Gunning for God (14 page)

Dawkins is a thoroughgoing naturalist, indeed a materialist, in his philosophy. And to say, as he does, that there is “not the smallest evidence” that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things
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is to tell us a lot more about himself than it does about history. This statement does not exactly encourage us to place much confidence in his judgment, especially when we add it to his observation describing all religion as evil (as discussed in our last chapter). He is, of course, wrong on both counts.

THE NEW ATHEIST ATTITUDE TO HISTORY ONCE MORE

And that is a most worrying matter. After all, it is not surprising that Dawkins has no time for theology — he is on record as calling into question its worthiness to be a university subject. But, whatever one may think of that, history is surely a very different matter. As a biologist, one of Dawkins’ main interests is the history of life on earth; and he would be very quick to challenge those who disagreed with him on it. And yet, when it comes to broader matters of history, we find that he, in common with the other New Atheists, is characterized by a breathtakingly cavalier attitude. We have already seen the superficiality of the New Atheists’ analysis of the history of Christianity; and now we are about to see the same weakness permeating their attitude to the history of the twentieth century.

Indeed the present writer, who has had the privilege of visiting the countries of the former communist world many times over the past thirty years, is simply flabbergasted by the naiveté and inaccuracy of Dawkins’ assessment. Dawkins could not have got it more wrong if he had tried. I have often spoken with Russian intellectuals, some of them dissidents with impressive academic pedigrees, who have said to me something like: “We thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings. We were wrong. We destroyed both God and man.” My Polish friends are more blunt: “Dawkins has lost contact with the realities of twentieth-century history. Let him come here and talk to us, if he is really open to listening to evidence of the link between atheism and atrocity.”

Yet Dawkins asserts blithely: “Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.”
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Well, if Stalin and Hitler are to be criticized for being dogmatic, where does that leave the New Atheists? John Humphrys says that, when he produced the highly acclaimed 2006 series for BBC Radio,
Humphrys in Search of God
, one thing that struck him was that, of all the people he interviewed, the atheists were the most dogmatic. To paraphrase Peter Berkowitz,
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Socrates defined an educated person to be someone who was aware of his own ignorance. The New Atheists show no awareness that their atheism, far from arising out of open inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which their inquiries proceed, that colours all their observations, and determines their conclusions.

Moreover, they are entrapped in a dogmatism that is stiffened on this issue by lack of the basic knowledge that, for Marx, the foundation of all criticism was the criticism of religion. Hitchens actually (unconsciously?) echoes Marx, when he claims that: “The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all other arguments, because it is the beginning — but not the end — of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature.”
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In the Foreword to his doctoral thesis, Marx wrote:

Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ admission “I hate all gods” is its own admission, its own motto against all gods, heavenly and earthly, who do not acknowledge the consciousness of man as the supreme divinity.
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A man does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favour of another considers himself a dependant being. But I live completely by another person’s favour when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its
creation
,
when he is its source.
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Marx held that “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness”. Thus, atheism lies at the very heart of the communist agenda. This is why many people in the former communist world, with whom I have spoken about the assertions of the New Atheists, dismiss them as ludicrous. Have Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris never read
The Black Book of Communism
, in which we find that “communist regimes… turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government”, with a death toll calculated to be around 94 million, of which 85 million were accounted for by China and Russia alone?
¹⁴

And what about Hitler? In his authoritative book entitled
Hitler’s God: The German Dictator’s Belief in Predestination and his Sense of Mission
,
¹⁵
historian Michael Rissmann records that Hitler thought of “God” as “the rule of natural law throughout the universe”, and that “his [Hitler’s] religiosity consisted of an attempt to equate predestination with the regularities established by science”.
¹⁶
Rissmann also relates how Hitler on one occasion told those gathered in the Bunker that as a schoolboy he had already “seen through the lying fairy tales of a church with two gods”.

Furthermore, Hitler expected Christianity to shrivel before the inexorable advance of science. In
Table Talk
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he is reported as saying: “When understanding of the universe has become widespread… then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.” His view of Christianity was very clear: “The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.” Put that way it sounds familiar. Did one of the New Atheists not express the very similar sounding opinion somewhere, that religion is like a “virus of the mind, similar to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”? There really is nothing new under the sun.

For Hitler, Christianity was “the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity”; it was “the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance.” Hitler thus echoed Nietzsche, who called Christianity “the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Whatever category Hitler is put in, one thing is certain — he was both vehemently anti-Christian and anti-Jewish.

However, Dawkins eschews serious analysis and contents himself with what can only be described as very silly statements about both Hitler and Stalin. “Even if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism, they both also had moustaches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what?”
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We might add, in a sudden flash of deep insight, that all three had noses in common with the rest of us. What kind of “reasoning” is this? We are talking, not of shared, general characteristics, but of the motivating ideology that drove Hitler, Stalin, and others to murder millions in their attempt to get rid of religion, whether Jewish or Christian or anything else. David Berlinski has put his finger on the real issue. He recalls one occasion:

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave. Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said. And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did
not
believe, and what Stalin did
not
believe, and what Mao did
not
believe, and what the SS did
not
believe, and what the Gestapo did
not
believe, and what the NKVD did
not
believe, and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Blackshirts, Gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did
not
believe, was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

That is, after all, the
meaning
of a secular society.
¹⁹

Michel Onfray rates Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx as the “luminaries who succeeded Kant”. “Luminaries” seems a strange term to describe men whose atheistic philosophy fired the minds of a succession of tyrants, and in the twentieth century led to a great darkness that enveloped vast segments of the earth resulting in the murder of millions. Far more perished then than in the religious wars of all other centuries put together — inexcusable as they were also. Does Onfray seriously want us to think of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx as the first “Brights”?

Do the New Atheists really think that a truly secular society, in which religion had been abolished, would be less prone to violence than a society in which any form of religion was tolerated? This is an astonishing idea to hold, when the twentieth century’s examples of such regimes have been the most intolerant and violent in all of history.

Nevertheless, the New Atheists’ insistence on exonerating atheism precipitates their headlong rush across the boundaries of absurdity. Dawkins writes that he does not believe that there is an “atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca — or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame”. This statement has received the response it deserves: “Cathedrals are too high for bulldozers. In the Soviet Union under Stalin and in the German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht they used explosives instead — for instance, to blow up the University Church in Leipzig in 1968.” This is the apt rejoinder of Richard Schröder, now Professor of Philosophy in Berlin; formerly an SPD-Party leader, who grew up in the German Democratic Republic and therefore knows communism well.
²⁰

The mind boggles at the implications of Dawkins’ statement. Has he really never read of the wanton destruction of churches in atheist countries, or of their forcible transformation into museums of atheism in order to obliterate religion, or into warehouses, cinemas, restaurants, and the like? After all, Stalin closed only about 54,000 churches; admittedly not all of them were blown up. And if Dawkins has read these things, why does he deny them so explicitly? And yet it is this same Dawkins who is prepared to risk drawing some kind of parallel between creationists and holocaust deniers.
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One also wonders whether the New Atheists have ever met men and women who have been tortured within an inch of death, or pumped full of psychiatric drugs, or spent years in prison, or all of these — simply because they were believers in God who did not fit in to an atheistic society, and had to be forcibly “cured”. I feel fairly sure that they have not met too many atheists who have suffered like that at the hands of Christians.

I also suspect that they have never sat with a thirteen-year-old in the former German Democratic Republic, as I have done. She was the brightest child in the school, but had just been told that she could not have any more education since she was not prepared to swear public allegiance to the
atheistic
state. One is tempted to call that intellectual murder. It was committed many times — all in the name of atheism. Was that not even worse than bulldozing buildings? But according to Dawkins there is not the
smallest
evidence for this. Really? If this is the level of rational criticism of twentieth-century history that the New Atheists have to offer, they are well on the way to writing their own intellectual obituary.

It is with some relief that we come across atheists who have a much more balanced view of the historical situation. After charging religion with various crimes, Peter Singer and Marc Hauser write:

Lest we be charged with a blinkered view of the world, atheists have also committed their fair share of heinous crimes, including Stalin’s slaughter of millions of people in the USSR, and Pol Pot’s creation of the “killing fields” in which more than a million Cambodians were murdered. Putting these threads together, the conclusion is clear: neither religion nor atheism has a monopoly on the use of criminal violence.
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They are, however, being far too generous to atheism.

In this connection it is also encouraging to see that Dawkins has admitted more recently (perhaps as a result of the influence of Sam Harris?) that:

There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.
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