at the same time falsely blaming the evils of Christendom on the teaching of Christianity, does deep damage to the New Atheists’ credibility. Such manifest distortions of history show that we are not dealing with the kind of objective and measured evaluation that we have every right to expect from prominent public intellectuals who claim the scientific high-ground. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that we are not actually dealing with intellectuals at all, but with people so obsessed with their own agenda that they have lost touch with reality. After all, one does not have to be a genius to predict how the New Atheists would react against an all-out attack on science which, using their own methodology, piled example on example of the terrible things that science has done in and to our world (from weapons of mass destruction to the poisoning of the environment), in order to dismiss science as dangerous and immoral. In fact, there is surely much more justification for saying that science causes war, than to claim that monotheism causes war.

As ever, David Berlinski puts it succinctly. After citing Steven Weinberg’s public statement, “For good people to do evil things, that takes religion”, he points out that not one member of Weinberg’s audience asked “the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.”
⁴⁷

Noam Chomsky sees the New Atheist attitude as a turning away from reason: “I think the sharpest turn away from reason is among the educated intellectuals who advocate reason and blame others for turning away from it. If we can’t even reach the level of applying to ourselves rational standards of the kind that we apply to others, our commitment to reason is very thin.”
⁴⁸

In conclusion, it would therefore appear that Christopher Hitchens’ allegation that “religion poisons everything” does not have reason on its side. Certainly, in the case of Christianity, his assertion is demonstrably false.

CHAPTER 3

IS ATHEISM POISONOUS?

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

Karl Marx

“I do not believe there is atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca — or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame.”

Richard Dawkins

“Cathedrals are too high for bulldozers. In the Soviet Union under Stalin and in the German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht they used explosives instead.”

Richard Schroeder

It would be wonderful not only to imagine John Lennon’s world without all the evils that have been attributed to religion, as Richard Dawkins calls us to, but also to live in such a world. All sensible people would surely agree with the New Atheists here. But then, if you will forgive me for stating the obvious, I am not John Lennon. I happen to be John Lennox, and I would like to ask you also to imagine a world with no atheism. No Stalin, no Mao, no Pol Pot, just to name the heads of the three officially atheistic states that were responsible for some of the worst mass crimes of the twentieth century. Just imagine a world with no Gulag, no Cultural Revolution, no Killing Fields, no removal of children from their parents because the parents were teaching them about their beliefs, no refusal of higher education to believers in God, no discrimination against believers in the workplace, no pillaging, destruction, and burning of places of worship. Would that not be a world worth imagining too?

Yet, as Pulitzer Prizewinner Marilynne Robinson observes, Dawkins finds atheism incapable of belligerent intent when he says: “Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?” Robinson continues:

It is a peculiarity of our language that by war we generally mean a conflict between nations, or at least one in which both sides are armed. There has been persistent violence against religion — in the French Revolution, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet Union, in China. In three of these instances the extirpation of religion was part of a program to reshape society by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been served by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the history of modern authoritarianism.
¹

Christopher Hitchens is also aware of this issue: “It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.”
²
However, as Peter Berkowitz points out in
The Wall Street Journal
, it is Hitchens who is behaving defensively here. He is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is “he who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity’s evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions”.

Berkowitz adds perceptively:

Nor is his [Hitchens’] case bolstered by his observation that 20th-century totalitarianism took on many features of religion. That only brings home the need to distinguish, as Mr Hitchens resolutely refuses to do, between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious teachings. And it begs the question of why the 20th-century embrace of secularism unleashed human depravity of unprecedented proportions.
³

There is a deeper issue here. Hitchens tries to exculpate Stalin and Hitler by blaming their ideas on religion. But he can only do so by making the elementary mistake of failing to distinguish between nominal religion and a personal, living faith in God. Whatever these evil men were by label or background, they were atheists in practice. What they had in common was a utopian vision for the remaking of humanity in their own image; and in so doing they effectively created a substitute religion: “Those who in the name of science claim that we can overcome our imperfect human nature create a belief system
that functions like religion.
”
⁴
Huxley saw this long ago and was explicit about it; so did Haeckel in Germany. Michael Ruse is honest enough to admit that, for many, evolution seems to function in a similar way to an almighty creator.

The New Atheists think that science inevitably entails naturalism that eliminates religion, and they then use science to “arrogate to themselves moral authority over all creation including those of their species too dim to see the truth”.
⁵
They alone think that they understand how to bring about collective salvation and redeem the human race. If Hitchens is going to call Stalin and Hitler religious because of their background or the religious overtones of what they say, then we might as well call Hitchens religious when he says he is a Protestant atheist.

John Gray, in his book
Black Mass
, makes a very important point:

The role of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century terror remains a blind spot in western perception… Communist regimes were established in pursuit of a utopian ideal whose origins lie in the heart of the Enlightenment… a by-product of attempt to remake life. Pre-modern theocracies did not attempt to do this… Terror of the kind practised by Lenin did not come from the Tsars.
⁶

The New Atheists resort to desperate measures in their attempt to draw a line between the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and the atheist philosophy they espoused. Indeed, in the course of my debate with him, Dawkins asserted that there was no pathway from atheists to their atrocities, comparable to that which exists from religious people to theirs. After all, he said to me, we are both atheists with respect to Zeus and Wotan and that clearly does not harm anyone — what a person does not believe in cannot harm anyone, can it?

Yes it can, when not believing in something entails a corresponding set of positive beliefs in something else that has the potential to inspire harm. The difference between not believing in Wotan and not believing in God is immense, because the former has no serious entailment that one can think of; but the denial of the existence of God has massive entailments — the whole of Dawkins’ materialistic philosophy, in fact. That is why, as I pointed out to Dawkins in debate, that he has not bothered to write a 400-page book expounding a-Wotanism or a-Zeusism! But he has written such a tome on a-theism. Why so?

For he and the other New Atheists are not simply atheists, they are anti-theists. Not believing in God does not leave them in a passive, negative, innocuous vacuum. Their books are replete with all the positive beliefs that flow from their anti-theism. These beliefs form their credo, their faith — much as they like to deny that they have one. Indeed, their own definition of a Bright is “someone who has a naturalistic worldview”. Dawkins is surely quoting Julian Baggini, with approval on the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism, when he writes: “What most atheists do
believe
[italics mine] is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values — in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.” Just a little later in the text Dawkins says (no longer quoting Baggini or anyone else): “An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who
believes
[italics mine] there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe…”
⁷
In light of his own statements, one wonders by what intellectual contortions Dawkins can persuade himself that his atheism is not a
belief
system — his faith shines out too clearly.