Gunning for God (15 page)

It is a pity that he did not think this through before he wrote
The God Delusion
; but I am glad to see that he is saying it now.

IS THE NEW ATHEISM DANGEROUS?

The public at large is rightly concerned about the New Atheist propensity for calling into question widely held scholarly interpretations of history, in the interests of propagating an atheist ideological agenda. Such a tendency can so easily warp into an ugly totalitarianism. Of course, it is not hard to think of a reason why the New Atheists are so insistent on rewriting the history of the twentieth century by air-brushing out the role of atheism. They do not want it to occur to anyone to draw a parallel between their anti-religious agenda and the violent and cruel attempt of communism to obliterate religion from the face of the earth.

Unfortunately, some of them invite such comparisons. At the forum sponsored by The Science Network at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (mentioned in the Introduction), the tone of intolerance reached such a peak that anthropologist Melvin J. Konner commented: “The viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

I would hope that most of the New Atheists would distance themselves from this kind of inflammatory statement. After all, it sits ill with a movement that makes such an issue of religious violence. Furthermore, history teaches us that movements that begin with intellectual analysis and debate can end in intolerance and violence. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx developed his atheistic theories in the idyllic quietness of a library in London. One wonders what he would think now of what his words have led to. Ideas have consequences. Ideas can be explosive. It would therefore be unwise to forget that attempts to obliterate belief in God have been made before — and have only succeeded in obliterating human beings.

Was it not comrade Khrushchev who claimed that he would soon show to the world the last remaining Russian Christian? I wonder why I thought of this when I read Steven Weinberg’s words at the Salk Institute conference, encouraging scientists to contribute “
anything
we can do to weaken the hold of religion”. This hint of totalitarianism may only be a straw in the wind. But straws serve to show where the wind is blowing, and not so long ago that same wind blew in the direction of the Gulag.

I wish to stress once more that many of us who are not atheists share the New Atheists’ antipathy to the patent evil that has been perpetrated in the name of religion. However, their atheistic programme, though superficially attractive to many, is potentially dangerous for exactly the same reasons that the New Atheists (with less justification) use against religion. For instance, Dawkins warns (against the evidence, in the case of Christianity at least) that “the teachings of moderate religion are an open invitation to extremism”.
²⁴
By the same token, might it not be wise for him to heed his own advice and also warn us that the teachings of moderate atheism may be an even more open invitation to extremism — an idea for which there is very strong evidence? After all, there is a noticeable straight line from the Enlightenment to the violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But nonetheless the biblical diagnosis is that the human race is flawed by evil, a contention that is surely not surprising in light of our common experience, even though that contention is resisted by those whose minds are irrationally full of optimistic notions of “progress”. John Gray insists, however:

The cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings. Nearly all pre-modern thinkers took it as given that human nature is fixed and flawed, and in this as in some other ways they were close to the truth of the matter. No theory of politics can be credible that assumes that human impulses are naturally benign, peaceable or reasonable.
²⁵

The source of that evil flaw is given in the following key statement by St Paul: “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”.
²⁶
We shall discuss this statement in more detail in Chapter 6.

John Gray, not an obvious friend of theism, writes:

The totalitarian regimes of the last century embodied some of the Enlightenment’s boldest dreams. Some of their worst crimes were done in the service of progressive ideals, while even regimes that viewed themselves as enemies of Enlightenment values attempted a project of transforming humanity by using the power of science, whose origins are in Enlightenment thinking. The role of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century terror remains a blind spot in western perception.
²⁷

It is certainly a blind spot in New Atheist perception, and it is not hard to see why: Dawkins’ argument for banning the teaching of religion would logically lead even faster to banning the teaching of atheism because of the horrors it has provoked, even within the living memory of many people.

It is, after all, no small irony that a filmed discussion between the four leaders — Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens — is entitled
The Four Horsemen
: an undoubted allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, described in the book of Revelation as conquest, war, famine, and death.
²⁸
One just wonders whether their choice of this epithet is another evidence of their ignorance of the book they attempt to rubbish? I hope so, for I find some of the statements of these horsemen rather chilling. For example, the following reprehensible statement by Sam Harris sounds like a harbinger of death: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”
²⁹
We might well ask whether it will be the New Atheists who in the end have the authority to decide what those deadly propositions are and who will execute the sentence?

The New Atheists do their best to show that violence, cruelty, and war lie at the heart of Christianity, but have nothing whatsoever to do with atheism. The supreme irony in this wildly intemperate assertion is that investigation of the teaching of Christ and the teaching of the aforementioned anti-religious ideologies of the twentieth century shows the exact opposite to be the case. The New Atheists’ crusade will inevitably founder, because its false diagnosis leads to a solution that history has shown to be even worse than the problem they are trying to solve. But, since experience teaches us that we learn little from history, the New Atheism may not founder before it does a great deal of damage.

THE NEW ATHEISM IS NOT NEW

My debate with Christopher Hitchens, which opened the Edinburgh Festival in August 2008, was on the motion “The New Europe Should Prefer the New Atheism”. In my final contribution to that debate I said something like the following:

There is actually nothing new about the New Atheism. For over forty years a version of it dominated Eastern Europe. And Eastern Europe decisively rejected it in 1989. Far from Christianity hindering the formation of the New Europe, as our motion suggests, it played a crucial role in creating the New Europe. President of the British Academy, Sir Adam Roberts, Professor of International Relations at Oxford, is a world authority on the Cold War and the role of religion in resistance movements. In a public lecture in Oxford that I attended, he pointed out that in 1989 the Christian churches in Leipzig played a crucial role in preventing the violence that would have given the German Democratic Republic an excuse to send in the troops and thus threaten Gorbachev’s policy of allowing peaceful democracy to have its way. Sir Adam emphasized that if the churches had not acted as they did the outcome might well have been disastrous — there would have been no New Europe.

The very creation of the New Europe is thus an example of how genuine Christianity, in its insistence on the dignity of human beings made in the image of God, brings freedom. The New Atheism threatens to undermine those freedoms, as its communist predecessor did. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it well:

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to say: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened… if I were called upon to identify the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God… To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
³⁰

It is only because the wall created by the previous version of the New Atheism was pulled down that the New Europe exists today. Do we really want to build another wall?

CHAPTER 4

CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?

If God does not exist, everything is permissible.

Fyodor Dostoievski

The New Atheists are gunning for God not only on the scientific level, but also the moral level. Their attack has two prongs. Firstly, they fulminate against what they perceive to be the primitive, unacceptable, indeed, for them, abhorrent, morality of the Bible. Secondly, they claim that God is unnecessary for morality. They tell us that they are not rejecting morality as such — simply the traditional view that morality is somehow dependent on God. In short, their view is that we can be good without God.

Christopher Hitchens thunders about the “nightmare of the Old Testament”
¹
and the “evil of the New Testament”.
²
Richard Dawkins loves to shock audiences by reading aloud a blistering invective against the God of the Old Testament, describing him as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction”.
³
Hitchens, in debate with me at the Edinburgh Festival, made no bones about his abhorrence of a God who, in his view, is a tyrant and a bully, always watching us. In his view, “God is not Great”.

Now all of these New Atheist criticisms of God are clearly moral criticisms. That is clear even to their fellow atheists. In a brief section of his book devoted to Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse writes: “Finally, and most importantly, there is the fact that Dawkins is engaged on a moral crusade, not as a philosopher trying to establish premises and conclusions but as a preacher, telling the ways to salvation and to damnation.
The God Delusion
is above all a work of morality.”
⁴
Now, moral crusades must be squarely based on moral standards, otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish evil from its opposite. Indeed, in this particular case, those standards must be very lofty, since they are used to justify an extremely vehement intolerance of religion. We naturally are led to ask: where do such uncompromising standards come from, if God is not in the picture?

Leading ethicist Peter Singer articulates the implications of leaving God out of the picture as follows:

Whatever the future holds, it is likely to prove impossible to restore in full the sanctity-of-life view. The philosophical foundations of this view have been knocked asunder. We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul. Our better understanding of our own nature has bridged the gulf that was once thought to lie between ourselves and other species; so why should we believe that the mere fact that a being is a member of the species
Homo Sapiens
endows its life with some unique, almost infinite value?
⁵

Similarly, Singer’s former student, now a professor at Oxford, Julian Savulescu, writes: “I believe that God’s existence is irrelevant. What matters is ethical behaviour.”
⁶

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoievski disagreed. In his famous novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
, he put a statement into the mouth of Ivan that is usually quoted as: “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Now Dostoievski was not arguing that atheists were incapable of moral behaviour, of being good. That would simply be slanderously false. Indeed, many who claim to be Christians are at times put to shame by their atheist neighbours. The point Dostoievski is making is not that atheists cannot be good, but that atheism does not supply any intellectual foundation for morality.