Gunning for God (4 page)

The agnostic fraternity is also disturbed by the New Atheist onslaught. In his book
In God We Doubt
,
⁵²
the well-known BBC Radio Presenter John Humphrys presents the main ideas of the New Atheists, and his responses to them, in his inimical, pithy way. It goes like this:
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1. Believers are mostly naive or stupid. Or, at least, they’re not as clever as atheists.

Response: This is so clearly untrue it’s barely worth bothering with. Richard Dawkins, in his bestselling
The God Delusion,
was reduced to producing a “study” by Mensa that purported to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief. He also claimed that only a very few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god. So what? Some believers are undoubtedly stupid (witness the creationists) but I’ve met one or two atheists I wouldn’t trust to change a light-bulb.

2. The few clever ones are pathetic because they need a crutch to get them through life.

Response: Don’t we all? Some use booze rather than the Bible. It doesn’t prove anything about either.

3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.

Response: Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.

4. They have been brainwashed into believing. There is no such thing as a “Christian child”, for instance — just a child whose parents have had her baptised.

Response: True, and many children reject it when they get older. But many others stay with it.

5. They have been bullied into believing.

Response: This is also true in many cases but you can’t actually bully someone into believing — just into pretending to believe.

6. If we don’t wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.

Response: Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we’ve survived monotheist religion for 4,000 years or so, and I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.

7. Trust me: I’m an atheist.

Response: Why?

Humphrys adds wryly: “I make no apology if I have oversimplified their views with that little list: it’s what they do to believers all the time.”
Quite so!

More needs to be said, of course. But this kind of reaction on the part of John Humphrys, who is a highly intelligent person with no religious affiliation (he classifies himself as a doubter), serves to show why many people are left uneasy by the New Atheists’ message. They find it unbalanced and often extreme in many places; at best unsubstantiated and at worst plainly wrong. Dawkins is constantly encouraging us to be critical; but we shall see that he himself is highly selective in what he chooses to criticize, and indeed in what he understands by criticism.

THE IRONY OF THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE RELIGION

One of the ironies emerging about the New Atheists has to do with the fact that they assign an important role to evolutionary theory
⁵⁴
in their attempt to annihilate religious belief. However, evolution does not appear to be playing ball!
The Sunday Times
⁵⁵
ran an article by the science editor John Leake, entitled, “Atheists are a dying breed as nature ‘favours faithful’”. He reports on an eighty-two country study entitled
The Reproductive Advantage of Religiosity
, led by Michael Blume of Jena, which found that those whose inhabitants worship at least once a week have 2.5 children each, and those who never worship have 1.7 — which is less than the number needed to replace themselves. Leake contrasts Dawkins’ argument that religions are like mental viruses that infect people and impose great costs in terms of money and health risks, with Blume’s work, which suggests the opposite: evolution favours believers so strongly that over time a tendency to be religious has become embedded in our genes.

One might have thought that, if the New Atheists are right about evolution, they, of all people, would be the most enthusiastic about spreading their genes. Clearly not.

Perhaps, then, all we have to do is wait?

However, perhaps not; for even though the New Atheists seem to have lost interest in spreading their genes they have not yet abandoned the propagation of their “memes”.

CHAPTER 1

ARE GOD AND FAITH ENEMIES OF REASON AND SCIENCE?

“Monotheism loathes intelligence.”

“God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind.”

Both Michel Onfray

“Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”

Richard Dawkins

“These things are written that you might believe.”

St John

Michel Onfray thinks that God is not dead. But theists should not cheer prematurely, for his explanation is:

A fiction does not die, an illusion never passes away, a fairy tale does not refute itself… You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads towards extinction… We cannot assassinate or kill an illusion. In fact illusion is more likely to kill us — for God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction.
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For Onfray, then, it is this fictional god that is an enemy of reason. Well, fictional gods may well be enemies of reason: the God of the Bible certainly is not. The very first of the biblical Ten Commandments contains the instruction to “love the Lord your God with all your
mind
”. This should be enough to tell us that God is not to be regarded as an enemy of reason. After all, as Creator he is responsible for the very existence of the human mind; the biblical view is that human beings are the pinnacle of creation. They alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.

Consistent with this, far from being anti-scientific, the Bible positively encourages science. It could be said that it gave science its initial mandate. One of the activities fundamental to all branches of science (indeed to all intellectual disciplines) is the naming, and therefore classifying, of things and phenomena. Every intellectual discipline has its special dictionary of words. According to Genesis, in the biological field it was God who initiated this process by telling humans to name the animals.
²
Taxonomy thus got underway. With time this broadened into a vision of nature as a rational unity that was (at least in part) amenable to human comprehension, because it was designed by the mind of God in whose image the human mind was made.

In fact, as Alfred North Whitehead and others have pointed out, there is strong evidence that the biblical worldview was intimately involved in the meteoric rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. C. S. Lewis summarizes as follows: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” More recently Oxford’s Professor of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison, has argued an impressive case for a sharpening of Whitehead’s thesis. He shows that it was not only theism in general, but also the particular principles of biblical interpretation used by the Reformers that made a significant contribution to the rise of science.
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The Bible teaches that creation is contingent; that is, God as Creator is free to make the world as and how he likes. Thus, in order to find out what the universe is like and how it works, we have to go and look. We cannot, as Aristotle thought, determine the nature of the universe by starting with abstract philosophical principles. He held that there were certain
a priori
principles
⁴
to which the universe had to conform — a view that dominated thinking for centuries. One of these principles was that perfect motion must be circular. Since Aristotle thought that everything beyond the moon was perfect, it followed that the planets must move in circles. It was only when Kepler, a Christian, decided to break free of this Aristotelian metaphysical constraint, and allow the astronomical data on the movement of Mars (already collected by Tycho Brahe) to speak, that he discovered that the planets actually moved in equally “perfect” ellipses.

We admire Kepler for his willingness to follow where the evidence led, rather than allowing himself to be intellectually fettered by a metaphysical restraint — even though that restraint represented the established wisdom of centuries. Yet a storm of protest greeted world-renowned philosopher Anthony Flew when he announced his conversion to deism, on the basis of the evidence of the complexity of life. It would seem that stepping outside the naturalistic paradigm is fraught with as much difficulty as stepping outside the Aristotelian one. The largely irrational protest against Flew, by people whose intellectual pretensions should have moderated their reaction, is unequivocal evidence that an
a priori
naturalism can effectively stop intelligent minds entertaining the notion that some features of the universe point towards a designing intelligence, even though such an explanation may be the most logical and obvious way of interpreting the evidence.

Again it was a theist, not an atheist, who had the idea that led to the current widely accepted Big Bang model of the origin of the universe. Georges Lemaitre (1894—1966), a Belgian priest and astronomer, challenged the theory of an eternal universe that had held sway for centuries, and which even Einstein held at the time (Aristotle’s influence, once more). Lemaitre made a brilliant application of Einstein’s theory of relativity to cosmology, and in 1927 worked out a precursor of Hubble’s Law regarding the fact that the universe is expanding. In 1931 he went on to propose his hypothesis of the “primeval atom”, by which he meant that the universe began in a “day that did not have a yesterday”. Like Alexander Friedman, Lemaitre had discovered that the universe must be expanding; but Lemaitre went further than Friedman in arguing that a creation-like event must have occurred. Interestingly, Einstein was suspicious of this, because for him it was too reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of creation. So was Sir Arthur Eddington (1882—1944), who had taught Lemaitre at Cambridge and regarded his 1927 work as a “brilliant solution” to an outstanding problem in cosmology. Nonetheless the idea of a creation was too much for Eddington: “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant… I should like to find a genuine loophole.”
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Much later — in the 1960s — another well-known scientist, Sir John Maddox, then Editor of
Nature
, responded equally negatively to the discovery of further evidence supporting the Big Bang theory. For him, the idea of a beginning was “thoroughly unacceptable”, since it implied an “ultimate origin of our world”, and gave those who believed in the biblical doctrine of creation “ample justification” for their beliefs.
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It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advance in science because it seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific models of a beginning were resisted because they might increase the plausibility of belief in God.

An anti-scientific stance is completely antipathetic to the biblical worldview, and I am as opposed to it as the New Atheists are. That is not to say that no religious people hold anti-scientific attitudes. It is the sad fact that they do. From the Christian perspective such views are inexcusable, and it is lamentable that they are still to be found. On the other hand, it is also regrettable that the New Atheists are not always as scientific as they profess to be, particularly when it comes to following evidence where it leads — especially when that evidence threatens their materialistic or naturalistic presuppositions. The New Atheists can then be just as anti-scientific as anyone else.
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We note in passing that it is often claimed that scientists who believe in a Creator are being unscientific, because their model of the universe is incapable of generating testable predictions. But Maddox’s statement above shows that this is not the case. Maddox was hostile to the notion of a beginning precisely because the Genesis creation-model clearly entailed such a beginning, and he did not welcome scientific confirmation of that model. However, his protests had to give way when confronted with the evidence. The discovery of the galactic red-shift and the cosmic echo of creation, the microwave background, confirmed the obvious prediction that the biblical account implied — there was a beginning to space-time.