Gunning for God (9 page)

The question we are addressing boils down to this: what authority, and, hence, what reliability or warrant has our reason? Are our cognitive faculties deliberately designed to enable us to discover, recognize, and believe the truth? Now I am well aware that some will at once choke on the word “designed”, and I am also aware that atheists, by definition, deny any deliberate design by a creator. But even atheists believe that reason does have a proper function and purpose, in the same sense as, say, the heart does. The heart’s proper purpose is to pump the blood round the body; whereas a cancerous growth has no proper purpose or function within the human body. It results from purposeless, chaotic growth.

Moreover atheists, when they assert that belief in the existence of God results from a misuse of reason, inadvertently reveal their belief that the faculty of reason is in this sense “designed” to fulfil the purpose of discovering the truth. If reason had no proper function, obviously no one could be accused of misusing it. But, as we saw above, many follow Freud’s contention that all the apparently rational arguments put forward by believers for the existence of God are in fact driven and corrupted by a hidden, subconscious wish-fulfilment-mechanism: the desire to construct for themselves a crutch to help them through life’s difficulties;
⁷¹
whereas reason, if uncorrupted, would achieve its proper purpose and discover the truth, namely atheism. Indeed, Richard Dawkins now makes the astonishing claim that religious belief comes about by a misfiring of evolution.
⁷²

The irony of the atheists’ position becomes instantly apparent, however, as soon as one enquires about the origin of the human faculty of reason. Atheists hold that the driving force of evolution, which eventually produced our human cognitive faculties — reason included — was not primarily concerned with truth at all, but with survival. And we all know what has generally happened — and still happens — to truth when individuals or commercial enterprises or nations, motivated by what Dawkins calls their “selfish genes”, feel themselves threatened and struggle for survival.

The New Atheists have signally failed to appreciate the sceptical implications of their view. They are essentially obliged to regard thought as some kind of neuro-physiological phenomenon. From the evolutionary perspective, the neurophysiology might well be adaptive — but why should one think for a moment that the beliefs caused by that neurophysiology would be mostly true? After all, as the chemist J. B. S. Haldane pointed out long ago, if the thoughts in my mind are just the motions of atoms in my brain — a mechanism that has arisen by mindless unguided processes, why should I believe anything it tells me — including the fact that it is made of atoms? In particular, what grounds are there to believe that naturalism is true? In other words, the New Atheists’ unguided evolution undermines their naturalism.

Stephen Hawking seems not to have taken this into account when he wrote in
The Grand Design
: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have come close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our Universe is a great triumph.”
⁷³

Atheist John Gray spells out the implications of this view: “Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.”
⁷⁴

In light of this we might well ask: how can the New Atheists claim that it is, on the one hand,
rational
to believe in the theory that the evolution of our faculty of reason was not directed for the purpose of discovering the truth; and, on the other hand,
irrational
to believe that our faculty of reason was designed and created by our Maker to enable us to understand and believe the truth?

American philosopher Alvin Plantinga sums up the position:

If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce — including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.
⁷⁵

That is, atheism undermines the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever — let alone a scientific one. Atheism is ultimately nothing but one great self-contradictory delusion.

R. A. Collingwood once said that materialism
⁷⁶
has the characteristic of “writing itself a large cheque on income it had not yet received”. Reducing thought to nothing but neurophysiology is a prime example of this tendency, as inevitably it also leads to the demise of science, rationality, and belief in truth itself — it is ultimately nihilistic. That is the real price you have to pay for the New Atheism — a price that the New Atheists do not put on the sales ticket.

Putting this very important point the other way round, eminent German philosopher Robert Spaemann has pointed out that we are faced, not with the choice between God and science, as the New Atheists would have us to think, but with the choice either to put faith in God or to give up on understanding the universe. That is, if there is no God there can be no science. Spaemann is not suggesting that atheists cannot do science: that would be completely untrue. He is saying that, if we eliminate God, there is no rational basis for science. Indeed, there is no rational basis for truth. Science and truth are left without warrant.

By contrast, biblical theism is coherent in its explanation of why the universe is (scientifically) intelligible. It teaches that God is ultimately responsible as Creator, both for the existence of the universe and the human mind. Human beings are made in his image: the image of a rational, personal Creator; and that is why they can understand the universe, at least in part. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a close link between this belief and the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, thinking both critically and biblically is not the oxymoron that Dawkins imagines.
⁷⁷
The oxymoron would seem rather to be trying to think both critically and “Dawkinsly”.

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have attempted to understand why there is such confusion about the nature of faith. We have seen that the New Atheists essentially define as faith what most people would think of as blind faith; whereas the OED makes clear that faith and belief are cognate concepts intimately related to the question of substantiating evidence. That is, evidence-based faith is the normal concept on which we base our everyday lives.

We then found that the New Atheists’ idiosyncratic definition of faith leads to them failing to appreciate the role of faith in science, and failing to see that at the heart of science is the
belief
that the universe is rationally intelligible. We went on to see that the New Atheists’ view of the origin of the human cognitive faculty gives them no ground for the faith in science that they cannot do without. Indeed, their reduction of human thought to neurophysiology is ultimately nihilistic and destroys the possibility of truth, thus undermining the validity of all arguments including those of the New Atheists. The faith of the New Atheists turns out to have no evidential base. Their view, therefore, is a perfect example of their own (erroneous) notion of a “faith position”. By contrast, the biblical view makes perfect sense of the fact that we can do science. The universe is (in part) intelligible to the human mind, since both trace their origins ultimately to the same Creator.

At this point the atheist faith strikes me as the very opposite of great. To quote a fine phrase of Christopher Hitchens out of context, the New Atheists are “assassins of the mind”. Epistemically their atheism is blind, anti-science, and incoherent, even though emotionally its proponents seem unable to take this on board. However, if one still insists on taking the view that all faith is blind faith, then one should dismiss the New Atheism as well; since, like the old atheism, it is equally a matter of faith. It is ironic that the New Atheists are classic examples of the very thing that they despise: they are characterized by the blind faith that all faith is blind faith. It is also ironic that the New Atheists do not even see that they themselves are driven by faith, even as they seek to destroy it. They believe that the world is rational, that truth is important. They have faith that their own minds can understand the things they are talking about. They also have faith that they can convince us by their arguments. If they think that their view is not a faith or belief system, why do they try to give evidence to get the rest of us to
believe
it? All of this they do, failing blissfully to see that their atheism cuts the rational ground from under them on which they so much wish to stand.

The upshot of all this is that it is not faith in God that is the delusion. It is the New Atheist concept of faith that is a delusion in the precise sense they assign to that term: a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. Against all the evidence (do they not even bother to consult dictionaries?) they irrationally reduce all faith to blind faith, and then subject it to ridicule.

Of course, that approach provides them with a very convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion about real evidence. “People of faith” or “faith-heads” cannot have anything sensible to say, for, by definition, they have no evidence for their beliefs. So don’t listen to them or engage them in discussion. It is very tempting to describe this attitude as intellectual laziness — or perhaps even delusional. Who, after all, turns out to be the real “faith-heads”?

The delightful irony of all this is that if we for a moment (but only for a moment) adopt the New Atheists’ definition of faith as blind belief, then their atheism seems in prime position to be the only true faith around.

CHAPTER 2

IS RELIGION POISONOUS?

“The concept of ‘God’ invented as the antithesis of life — everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole hostility unto death against life synthesized in a gruesome unity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Religion poisons everything.”

Christopher Hitchens

“The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally. If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land.”

Andrew Sims

At the 2007 conference entitled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival” mentioned in the previous chapter, physics Nobel Prizewinner Steven Weinberg said: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With, or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” This impression that religion is harmful would appear to be spreading. According to the 2007 British YouGov poll cited in the Introduction, nearly half (42 per cent) of the 2,200 people taking part thought religion had a harmful effect, and only 17 per cent thought the influence of religion was beneficial, a figure rather strangely less than the 28 per cent who claimed to believe in God.
¹

Again, it is of interest to set these figures in the wider context of the ten-nation BBC poll of 2004, also mentioned earlier in the Introduction, entitled: “What the world thinks of God”.
²
Thus, in the UK 29 per cent of people polled believed that the world would be better off if people did not believe in God, by contrast with the USA where just 6 per cent held this view.

There would seem to be a marked increase, therefore, between 2004 and 2007. John Humphrys comments on possible causes: “One reason might be the publicity attracted by a handful of mad mullahs and their hate-filled rhetoric.”
³
This observation is in line with the assertions of the New Atheists, that fundamentalist Islam has tipped the scales in alerting the world to the dangers of religion. It certainly is all too easy to write a searing account of the atrocious behaviour attributable to adherents of various religions; as for instance Christopher Hitchens’ chapter “Does religion make people better?”
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THE DANGER OF UNWARRANTED GENERALIZATION

However, the New Atheists undermine their own case in astonishingly naïve fashion by lumping all religions together indiscriminately, as if all religions were equally guilty of the charge of fomenting dangerous behaviour. One would not expect such unscholarly, crass oversimplification to come from authors who loudly praise their “scientific approach”. In this connection it is to be noted that
Prospect
magazine, which had earlier voted Dawkins a world-class intellectual, described his book
The God Delusion
as “incautious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory”. After all, it does not take one to be at the cutting edge of academic research into religious thought, to see that classifying the peace-loving Amish with Islamic fundamentalist extremists is culpably and dangerously naïve. Indeed, anyone who knows anything at all about religions knows that they differ profoundly in their teachings and practices. Therefore, millions of moderate people of all religious persuasions will, rightly, strenuously object to being classified by the New Atheists along with violent extremists, even those of their own religious persuasion. After all, 9/11 is a rather strange launching pad for the New Atheist attack on Christianity.