Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath
Christopher Hitchens, Alister McGrath
Reposted from:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6851159367044940771&hl=en
and
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pageID.390/default.asp
Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World
Video of a debate, dialogue, and discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath
Watch on Google Video HERE
YouTube links (thanks to Ronan):
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM18VXNgvDo
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36U-DuD5MnQ
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIvB9qTqbJE
Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbkeFEx95ok
Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efkCnz6P9WM
Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVto--zU2WU
Part 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdcma46c6Kg
Part 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsamdA86e8w
Part 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oenhstox25E
Part10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gyAPIkUC_k
Part11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL9MSlXfEE8
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
"The Sacred and the Human," by Roger Scruton
It is not surprising that decent, sceptical people, observing the revival in our time of superstitious cults, the conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderousness of radical Islamism, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others. The "sleep of reason" has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits?
What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos—beliefs that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe God is Not Great, writes: "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs)."
Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.
Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, it was not faith, but faiths in the plural, that composed the primary subject matter of theology. Hence the appearance of books like CF Dupuis's Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795), and the busy decipherment of oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers, the monotheistic belief systems were not related to ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. Rather, they were crystallisations of the emotional need which found expression both in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and Upanishads of the Hindus. This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and 1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance.
If you look at ancient religion in this way, then inevitably your vision of the Judeo-Christian canon changes. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read as a myth, however, this naive-seeming text reveals itself as a study of the human condition. The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote (in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827), "not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity." It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship, about our relation to nature and mortality. For Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom that conditions all that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much a discovery as a form of self-creation, as the spirit learns to recognise itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its finitude.
Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the later studies of James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two thinkers stand out as the founders of a new intellectual enterprise—an enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. The thinkers are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us through the experience of sacred things. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner, in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal, as well as in his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition, placed the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim. By calling these moments "sacred," we recognise both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation.
The attempt by Nietzsche and Wagner to understand the concept of the sacred was taken forward not by anthropologists but by theologians and critics—Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917), Georges Bataille in L'Érotisme (1957), Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), and, most explicitly and shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré (1972). It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed?
Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran—al-rahmân al-rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands—such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honour—a theme that has been explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.
Girard's theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea of Nietzsche's. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal slavery by the "beasts of prey"—the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves—just as we punish a disobedient horse. The slave, too timid and demoralised to rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot exact revenge, the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his condition as in some way deserved. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. The resentment of the slave explains, for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of compassion, the mortification of the flesh and the life-denying routines of the "slave morality." Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form of human mastery.
That "genealogy" of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max Scheler in his book Ressentiment (1912). Scheler argues that the Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of resentment but rather the only way to overcome it. Nevertheless, there is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche's wild generalisations. Resentment remains a fundamental component in our social emotions, and it is widely prevalent in modern societies. The 20th century was the century of resentment. How else do you explain the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy whose privileges and property have been unjustly acquired. Religion plays no real part in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the targets.
Girard's theory, like Nietzsche's, is expressed as a genealogy, or a "creation myth": a fanciful description of the origins of human society from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from literary criticism.) And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms—religious ritual, prayer, tragedy—but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.
According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is implanted in the human psyche, arising from the attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost. In Girard's view, a tragedy like Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a way of retelling the story of what was originally a ritual sacrifice in which the victim can be sacrificed without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city's plagues and their cure.
In many Old Testament stories, we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim and attached first to animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the visceral rivalries of sexual predation. To repeat: religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it—the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.
It is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the achievement of Christianity. In his study of the scapegoat, Le Bouc émissaire (1982), Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim—one who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he understands what is going on. The words "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" are pivotal for Girard. They involve a recognition of the need for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of the community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those ignorant of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic climax. The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which even the cruellest of persecutors can learn to humble himself and to renounce his vengeful passion. Through his acceptance of his sacrifical role, Christ made the "love of neighbour"—which had featured in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible as the standard to which humanity should aspire—into a reality in the hearts of those who meditate upon his gesture. Christ's submission purified society and religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy, as Nazis and communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.
Girard's account of the Passion is amplified by many references to Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy are, as Nietzsche argued, adjacent in the human psyche, comparable receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities. That is how Girard explains the peace and celebration that attends the ritual of communion—the sense of renewal which must always itself be renewed. Girard takes himself to be describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of Hinduism as in the everyday "miracle" of the Eucharist.
There are many features of Girard's theory that can be criticised—not least the idea that human institutions can be explained through creation myths. We need more evidence than is contained in a creation myth for the view that our "original" condition is one of vengeful competition. And the alleged "mimetic" nature of human competition is underjustified. Moreover, there are other plausible explanations of the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice besides the one offered by Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has other causes besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the cross. The growth of towns under Roman imperial jurisdiction meant that people were in daily contact with "the other," and living under competing urges both to exclude and to forgive. Why is that not an equal factor in explaining the rapid spread of a gospel of disinterested love?
Such criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative neglect of Girard's ideas. Girard's thesis has been received with the same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy, and though he has been honoured with a siège (seat) at the Académie française, the honour has come only now, as Girard approaches his 90th year. I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are transcended—washed in the blood of the lamb.
Girard's genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him, it is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986), he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner's masterpiece.
Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.
link
What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos—beliefs that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe God is Not Great, writes: "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs)."
Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.
Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, it was not faith, but faiths in the plural, that composed the primary subject matter of theology. Hence the appearance of books like CF Dupuis's Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795), and the busy decipherment of oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers, the monotheistic belief systems were not related to ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. Rather, they were crystallisations of the emotional need which found expression both in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and Upanishads of the Hindus. This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and 1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance.
If you look at ancient religion in this way, then inevitably your vision of the Judeo-Christian canon changes. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read as a myth, however, this naive-seeming text reveals itself as a study of the human condition. The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote (in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827), "not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity." It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship, about our relation to nature and mortality. For Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom that conditions all that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much a discovery as a form of self-creation, as the spirit learns to recognise itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its finitude.
Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the later studies of James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two thinkers stand out as the founders of a new intellectual enterprise—an enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. The thinkers are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us through the experience of sacred things. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner, in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal, as well as in his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition, placed the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group—an idea that was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by Durkheim. By calling these moments "sacred," we recognise both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation.
The attempt by Nietzsche and Wagner to understand the concept of the sacred was taken forward not by anthropologists but by theologians and critics—Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917), Georges Bataille in L'Érotisme (1957), Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), and, most explicitly and shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré (1972). It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed?
Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran—al-rahmân al-rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands—such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honour—a theme that has been explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.
Girard's theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea of Nietzsche's. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal slavery by the "beasts of prey"—the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves—just as we punish a disobedient horse. The slave, too timid and demoralised to rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot exact revenge, the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his condition as in some way deserved. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. The resentment of the slave explains, for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of compassion, the mortification of the flesh and the life-denying routines of the "slave morality." Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form of human mastery.
That "genealogy" of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max Scheler in his book Ressentiment (1912). Scheler argues that the Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of resentment but rather the only way to overcome it. Nevertheless, there is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche's wild generalisations. Resentment remains a fundamental component in our social emotions, and it is widely prevalent in modern societies. The 20th century was the century of resentment. How else do you explain the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy whose privileges and property have been unjustly acquired. Religion plays no real part in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the targets.
Girard's theory, like Nietzsche's, is expressed as a genealogy, or a "creation myth": a fanciful description of the origins of human society from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from literary criticism.) And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms—religious ritual, prayer, tragedy—but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.
According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is implanted in the human psyche, arising from the attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost. In Girard's view, a tragedy like Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a way of retelling the story of what was originally a ritual sacrifice in which the victim can be sacrificed without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city's plagues and their cure.
In many Old Testament stories, we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim and attached first to animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the visceral rivalries of sexual predation. To repeat: religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it—the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.
It is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the achievement of Christianity. In his study of the scapegoat, Le Bouc émissaire (1982), Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim—one who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he understands what is going on. The words "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" are pivotal for Girard. They involve a recognition of the need for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of the community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those ignorant of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic climax. The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which even the cruellest of persecutors can learn to humble himself and to renounce his vengeful passion. Through his acceptance of his sacrifical role, Christ made the "love of neighbour"—which had featured in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible as the standard to which humanity should aspire—into a reality in the hearts of those who meditate upon his gesture. Christ's submission purified society and religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy, as Nazis and communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.
Girard's account of the Passion is amplified by many references to Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy are, as Nietzsche argued, adjacent in the human psyche, comparable receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities. That is how Girard explains the peace and celebration that attends the ritual of communion—the sense of renewal which must always itself be renewed. Girard takes himself to be describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of Hinduism as in the everyday "miracle" of the Eucharist.
There are many features of Girard's theory that can be criticised—not least the idea that human institutions can be explained through creation myths. We need more evidence than is contained in a creation myth for the view that our "original" condition is one of vengeful competition. And the alleged "mimetic" nature of human competition is underjustified. Moreover, there are other plausible explanations of the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice besides the one offered by Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has other causes besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the cross. The growth of towns under Roman imperial jurisdiction meant that people were in daily contact with "the other," and living under competing urges both to exclude and to forgive. Why is that not an equal factor in explaining the rapid spread of a gospel of disinterested love?
Such criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative neglect of Girard's ideas. Girard's thesis has been received with the same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy, and though he has been honoured with a siège (seat) at the Académie française, the honour has come only now, as Girard approaches his 90th year. I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are transcended—washed in the blood of the lamb.
Girard's genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him, it is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986), he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner's masterpiece.
Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.
link
Monday, July 16, 2007
"The New New Atheism" by Peter Berkowitz
The New New Atheism
PETER BERKOWITZ
Attacking "God" has become a lucrative book business. But there's not much substance behind the latest atheist tracts.
"There is nothing new under the sun," proclaims the Book of Ecclesiastes. The rise of the new new atheism confirms this ancient biblical wisdom.
Of course the famous words of Ecclesiastes should not be taken in a slavishly literal sense, a technique that is all-too-common among those who think they can refute belief in God by showing that the Bible abounds in demonstrably false and self-contradictory statements.
But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist (2007).
Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.
So Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing.
The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently and most forcefully and wittily in God Is Not Great by my friend Mr. Hitchens. It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart.
But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil. Consider Mr. Hitchens's contention, elaborated at length and with gusto, that religion by its very nature compels people to behave cruelly and violently. According to Mr. Hitchens, religion educates children to hate nonbelievers, encourages grown-ups to engage in slaughter and conquest for God's greater glory, and obliges the "true believer" to restlessly circle the globe subduing peoples and nations until "the whole world bows the knee."
The bloody history of oppression and war undertaken on behalf of the gods and God, from time immemorial, makes all decent people shudder. But Mr. Hitchens knows perfectly well that human beings are not born in Rousseauian purity and freedom, and then made savage by the imposition of the chains of religion. Therefore, he should have asked whether and to what extent the varieties of religion have inflamed or rather disciplined humanity's powerful built-in propensity, attested to by social science, to fight and kill. But he didn't.
Such a question opens intriguing possibilities. Mr. Hitchens mocks the crudity of the biblical principle known in Latin as lex talionis, or an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot." But suppose, as Jewish teaching suggests, that the biblical principle put an end to the practice of taking a leg for a foot and a life for an eye, and in its place established a principle that, though differently interpreted today, remains a cornerstone of our notion of justice—that the punishment should fit the crime.
Similarly, Mr. Hitchens heaps scorn on the biblical story of Abraham's binding of Isaac, in which, at the last moment, an angel stays Abraham's hand. What kind of barbarian, wonders Mr. Hitchens, would prepare to sacrifice his son at God's command, and what kind of morally stunted individuals would honor such a man, or the deity who made the demand? Yet Mr. Hitchens's categorical claim that religion poisons everything is undermined by the common interpretation according to which God's testing of Abraham taught, among other things, that the then widespread practice of child-sacrifice was contrary to God's will, and must be put to an end forever.
At the same time, Mr. Hitchens has next to nothing to say about the historical role of religion, particularly Christianity, particularly in America, in nourishing the soil in which our widely and deeply shared beliefs in liberty, democracy and equality took root and grew strong—a subject dealt with perceptively by Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter in his recent book Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion.
Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity, dwarfing religion's sins, committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the challenge with sophistry: "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." But who is behaving defensively here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity's evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
Nor is his 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.
Even were he to concede that religion doesn't poison everything, Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually operates—in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and modern physics—he concludes that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule."
This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a "great paleontologist" and whose authority he invokes in support of the proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution. Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are religious, Gould commented amusingly that "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
These lines are quoted in The Dawkins Delusion, by Alistair McGrath, who holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Oxford, where he is now professor of historical theology, and by his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who studied experimental psychology at Oxford and is currently a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. According to the McGraths, Gould was correct to think that both conventional religious belief and atheism are compatible with natural science, in part because "there are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method." Such questions—toward which the mind naturally wanders, though it is susceptible to ambush by the crude scientism of which Mr. Hitchens occasionally avails himself—include: Where did the universe come from, and is it governed by purpose?
As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr. Hitchens's readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame.
However, isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible from the communities and interpretive traditions that have elaborated its teaching is invalid. It is like deriving the meaning of the Constitution today by reading its provisions without reference to The Federalist Papers, which provides authoritative commentary on its principles; without reference to the two centuries of cases and controversies through which the Supreme Court has sought to construe its meaning; and without reference to the two centuries of experience through which the American people have sought to put the institutional framework it outlines into practice.
In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.
Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.
Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.
Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings—woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes—are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).
That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women—a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation—is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.
link
PETER BERKOWITZ
Attacking "God" has become a lucrative book business. But there's not much substance behind the latest atheist tracts.
"There is nothing new under the sun," proclaims the Book of Ecclesiastes. The rise of the new new atheism confirms this ancient biblical wisdom.
Of course the famous words of Ecclesiastes should not be taken in a slavishly literal sense, a technique that is all-too-common among those who think they can refute belief in God by showing that the Bible abounds in demonstrably false and self-contradictory statements.
But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist (2007).
Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.
So Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing.
The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently and most forcefully and wittily in God Is Not Great by my friend Mr. Hitchens. It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart.
But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil. Consider Mr. Hitchens's contention, elaborated at length and with gusto, that religion by its very nature compels people to behave cruelly and violently. According to Mr. Hitchens, religion educates children to hate nonbelievers, encourages grown-ups to engage in slaughter and conquest for God's greater glory, and obliges the "true believer" to restlessly circle the globe subduing peoples and nations until "the whole world bows the knee."
The bloody history of oppression and war undertaken on behalf of the gods and God, from time immemorial, makes all decent people shudder. But Mr. Hitchens knows perfectly well that human beings are not born in Rousseauian purity and freedom, and then made savage by the imposition of the chains of religion. Therefore, he should have asked whether and to what extent the varieties of religion have inflamed or rather disciplined humanity's powerful built-in propensity, attested to by social science, to fight and kill. But he didn't.
Such a question opens intriguing possibilities. Mr. Hitchens mocks the crudity of the biblical principle known in Latin as lex talionis, or an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot." But suppose, as Jewish teaching suggests, that the biblical principle put an end to the practice of taking a leg for a foot and a life for an eye, and in its place established a principle that, though differently interpreted today, remains a cornerstone of our notion of justice—that the punishment should fit the crime.
Similarly, Mr. Hitchens heaps scorn on the biblical story of Abraham's binding of Isaac, in which, at the last moment, an angel stays Abraham's hand. What kind of barbarian, wonders Mr. Hitchens, would prepare to sacrifice his son at God's command, and what kind of morally stunted individuals would honor such a man, or the deity who made the demand? Yet Mr. Hitchens's categorical claim that religion poisons everything is undermined by the common interpretation according to which God's testing of Abraham taught, among other things, that the then widespread practice of child-sacrifice was contrary to God's will, and must be put to an end forever.
At the same time, Mr. Hitchens has next to nothing to say about the historical role of religion, particularly Christianity, particularly in America, in nourishing the soil in which our widely and deeply shared beliefs in liberty, democracy and equality took root and grew strong—a subject dealt with perceptively by Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter in his recent book Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion.
Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity, dwarfing religion's sins, committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the challenge with sophistry: "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." But who is behaving defensively here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity's evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
Nor is his 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.
Even were he to concede that religion doesn't poison everything, Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually operates—in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and modern physics—he concludes that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule."
This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a "great paleontologist" and whose authority he invokes in support of the proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution. Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are religious, Gould commented amusingly that "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
These lines are quoted in The Dawkins Delusion, by Alistair McGrath, who holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Oxford, where he is now professor of historical theology, and by his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who studied experimental psychology at Oxford and is currently a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. According to the McGraths, Gould was correct to think that both conventional religious belief and atheism are compatible with natural science, in part because "there are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method." Such questions—toward which the mind naturally wanders, though it is susceptible to ambush by the crude scientism of which Mr. Hitchens occasionally avails himself—include: Where did the universe come from, and is it governed by purpose?
As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr. Hitchens's readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame.
However, isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible from the communities and interpretive traditions that have elaborated its teaching is invalid. It is like deriving the meaning of the Constitution today by reading its provisions without reference to The Federalist Papers, which provides authoritative commentary on its principles; without reference to the two centuries of cases and controversies through which the Supreme Court has sought to construe its meaning; and without reference to the two centuries of experience through which the American people have sought to put the institutional framework it outlines into practice.
In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.
Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.
Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.
Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings—woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes—are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).
That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women—a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation—is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.
link
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Ross Douthat
Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
link
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
link
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
"Frank Brennan answers atheist manifestos"
Book Review: Frank Brennan answers atheist manifestos
Frank Brennan June 05, 2007
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens, Twelve, New York, 305pp
The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Michel Onfray, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2007, 219pp
Against Religion, Tamas Pataki, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007, 136pp
These anti-religious tomes arrived at my bedside when I was hospitalised with acute renal failure. Being in a state hospital, I had no idea of the religious affiliations, if any, of my doctors or nurses. I did not inquire, though I noted one wearing a hijab and some others wearing crosses or religious medals. Each day a different church volunteer came to my four bed ward offering me the Eucharist. We would pray together briefly. One night a priest came and anointed me. I received cards and greetings from people offering their prayers. None of this disrupted the hospital routine and it helped me in my hour of need. As the media had reported my hospitalisation, the hospital authorities had to place strict limits on visitors. One evening a charge sister asked if two women at my bedside were on the approved list. I told her that we did not mess with Aboriginal matriarchs. These two women had discovered my presence in the hospital and came to pray over me, telling me that I still had much work to do.
Prior to the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006), I had presumed that in western intellectual circles the atheists were ahead on points and that they were little troubled by the doings of those they regarded as well meaning, slightly befuddled religious people. Like them, I had strong concerns about fundamentalists who used their simplistic religious beliefs to buttress their commitment to violent or undemocratic action. I now realise that Dawkins and his ilk are upset even by religious people like me, perhaps especially by religious people like me.
Dawkins claims that moderation in faith fosters fanaticism: “even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes”. Dawkins’ “take home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of perversion of real, decent religion”. The same argument would not be put for scientific inquiry. Imagine a call to ban all scientific inquiry because those who engage in responsible scientific inquiry may be providing the opportunity for fanatics to harness science for their own purposes. Dawkins and his ilk think religious belief of any kind is meaningless, infantile and demeaning, so nothing is lost by agitating in the most illiberal way for the suppression of all religion and not just religious extremism which causes harm to others.
The successful marketing of The God Delusion has now unleashed a steady flow of anti-religious rantings from intelligent authors who have thrown respect for the other and careful argument to the wind, staking bold claims for the destruction of religion. Instead of proposing strategies for weeding out religious fundamentalists who pose a threat to the freedom, dignity and rights of others, these authors are proposing a scorched earth policy of killing off all religion.
Christopher Hitchens has visited most of the trouble spots of the world. He is an acute journalistic critic of warring parties in any dispute. But in God is Not Great he is not the bystander adjudicating between the fundamentalist Muslim suicide bombers and the conservative Christian backers of the Bush White House. He is a belligerent, unyielding disputant asserting that religion ought have no place at the table of public deliberation. While he, who is not Irish, thinks Mother Teresa had no right to express her opinion about divorce law reform in Ireland, he has no hesitation in telling Australians about what we should be doing in Iraq. Why not the same rule for political intervention by outsiders, whether or not they are religious?
Hitchens identifies four irreducible objections to any religious faith: “that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” He presumes that any believing Christian or Jew must subscribe to a literalist reading of Genesis as if it were a scientific text purporting to describe the origins of man and the cosmos. And yet, no scientific theory about the origin of man or the cosmos undermines or changes my reading of Genesis, any more than it undermines or changes my reading of Aboriginal creation myths.
In the wake of death threats for having offered shelter to his friend Salman Rushdie, he concludes with one of his many universal judgments against all religions and all religious persons: “The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognise it have forfeited their right to exist?” It is not obvious to me. He thinks organised religion should have a lot on its conscience being “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive towards children”.
Hitchens has dedicated his book to the novelist Ian McEwan “whose body of fiction shows an extraordinary ability to elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the supernatural”. Hitchens had never been religious but in his Marxist phase he “did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered” and he admired Trotsky who had a sense “of the unquenchable yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent.
For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not quite abandoned.” Now that he is neither poor nor oppressed he sees no need for transcendence beyond the strictly material world; he is content with an elucidation of the numinous in the written word as from the pen of McEwan. He does think “We have to transcend our prehistory” which includes “all postures of submission and surrender.”
He has no good word for any Christian or religious person except for Oscar Romero and qualified approval of Martin Luther King. However of King, he opines, “In no real as opposed to nominal sense was he a Christian”. He has no time for the argument that some religious people should be judged favourably because of their good humanitarian because the best relief workers he has met are secularists anyway.
He does concede that “religious faith is…. ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.” He does see a place for conscience, “whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking”. For him, “Ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.”
Some of us do find that we can form and inform our conscience even better when we believe that a loving God is accompanying us in the lonely chambers of decision. Some of us stand tallest when we submit and surrender to death, darkness and the other with dignity, and in love – with a religious sensibility.
Michel Onfray’s The Atheist Manifesto is one of those books you can judge by its back cover. It portrays him against a blank wall with a vacuum cleaner at his feet. His book is the result of a flurried, philosophical spring clean of history. He has swept up a potpourri of anti-religious content over the centuries and prefaced each collection of detritus with sweeping assertions such as: “all three monotheisms have a negative attitude toward the joy of life and even toward some of the basic human drives”; “monotheism loathes intelligence”; “in science, the church has always been wrong about everything: faced with epistemological truth it automatically persecutes the discoverer”; “monotheisms have no love for intelligence, books, knowledge, science”.
The Catholic Church “excels in the destruction of civilisations. It invented ethnocide”; and monotheism is fatally fixated on death”. The argument for the last assertion is supported by the outrageous claim that Pope John Paul II “actively defend(ed) the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi by the Catholic Hutu of Rwanda”. There is no evidence for such a claim. Consider the Pope’s homily at the opening of the African Synod on 10 April 1994 a few days after the killings commenced:
I wish to recall now in particular the people and the Church of Rwanda, who these days are being tried by an upsetting tragedy linked in particular to the dramatic assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. With you, reunited in this African Synod, and in communion of spirit with the Bishops of Rwanda who could not be with us today, I feel the need to launch an appeal to stop that homicide of violence. Together with you, I raise my voice to tell all of you: stop these acts of violence! Stop these tragedies! Stop these fratricidal massacres!
Onfray begins the book with the stylistic flourish of a series of “mystical postcards” and assures the reader, “In none of those places did I feel superior to those who believed in spirits, in the immortal soul, in the breath of the gods, the presence of angels, the power of prayer, the effectiveness of ritual, the validity of incantations, communion with voodoo spirits, haemoglobin-based miracles, the Virgin’s tears, the resurrection of a crucified man……Never.”
By the book’s end, the reader realises that the answer was not “Never” but “Always”. Onfray writes with a haughty and dismissive arrogance towards any person who has a religious sentiment. He even denies equality of treatment in the public square to any religious believer. “Equality between the believing Jew and the philosopher who proceeds according to the hypothetico-deductive model? Equality between the believer and the thinker who deconstructs the manufacture of belief, the building of a myth, the creation of a fable? Equality between the Muslim and the scrupulous analyst? If we say yes to these questions, then let’s stop thinking.”
What are we to do – start fighting? Do we not need to accord equality to all these persons in the public square of the free and democratic society, applying the same rules to each of them whether or not they are religious? And is this not the real challenge for us in this post September 11 world? Onfray’s social and political philosophy is very thin. A pacifist, he has no time for just war theory. A simple utilitarian, he thinks “good and evil continue to matter…simply as factors in the struggle to ensure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number”.
He claims the Church supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Fr George Zabelka blessed the crew of the Enola Gay. No mention of Fr Pedro Arrupe, later the Superior General of the Jesuits, who ministered to the survivors at Hiroshima and then spent years travelling the globe speaking against nuclear war espousing his message of The Planet to Heal. No mention of the Second Vatican Council’s most authoritative and binding declaration: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”
Tamas Pataki has contributed an Australian home-grown polemic Against Religion. He is less shrill and more measured than his French and English colleagues, and adds local colour with attacks on Peter Costello whose “appearances at Hillsong received an unusual degree of attention from the Australian media”. The “mendacious John Howard” joins company with “the apocalyptic Tony Blair”.
He argues that religion captures the mind when reinforced and held in place by unconscious needs and phantasies. Religious people are narcissistic individuals who want to be loved and to feel special. They find it difficult to accept that “there is nothing higher than earthly human love because the love of ordinary men and women is so fragile and incestuously tainted for them. So they must seek something ‘higher’, something transcendent.”
All three authors find it inconceivable that a religious person could accord reason and science their due place, could live a balanced life without being sexually repressed, and could welcome the insights of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Bertrand Russell. Hitchens asserts, “Thanks to the telescope and microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important…It can now only impede or retard”. Regardless of the knowledge provided us by the telescope and microscope, every person, every generation and every culture has to make existential sense of the abyss which will always lie beyond the reach of the telescope and the microscope.
The thinking, self-critical religious person parts company with these three authors at the edge of what can be known about the self and about the world. For these authors, there is nothing beyond that edge because it is not knowable, though each of them occasionally lapses into a yearning for the transcendent or at least the numinous. The religious person embraces the mystery of what lies beyond the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown and the other.
The US liberal Ronald Dworkin has recently published Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton University Press, 2006) He posits the only realistic choice for the modern nation state as being. “A religious nation that tolerates non-belief? Or a secular nation that tolerates religion?” In our globalised world, there will always be a Mother Teresa or a Christopher Hitchens wanting to make their contribution to public debate about law and policy even in those countries where they do not enjoy citizenship. We need rules for engagement which apply equally to persons of religious faith and none. We need to distinguish the role of the individual citizen and the role of the person in a position of public trust whether in the executive, legislature or judiciary.
That public trust must be discharged faithfully whether or not the office holder be a religious person. Religious beliefs and philosophical standpoints may well help to inform the discharge of that public trust. It is now too simplistic to assert that engagement in the public square or in a position of public trust ought to be open only to those who have no religious beliefs or who leave their religious commitments at home.
Public intellectuals like the present three pamphleteers may relish the public expression of scorn and disdain for all religions. But they do nothing to assist the needed public discernment of the limits on personal opinions and preferences in the public square and in law and public policy.
One of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner, in volume 22 of his Theological Investigations (Crossroad, 1989) asked two questions about dialogue and tolerance as the foundations of a humane society:
* Are you really willing to grant freedom to the other person, insofar as it can be done without harming others, even when you hold a different opinion and have the power to prevent others from doing what they want?
* Are you willing and patient enough, as far as possible, to find out and try to feel what others (or another group) want to be and how they want to understand themselves?
Sadly these three intelligent, gifted and illiberal authors have demonstrated that it is not only Islamic fundamentalists who fail to understand the rules for civil discourse and engagement in the post September 11 public square.
– Fr Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University and professor of human rights and social justice at the University of Notre Dame Australia. His latest book is Acting on Conscience: How can we responsibly mix law, religion and politics? (University of Queensland Press, 2007). He appeared at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this month with Michel Onfray and Tamas Pataki. This review is an expanded version of the review first published in The Weekend Australian, 2-3 June 2007.
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Frank Brennan June 05, 2007
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens, Twelve, New York, 305pp
The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Michel Onfray, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2007, 219pp
Against Religion, Tamas Pataki, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007, 136pp
These anti-religious tomes arrived at my bedside when I was hospitalised with acute renal failure. Being in a state hospital, I had no idea of the religious affiliations, if any, of my doctors or nurses. I did not inquire, though I noted one wearing a hijab and some others wearing crosses or religious medals. Each day a different church volunteer came to my four bed ward offering me the Eucharist. We would pray together briefly. One night a priest came and anointed me. I received cards and greetings from people offering their prayers. None of this disrupted the hospital routine and it helped me in my hour of need. As the media had reported my hospitalisation, the hospital authorities had to place strict limits on visitors. One evening a charge sister asked if two women at my bedside were on the approved list. I told her that we did not mess with Aboriginal matriarchs. These two women had discovered my presence in the hospital and came to pray over me, telling me that I still had much work to do.
Prior to the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006), I had presumed that in western intellectual circles the atheists were ahead on points and that they were little troubled by the doings of those they regarded as well meaning, slightly befuddled religious people. Like them, I had strong concerns about fundamentalists who used their simplistic religious beliefs to buttress their commitment to violent or undemocratic action. I now realise that Dawkins and his ilk are upset even by religious people like me, perhaps especially by religious people like me.
Dawkins claims that moderation in faith fosters fanaticism: “even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes”. Dawkins’ “take home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of perversion of real, decent religion”. The same argument would not be put for scientific inquiry. Imagine a call to ban all scientific inquiry because those who engage in responsible scientific inquiry may be providing the opportunity for fanatics to harness science for their own purposes. Dawkins and his ilk think religious belief of any kind is meaningless, infantile and demeaning, so nothing is lost by agitating in the most illiberal way for the suppression of all religion and not just religious extremism which causes harm to others.
The successful marketing of The God Delusion has now unleashed a steady flow of anti-religious rantings from intelligent authors who have thrown respect for the other and careful argument to the wind, staking bold claims for the destruction of religion. Instead of proposing strategies for weeding out religious fundamentalists who pose a threat to the freedom, dignity and rights of others, these authors are proposing a scorched earth policy of killing off all religion.
Christopher Hitchens has visited most of the trouble spots of the world. He is an acute journalistic critic of warring parties in any dispute. But in God is Not Great he is not the bystander adjudicating between the fundamentalist Muslim suicide bombers and the conservative Christian backers of the Bush White House. He is a belligerent, unyielding disputant asserting that religion ought have no place at the table of public deliberation. While he, who is not Irish, thinks Mother Teresa had no right to express her opinion about divorce law reform in Ireland, he has no hesitation in telling Australians about what we should be doing in Iraq. Why not the same rule for political intervention by outsiders, whether or not they are religious?
Hitchens identifies four irreducible objections to any religious faith: “that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” He presumes that any believing Christian or Jew must subscribe to a literalist reading of Genesis as if it were a scientific text purporting to describe the origins of man and the cosmos. And yet, no scientific theory about the origin of man or the cosmos undermines or changes my reading of Genesis, any more than it undermines or changes my reading of Aboriginal creation myths.
In the wake of death threats for having offered shelter to his friend Salman Rushdie, he concludes with one of his many universal judgments against all religions and all religious persons: “The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognise it have forfeited their right to exist?” It is not obvious to me. He thinks organised religion should have a lot on its conscience being “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive towards children”.
Hitchens has dedicated his book to the novelist Ian McEwan “whose body of fiction shows an extraordinary ability to elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the supernatural”. Hitchens had never been religious but in his Marxist phase he “did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered” and he admired Trotsky who had a sense “of the unquenchable yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent.
For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not quite abandoned.” Now that he is neither poor nor oppressed he sees no need for transcendence beyond the strictly material world; he is content with an elucidation of the numinous in the written word as from the pen of McEwan. He does think “We have to transcend our prehistory” which includes “all postures of submission and surrender.”
He has no good word for any Christian or religious person except for Oscar Romero and qualified approval of Martin Luther King. However of King, he opines, “In no real as opposed to nominal sense was he a Christian”. He has no time for the argument that some religious people should be judged favourably because of their good humanitarian because the best relief workers he has met are secularists anyway.
He does concede that “religious faith is…. ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.” He does see a place for conscience, “whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking”. For him, “Ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.”
Some of us do find that we can form and inform our conscience even better when we believe that a loving God is accompanying us in the lonely chambers of decision. Some of us stand tallest when we submit and surrender to death, darkness and the other with dignity, and in love – with a religious sensibility.
Michel Onfray’s The Atheist Manifesto is one of those books you can judge by its back cover. It portrays him against a blank wall with a vacuum cleaner at his feet. His book is the result of a flurried, philosophical spring clean of history. He has swept up a potpourri of anti-religious content over the centuries and prefaced each collection of detritus with sweeping assertions such as: “all three monotheisms have a negative attitude toward the joy of life and even toward some of the basic human drives”; “monotheism loathes intelligence”; “in science, the church has always been wrong about everything: faced with epistemological truth it automatically persecutes the discoverer”; “monotheisms have no love for intelligence, books, knowledge, science”.
The Catholic Church “excels in the destruction of civilisations. It invented ethnocide”; and monotheism is fatally fixated on death”. The argument for the last assertion is supported by the outrageous claim that Pope John Paul II “actively defend(ed) the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi by the Catholic Hutu of Rwanda”. There is no evidence for such a claim. Consider the Pope’s homily at the opening of the African Synod on 10 April 1994 a few days after the killings commenced:
I wish to recall now in particular the people and the Church of Rwanda, who these days are being tried by an upsetting tragedy linked in particular to the dramatic assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. With you, reunited in this African Synod, and in communion of spirit with the Bishops of Rwanda who could not be with us today, I feel the need to launch an appeal to stop that homicide of violence. Together with you, I raise my voice to tell all of you: stop these acts of violence! Stop these tragedies! Stop these fratricidal massacres!
Onfray begins the book with the stylistic flourish of a series of “mystical postcards” and assures the reader, “In none of those places did I feel superior to those who believed in spirits, in the immortal soul, in the breath of the gods, the presence of angels, the power of prayer, the effectiveness of ritual, the validity of incantations, communion with voodoo spirits, haemoglobin-based miracles, the Virgin’s tears, the resurrection of a crucified man……Never.”
By the book’s end, the reader realises that the answer was not “Never” but “Always”. Onfray writes with a haughty and dismissive arrogance towards any person who has a religious sentiment. He even denies equality of treatment in the public square to any religious believer. “Equality between the believing Jew and the philosopher who proceeds according to the hypothetico-deductive model? Equality between the believer and the thinker who deconstructs the manufacture of belief, the building of a myth, the creation of a fable? Equality between the Muslim and the scrupulous analyst? If we say yes to these questions, then let’s stop thinking.”
What are we to do – start fighting? Do we not need to accord equality to all these persons in the public square of the free and democratic society, applying the same rules to each of them whether or not they are religious? And is this not the real challenge for us in this post September 11 world? Onfray’s social and political philosophy is very thin. A pacifist, he has no time for just war theory. A simple utilitarian, he thinks “good and evil continue to matter…simply as factors in the struggle to ensure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number”.
He claims the Church supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Fr George Zabelka blessed the crew of the Enola Gay. No mention of Fr Pedro Arrupe, later the Superior General of the Jesuits, who ministered to the survivors at Hiroshima and then spent years travelling the globe speaking against nuclear war espousing his message of The Planet to Heal. No mention of the Second Vatican Council’s most authoritative and binding declaration: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”
Tamas Pataki has contributed an Australian home-grown polemic Against Religion. He is less shrill and more measured than his French and English colleagues, and adds local colour with attacks on Peter Costello whose “appearances at Hillsong received an unusual degree of attention from the Australian media”. The “mendacious John Howard” joins company with “the apocalyptic Tony Blair”.
He argues that religion captures the mind when reinforced and held in place by unconscious needs and phantasies. Religious people are narcissistic individuals who want to be loved and to feel special. They find it difficult to accept that “there is nothing higher than earthly human love because the love of ordinary men and women is so fragile and incestuously tainted for them. So they must seek something ‘higher’, something transcendent.”
All three authors find it inconceivable that a religious person could accord reason and science their due place, could live a balanced life without being sexually repressed, and could welcome the insights of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Bertrand Russell. Hitchens asserts, “Thanks to the telescope and microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important…It can now only impede or retard”. Regardless of the knowledge provided us by the telescope and microscope, every person, every generation and every culture has to make existential sense of the abyss which will always lie beyond the reach of the telescope and the microscope.
The thinking, self-critical religious person parts company with these three authors at the edge of what can be known about the self and about the world. For these authors, there is nothing beyond that edge because it is not knowable, though each of them occasionally lapses into a yearning for the transcendent or at least the numinous. The religious person embraces the mystery of what lies beyond the abyss of death, the dark, the unknown and the other.
The US liberal Ronald Dworkin has recently published Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton University Press, 2006) He posits the only realistic choice for the modern nation state as being. “A religious nation that tolerates non-belief? Or a secular nation that tolerates religion?” In our globalised world, there will always be a Mother Teresa or a Christopher Hitchens wanting to make their contribution to public debate about law and policy even in those countries where they do not enjoy citizenship. We need rules for engagement which apply equally to persons of religious faith and none. We need to distinguish the role of the individual citizen and the role of the person in a position of public trust whether in the executive, legislature or judiciary.
That public trust must be discharged faithfully whether or not the office holder be a religious person. Religious beliefs and philosophical standpoints may well help to inform the discharge of that public trust. It is now too simplistic to assert that engagement in the public square or in a position of public trust ought to be open only to those who have no religious beliefs or who leave their religious commitments at home.
Public intellectuals like the present three pamphleteers may relish the public expression of scorn and disdain for all religions. But they do nothing to assist the needed public discernment of the limits on personal opinions and preferences in the public square and in law and public policy.
One of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner, in volume 22 of his Theological Investigations (Crossroad, 1989) asked two questions about dialogue and tolerance as the foundations of a humane society:
* Are you really willing to grant freedom to the other person, insofar as it can be done without harming others, even when you hold a different opinion and have the power to prevent others from doing what they want?
* Are you willing and patient enough, as far as possible, to find out and try to feel what others (or another group) want to be and how they want to understand themselves?
Sadly these three intelligent, gifted and illiberal authors have demonstrated that it is not only Islamic fundamentalists who fail to understand the rules for civil discourse and engagement in the post September 11 public square.
– Fr Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University and professor of human rights and social justice at the University of Notre Dame Australia. His latest book is Acting on Conscience: How can we responsibly mix law, religion and politics? (University of Queensland Press, 2007). He appeared at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this month with Michel Onfray and Tamas Pataki. This review is an expanded version of the review first published in The Weekend Australian, 2-3 June 2007.
link
Friday, June 1, 2007
"God Is Not Great" review by Sam Schulman
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve. 320 pp. $24.99
Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history—punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 created an appetite not only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe.
Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
_____________
Hitchens certainly does not share the worst political faults of the others, who tend to skirt the subject of Islam altogether. He begins, indeed, by thoroughly eviscerating the religious program of the “Islamofacists” now waging war against the West. Only then does he proceed to take us on the familiar guided tour of monotheistic religion in general and its metaphysical underpinnings. Highlights here include his discussion of the philosophical “argument from design” that is said to prove the existence of a divine creator. Any such proposition, Hitchens pronounces summarily, is given the lie by the manifestly absurd glitches in our own design as a species: “our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements.”
Other religious claims, Hitchens writes, show similarly clear traces of their man-made invention, and are all the more contemptible for that. The Ten Commandments he finds pitiless. On the one hand they are trite—everyone knows that murder and adultery are bad things. On the other hand they demand of us the impossible. (“One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions . . . but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.”) Moreover, the God of the Torah neglects to condemn other and arguably greater evils: racism, genocide, slavery. The purview of this God, Hitchens complains, is “oppressively confined and local. None of these [Hebrew] provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence.”
The same human stain corrupts arguments for the divinity of Jesus, about whose historical uniqueness Hitchens has his doubts. “There were many deranged prophets roaming Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be God or the son of God.” Here Hitchens takes on C.S. Lewis, the strongest modern apologist for Christianity, who posited in Mere Christianity (1943) that Jesus must have been either actually the Son of God or a complete madman of no interest in the least. “I do credit [Lewis] with honesty and with some courage,” Hitchens concedes, setting him up for the kill:
When he turns to Islam, Hitchens, unlike many of his fellow polemicists, does not step gingerly. He questions whether it is a separate religion at all, as opposed to “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms” from Judaism and Christianity. But, precisely because of its lack of originality, Islam is, for him, also the purest type of religion—that is, a showcase of everything evil about religious belief of any kind. After all, in today’s decadent West, “many religions now come to us with ingratiating smirks and outstretched hands.” Islam refreshingly reminds us of the unvarnished truth—which is “how barbarically [the others] behaved when they were strong”—and therefore of the need to free ourselves from all priestcraft if we are ever to realize our human potential for self-sufficient virtue.
Such virtue is, for Hitchens, emphatically not to be achieved by following religious teachings; nor are they the source of it. Human decency, he asserts, “does not derive from religion. It precedes it.” He points to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, whose moral insights are more valuable than anything we can learn from Scripture. By contrast, most of the evil people in history have been themselves religious; Hitchens adduces the Roman Catholic element in the Tutsi genocide of the Hutu in Rwanda, the Lord’s Resistance Army of Northern Uganda, the Spanish Inquisition. The British, he assures us, abolished slavery not because of agitation by Christian evangelicals but because the practice had become unprofitable.
_____________
According to some of today’s atheists, like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, religion is no longer necessary because mankind has outgrown it: the knowledge supplied jointly by Darwin and modern neurophysiology has made religion obsolete. For others, like Sam Harris (and Brooke Allen in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), it is modern liberal political arrangements that have made God-given laws otiose. Hitchens is distinct. He does not feel that science has made us superior to religion at last. For him, religion is fundamentally flawed—a petri dish for all the vices that flesh is heir to. It is proof of the enormous evil of which mankind is capable.
This might be called the Hitchens version of original sin—a doctrine he of course despises. At heart Hitchens is an unrelieved misanthrope. And, to his credit, he does exhibit a deeper familiarity with human depravity than any of our other anti-religionist authors, whose faith in the perfectibility of mankind is almost comically touching. The question, given his root-and-branch misanthropy, is where on earth he derives his conviction that mankind would be better off without religion.
The answer would seem to be: nowhere. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of sexual repression, which Hitchens blames on religion and regards (it goes without saying) as an unmitigated evil. But sexual repression, in one form or another, has characterized every human community in history, and always will. Religion can be a highly efficient means of enforcing sexual repression; but if it did not exist, some other means would have been found to impose limitations on the expression of human sexuality.
Or take the issue of religion and politics. In his own lifetime, as it happens, Hitchens has himself been a true believer, albeit not in God but in revolutionary Marxism. His hard-won and long-overdue disillusionment with that creed has given him some sympathy for religious believers: “to some extent I know what you are going through.” It has also, he thinks, given him special standing to deal with an anticipated objection to his argument about political evil—the objection, namely, that in every instance where power has been allied with militant atheism, the result has been the systematic, deliberate murder of citizens on a scale that renders trivial the total number of victims of religious persecution throughout recorded history.
Indeed, in the face of the horrors perpetrated by “scientific socialism,” whether of the Communist or Nazi variety, most of today’s atheists tend to fall mute. Hitchens, however, has a riposte. Communism and Nazism “did not so much negate religion,” he writes, “as seek to replace” it. That is, the essential wickedness of “scientific” totalitarian regimes is traceable in his view to the fact that they are themselves religions. For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name.
_____________
What, then, does Hitchens wish to put in place of religion? He calls for a new Enlightenment, and proposes that we realize its promise by imitating the Socratic method of rational thinking—a suggestion that compels him to engage in some fancy footwork in order to deny there was anything supernatural in Socrates’ insistence that he had a daimon, an inner voice, that enabled him to distinguish good from evil. But this recommendation falls into the same morass as Hitchens’s urging of Shakespeare and Tolstoy over the Bible as teachers of morality. In each case the point is not only anachronistic but odd, given that none of these sages, let alone the Enlightenment itself, is remotely conceivable apart from the religious civilization out of which they all sprang.
There is worse to come. Hitchens is what Hazlitt would call a “good hater.” He hates the idea of the fall of man. He hates the doctrine of atonement and sacrifice. He hates the notion of eternal punishment: “ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.” He hates the proscription of masturbation and the prescription of circumcision. Most of all, it emerges, he hates Hanukkah.
Why Hanukkah? It is not just the fact that, in America, the Jews borrowed “shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with Christmas,” a holiday that is itself an “annexation . . . of a pagan Northland solstice.” It is the underlying meaning of the events that Hanukkah memorializes: namely, the success of the Maccabean revolt against the heretical Jewish Hellenizers in the 2nd century b.c.e. For, as Hitchens reads it, that victory—won by a hair—allowed Jewish monotheism to survive, and thereby “eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could,” he laments, “have been spared the whole thing.”
This stroke of counterhistory has been heavily prettified in the details. On the one hand, as Hitchens tells it, there were the Hellenized Jews of Palestine—suave, cosmopolitan, athletic, well educated, yearning to enjoy the finer things in life as represented by their Greek overlords. On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists of the day, the Jewish reactionaries seeking only to proscribe and to prescribe. In Hitchens’s reconstruction, the Maccabean revolt sounds like nothing so much as the struggle between “aesthetes” and “hearties” in the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
But the Maccabean wars were not like that. The Greeks were not fighting for the mellow and the metro- sexual. They aimed to pour hogs’ blood over the altar, erect statues of Jove in the sanctuary, eradicate Jewish identity itself. Had the Maccabees failed, there would have been a victory not of secular humanism over religious fundamentalism but of the pitiless Olympian gods—and their Egyptian co-deities—over monotheism and the complexities of ethical life.
Hitchens’s yearning for a world purified of Jews (and therefore of Christians and Muslims) may remind some of Nietzsche. The comparison is unfair, but inevitable. Hitchens’s sketch of a new Enlightenment posits not a world of supermen but only a mild utopia, populated by men in togas discoursing eternally on the eternal verities, a world like the one painted by the Victorian romanticist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, or envisioned by Oscar Wilde in his gullible, amateurish tract The Soul of Man under Socialism. But that is just the trouble. Shorn of the culture we have, a culture nurtured and preserved by monotheistic religion, his proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism. Hitchens here shows himself to be more credulous and sentimental—and much more insidious—than any of the religious mythmakers he so earnestly despises.
link
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve. 320 pp. $24.99
Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history—punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 created an appetite not only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe.
Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
_____________
Hitchens certainly does not share the worst political faults of the others, who tend to skirt the subject of Islam altogether. He begins, indeed, by thoroughly eviscerating the religious program of the “Islamofacists” now waging war against the West. Only then does he proceed to take us on the familiar guided tour of monotheistic religion in general and its metaphysical underpinnings. Highlights here include his discussion of the philosophical “argument from design” that is said to prove the existence of a divine creator. Any such proposition, Hitchens pronounces summarily, is given the lie by the manifestly absurd glitches in our own design as a species: “our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements.”
Other religious claims, Hitchens writes, show similarly clear traces of their man-made invention, and are all the more contemptible for that. The Ten Commandments he finds pitiless. On the one hand they are trite—everyone knows that murder and adultery are bad things. On the other hand they demand of us the impossible. (“One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions . . . but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.”) Moreover, the God of the Torah neglects to condemn other and arguably greater evils: racism, genocide, slavery. The purview of this God, Hitchens complains, is “oppressively confined and local. None of these [Hebrew] provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence.”
The same human stain corrupts arguments for the divinity of Jesus, about whose historical uniqueness Hitchens has his doubts. “There were many deranged prophets roaming Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be God or the son of God.” Here Hitchens takes on C.S. Lewis, the strongest modern apologist for Christianity, who posited in Mere Christianity (1943) that Jesus must have been either actually the Son of God or a complete madman of no interest in the least. “I do credit [Lewis] with honesty and with some courage,” Hitchens concedes, setting him up for the kill:
Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud. . . . Well, it can be stated with certainty, and on their own evidence, that the Gospels are most certainly not literal truth.
When he turns to Islam, Hitchens, unlike many of his fellow polemicists, does not step gingerly. He questions whether it is a separate religion at all, as opposed to “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms” from Judaism and Christianity. But, precisely because of its lack of originality, Islam is, for him, also the purest type of religion—that is, a showcase of everything evil about religious belief of any kind. After all, in today’s decadent West, “many religions now come to us with ingratiating smirks and outstretched hands.” Islam refreshingly reminds us of the unvarnished truth—which is “how barbarically [the others] behaved when they were strong”—and therefore of the need to free ourselves from all priestcraft if we are ever to realize our human potential for self-sufficient virtue.
Such virtue is, for Hitchens, emphatically not to be achieved by following religious teachings; nor are they the source of it. Human decency, he asserts, “does not derive from religion. It precedes it.” He points to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, whose moral insights are more valuable than anything we can learn from Scripture. By contrast, most of the evil people in history have been themselves religious; Hitchens adduces the Roman Catholic element in the Tutsi genocide of the Hutu in Rwanda, the Lord’s Resistance Army of Northern Uganda, the Spanish Inquisition. The British, he assures us, abolished slavery not because of agitation by Christian evangelicals but because the practice had become unprofitable.
_____________
According to some of today’s atheists, like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, religion is no longer necessary because mankind has outgrown it: the knowledge supplied jointly by Darwin and modern neurophysiology has made religion obsolete. For others, like Sam Harris (and Brooke Allen in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), it is modern liberal political arrangements that have made God-given laws otiose. Hitchens is distinct. He does not feel that science has made us superior to religion at last. For him, religion is fundamentally flawed—a petri dish for all the vices that flesh is heir to. It is proof of the enormous evil of which mankind is capable.
This might be called the Hitchens version of original sin—a doctrine he of course despises. At heart Hitchens is an unrelieved misanthrope. And, to his credit, he does exhibit a deeper familiarity with human depravity than any of our other anti-religionist authors, whose faith in the perfectibility of mankind is almost comically touching. The question, given his root-and-branch misanthropy, is where on earth he derives his conviction that mankind would be better off without religion.
The answer would seem to be: nowhere. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of sexual repression, which Hitchens blames on religion and regards (it goes without saying) as an unmitigated evil. But sexual repression, in one form or another, has characterized every human community in history, and always will. Religion can be a highly efficient means of enforcing sexual repression; but if it did not exist, some other means would have been found to impose limitations on the expression of human sexuality.
Or take the issue of religion and politics. In his own lifetime, as it happens, Hitchens has himself been a true believer, albeit not in God but in revolutionary Marxism. His hard-won and long-overdue disillusionment with that creed has given him some sympathy for religious believers: “to some extent I know what you are going through.” It has also, he thinks, given him special standing to deal with an anticipated objection to his argument about political evil—the objection, namely, that in every instance where power has been allied with militant atheism, the result has been the systematic, deliberate murder of citizens on a scale that renders trivial the total number of victims of religious persecution throughout recorded history.
Indeed, in the face of the horrors perpetrated by “scientific socialism,” whether of the Communist or Nazi variety, most of today’s atheists tend to fall mute. Hitchens, however, has a riposte. Communism and Nazism “did not so much negate religion,” he writes, “as seek to replace” it. That is, the essential wickedness of “scientific” totalitarian regimes is traceable in his view to the fact that they are themselves religions. For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name.
_____________
What, then, does Hitchens wish to put in place of religion? He calls for a new Enlightenment, and proposes that we realize its promise by imitating the Socratic method of rational thinking—a suggestion that compels him to engage in some fancy footwork in order to deny there was anything supernatural in Socrates’ insistence that he had a daimon, an inner voice, that enabled him to distinguish good from evil. But this recommendation falls into the same morass as Hitchens’s urging of Shakespeare and Tolstoy over the Bible as teachers of morality. In each case the point is not only anachronistic but odd, given that none of these sages, let alone the Enlightenment itself, is remotely conceivable apart from the religious civilization out of which they all sprang.
There is worse to come. Hitchens is what Hazlitt would call a “good hater.” He hates the idea of the fall of man. He hates the doctrine of atonement and sacrifice. He hates the notion of eternal punishment: “ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.” He hates the proscription of masturbation and the prescription of circumcision. Most of all, it emerges, he hates Hanukkah.
Why Hanukkah? It is not just the fact that, in America, the Jews borrowed “shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with Christmas,” a holiday that is itself an “annexation . . . of a pagan Northland solstice.” It is the underlying meaning of the events that Hanukkah memorializes: namely, the success of the Maccabean revolt against the heretical Jewish Hellenizers in the 2nd century b.c.e. For, as Hitchens reads it, that victory—won by a hair—allowed Jewish monotheism to survive, and thereby “eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could,” he laments, “have been spared the whole thing.”
This stroke of counterhistory has been heavily prettified in the details. On the one hand, as Hitchens tells it, there were the Hellenized Jews of Palestine—suave, cosmopolitan, athletic, well educated, yearning to enjoy the finer things in life as represented by their Greek overlords. On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists of the day, the Jewish reactionaries seeking only to proscribe and to prescribe. In Hitchens’s reconstruction, the Maccabean revolt sounds like nothing so much as the struggle between “aesthetes” and “hearties” in the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
But the Maccabean wars were not like that. The Greeks were not fighting for the mellow and the metro- sexual. They aimed to pour hogs’ blood over the altar, erect statues of Jove in the sanctuary, eradicate Jewish identity itself. Had the Maccabees failed, there would have been a victory not of secular humanism over religious fundamentalism but of the pitiless Olympian gods—and their Egyptian co-deities—over monotheism and the complexities of ethical life.
Hitchens’s yearning for a world purified of Jews (and therefore of Christians and Muslims) may remind some of Nietzsche. The comparison is unfair, but inevitable. Hitchens’s sketch of a new Enlightenment posits not a world of supermen but only a mild utopia, populated by men in togas discoursing eternally on the eternal verities, a world like the one painted by the Victorian romanticist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, or envisioned by Oscar Wilde in his gullible, amateurish tract The Soul of Man under Socialism. But that is just the trouble. Shorn of the culture we have, a culture nurtured and preserved by monotheistic religion, his proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism. Hitchens here shows himself to be more credulous and sentimental—and much more insidious—than any of the religious mythmakers he so earnestly despises.
link
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Oxford atheist ridiculed by Anglican theologian during debate
Oxford atheist ridiculed by Anglican theologian during debate
By Jonathan Luxmoore
Oxford, England, 4 April (ENI)--Crusading pro-evolution scientist Richard Dawkins has had his anti-religious claims ridiculed during an Oxford debate with a theologian who once was an atheist like the evolutionist, who is devout in his public denunciations of religion. "Having been an atheist, I discovered religion was in fact an enormously powerful, transformative power for good," said Alister McGrath, Oxford University's professor of Historical Theology.
"The claim that the scientific explanation ends everything, ignores fundamental realities. There's a whole range of human experiences, often involving a longing for something beyond us which brings legitimacy to our core notions and philosophical ideas."
The 54-year-old Anglican priest was debating with Dawkins during Oxford 's Literary Festival in March. Dawkins' post as professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is funded by Hungarian-born Microsoft millionaire Charles Simonyi. His attacks on religion are frequent, and he set up a foundation in December to send atheist books and DVDs to schools in Britain and the United States.
"Far from being enriching, religion is stultifying, impoverishing and limiting," said Dawkins, whose book, "The God Delusion", has sold a million copies since publication in 2006. "Science and religion both attempt to answer the same questions - the difference is that religion gets the answers wrong," the atheist campaigner asserted.
McGrath said, however, science was unable to provide a "guiding moral vision". He noted that non-believers such as the writer Iris Murdoch had agreed on the necessity of a transcendent basis for ethical decisions.
"Although I can't prove Christianity, as I can prove the structure of DNA is a double helix, it is a hypothesis which makes perfect sense, and which gives direction and animation to life," said McGrath, who became a Christian after studying chemistry and molecular biophysics. McGrath recently published "The Dawkins Delusion" as a riposte to the scientist's book.
"Belief in God creates an explanatory framework, which enables you to appreciate and value the sciences while also seeing beyond the beauty and glory of the world to something enriching and ennobling," contended McGrath.
Describing his book as a "consciousness-raising exercise", Dawkins belongs to the London-based National Secular Society, which has since the 19th century campaigned to make Britain atheist. In his speech Dawkins said he had "disposed one by one" of arguments for God's existence, and believed it was "a form of child abuse" to assume children inherited their parents' religion "without consent".
McGrath, however, rejected this, arguing Dawkins had ignored "the dialectic between proving and giving reasons for something," and had falsely assumed science eliminated "the conceptual space for God". "Religion has the capacity to go seriously wrong - it can be dogmatic, intolerant and aggressive, as can other worldviews," said McGrath. "But it can also provide a moral stimulus and raise our imaginative capacities to new heights. For every grand tragedy involving religion, there've been ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good."
link
By Jonathan Luxmoore
Oxford, England, 4 April (ENI)--Crusading pro-evolution scientist Richard Dawkins has had his anti-religious claims ridiculed during an Oxford debate with a theologian who once was an atheist like the evolutionist, who is devout in his public denunciations of religion. "Having been an atheist, I discovered religion was in fact an enormously powerful, transformative power for good," said Alister McGrath, Oxford University's professor of Historical Theology.
"The claim that the scientific explanation ends everything, ignores fundamental realities. There's a whole range of human experiences, often involving a longing for something beyond us which brings legitimacy to our core notions and philosophical ideas."
The 54-year-old Anglican priest was debating with Dawkins during Oxford 's Literary Festival in March. Dawkins' post as professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is funded by Hungarian-born Microsoft millionaire Charles Simonyi. His attacks on religion are frequent, and he set up a foundation in December to send atheist books and DVDs to schools in Britain and the United States.
"Far from being enriching, religion is stultifying, impoverishing and limiting," said Dawkins, whose book, "The God Delusion", has sold a million copies since publication in 2006. "Science and religion both attempt to answer the same questions - the difference is that religion gets the answers wrong," the atheist campaigner asserted.
McGrath said, however, science was unable to provide a "guiding moral vision". He noted that non-believers such as the writer Iris Murdoch had agreed on the necessity of a transcendent basis for ethical decisions.
"Although I can't prove Christianity, as I can prove the structure of DNA is a double helix, it is a hypothesis which makes perfect sense, and which gives direction and animation to life," said McGrath, who became a Christian after studying chemistry and molecular biophysics. McGrath recently published "The Dawkins Delusion" as a riposte to the scientist's book.
"Belief in God creates an explanatory framework, which enables you to appreciate and value the sciences while also seeing beyond the beauty and glory of the world to something enriching and ennobling," contended McGrath.
Describing his book as a "consciousness-raising exercise", Dawkins belongs to the London-based National Secular Society, which has since the 19th century campaigned to make Britain atheist. In his speech Dawkins said he had "disposed one by one" of arguments for God's existence, and believed it was "a form of child abuse" to assume children inherited their parents' religion "without consent".
McGrath, however, rejected this, arguing Dawkins had ignored "the dialectic between proving and giving reasons for something," and had falsely assumed science eliminated "the conceptual space for God". "Religion has the capacity to go seriously wrong - it can be dogmatic, intolerant and aggressive, as can other worldviews," said McGrath. "But it can also provide a moral stimulus and raise our imaginative capacities to new heights. For every grand tragedy involving religion, there've been ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good."
link
Thursday, March 1, 2007
"The Dawkins Confusion" by Alvin Plantinga
The Dawkins Confusion
Naturalism ad absurdum.
by Alvin Plantinga
Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God:
Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God doesn't return the compliment.)
The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown twins of current academic atheism.1 Dawkins has written his book, he says, partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith—at any rate its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.
Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term) and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects. As the above quotation suggests, one shouldn't look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?) If Dawkins ever gets tired of his day job, a promising future awaits him as a writer of political attack ads.
Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.
Chapter 3, "Why There Almost Certainly is No God," is the heart of the book. Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhood—so small as to be negligible for all practical (and most impractical) purposes. Why does he think so?
Here Dawkins doesn't appeal to the usual anti-theistic arguments—the argument from evil, for example, or the claim that it's impossible that there be a being with the attributes believers ascribe to God.2 So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create. Putting it another way, Dawkins says a designer must contain at least as much information as what it creates or designs, and information is inversely related to probability. Therefore, he thinks, God would have to be monumentally complex, hence astronomically improbable; thus it is almost certain that God does not exist.
But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is? Before looking more closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows that our world has not been designed—by God or anyone else. This thought is trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.
How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the universe is without design? Well, if the universe has not been designed, then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided, unorchestrated by any intelligent being.
But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all, couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution? What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided? What he does in The Blind Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.
Suppose he's successful with these three things: how would that show that the universe is without design? How does the main argument go from there? His detailed arguments are all for the conclusion that it is biologically possible that these various organs and systems should have come to be by unguided Darwinian mechanisms (and some of what he says here is of considerable interest). What is truly remarkable, however, is the form of what seems to be the main argument. The premise he argues for is something like this:
and Dawkins supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way. His conclusion, however, is
It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like
Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.
Here is where that alleged massive improbability of theism is relevant. If theism is false, then (apart from certain weird suggestions we can safely ignore) evolution is unguided. But it is extremely likely, Dawkins thinks, that theism is false. Hence it is extremely likely that evolution is unguided—in which case to establish it as true, he seems to think, all that is needed is to refute those claims that it is impossible. So perhaps we can think about his Blind Watchmaker argument as follows: he is really employing as an additional if unexpressed premise his idea that the existence of God is enormously unlikely. If so, then the argument doesn't seem quite so magnificently invalid. (It is still invalid, however, even if not quite so magnificently—you can't establish something as a fact by showing that objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)
Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?
Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.
So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true.
So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.
A second example of Dawkinsian-style argument. Recently a number of thinkers have proposed a new version of the argument from design, the so-called "Fine-Tuning Argument." Starting in the late Sixties and early Seventies, astrophysicists and others noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life—at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think it actually happened. For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed. Equally interesting in this connection is the so-called flatness problem: the existence of life also seems to depend very delicately upon the rate at which the universe is expanding. Thus Stephen Hawking:
That would be much too warm for comfort. Hawking concludes that life is possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate required to avoid recollapse. At an earlier time, he observes, the fine-tuning had to be even more remarkable:
One reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is to see them as substantiating the theistic claim that the universe has been created by a personal God and as offering the material for a properly restrained theistic argument—hence the fine-tuning argument.8 It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God.
Now in response to this kind of theistic argument, Dawkins, along with others, proposes that possibly there are very many (perhaps even infinitely many) universes, with very many different distributions of values over the physical constants. Given that there are so many, it is likely that some of them would display values that are life-friendly. So if there are an enormous number of universes displaying different sets of values of the fundamental constants, it's not at all improbable that some of them should be "fine-tuned." We might wonder how likely it is that there are all these other universes, and whether there is any real reason (apart from wanting to blunt the fine-tuning arguments) for supposing there are any such things.9 But concede for the moment that indeed there are many universes and that it is likely that some are fine-tuned and life-friendly. That still leaves Dawkins with the following problem: even if it's likely that some universes should be fine-tuned, it is still improbable that this universe should be fine-tuned. Name our universe alpha: the odds that alpha should be fine-tuned are exceedingly, astronomically low, even if it's likely that some universe or other is fine-tuned.
What is Dawkins' reply? He appeals to "the anthropic principle," the thought that the only sort of universe in which we could be discussing this question is one which is fine-tuned for life:
Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha is fine-tuned? One can't explain this by pointing out that we are indeed here—anymore than I can "explain" the fact that God decided to create me (instead of passing me over in favor of someone else) by pointing out that if God had not thus decided, I wouldn't be here to raise that question. It still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they do have; it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should have just those values; and it is still much less improbable that they should have those values, if there is a God who wanted a life-friendly universe.
One more example of Dawkinsian thought. In The Blind Watchmaker, he considers the claim that since the self-replicating machinery of life is required for natural selection to work, God must have jumpstarted the whole evolutionary process by specially creating life in the first place—by specially creating the original replicating machinery of DNA and protein that makes natural selection possible. Dawkins retorts as follows:
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage from Dawkins and declares it an "unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier." Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins) is entirely correct.
Here there is much to say, but I'll say only a bit of it. First, suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover machine-like objects that look and work just like tractors; our leader says "there must be intelligent beings on this planet who built those tractors." A first-year philosophy student on our expedition objects: "Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are." No doubt we'd tell him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two. For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we can concede for the moment) that intelligent life would have to be at least as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren't trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, and we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general; we are only trying to explain one particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of another. Similarly, in invoking God as the original creator of life, we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only a particular kind of it, i.e., terrestrial life. So even if (contrary to fact, as I see it) God himself displays organized complexity, we would be perfectly sensible in explaining the existence of terrestrial life in terms of divine activity.
A second point: Dawkins (and again Dennett echoes him) argues that "the main thing we want to explain" is "organized complexity." He goes on to say that "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity," and he faults theism for being unable to explain organized complexity. Now mind would be an outstanding example of organized complexity, according to Dawkins, and of course (unlike with organized complexity) it is uncontroversial that God is a being who thinks and knows; so suppose we take Dawkins to be complaining that theism doesn't offer an explanation of mind. It is obvious that theists won't be able to give an ultimate explanation of mind, because, naturally enough, there isn't any explanation of the existence of God. Still, how is that a point against theism? Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. Of course the same goes for any other view; on any view explanations come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn't have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles: they just are. So to claim that what we want or what we need is an ultimate explanation of mind is, once more, just to beg the question against theism; the theist neither wants nor needs an ultimate explanation of personhood, or thinking, or mind.
Toward the end of the book, Dawkins endorses a certain limited skepticism. Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely, he thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don't contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?
From a theistic point of view, we'd expect that our cognitive faculties would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable. God has created us in his image, and an important part of our image bearing is our resembling him in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he'd have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.
If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; natural- ism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.
The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins' naturalism, his belief that there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is that one can't rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism, therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.
The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a "delusion."
The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.
Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
1. A third book along these lines, The End of Faith, has recently been written by Sam Harris, and more recently still a sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation, so perhaps we should speak of the touchdown triplets—or, given that Harris is very much the junior partner in this enterprise (he's a grad student) maybe the "Three Bears of Atheism"?
2. Although Dawkins does bring up (p. 54), apparently approvingly, the argument that God can't be both omniscient and omnipotent: if he is omniscient, then he can't change his mind, in which case there is something he can't do, so that he isn't omnipotent(!).
3. See my Does God Have a Nature? Aquinas Lecture 44 (Marquette Univ. Press, 1980).
4. The distinguished Oxford philosopher (Dawkins calls him a theologian) Richard Swinburne has proposed some sophisticated arguments for the claim that God is simple. Dawkins mentions Swinburne's argument, but doesn't deign to come to grips with it; instead he resorts to ridicule (pp. 110-111).
5. What about the Trinity? Just how we are to think of the Trinity is of course not wholly clear; it is clear, however, that it is false that in addition to each of the three persons of the Trinity, there is also another being of which each of those persons is a part.
6. "The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times," in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Springer, 2002), p. 285.
7. John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (Random House, 1989), p. 22.
8. One of the best versions of the fine-tuning argument is proposed by Robin Collins in "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument," in Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 47-75.
9. See my review of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea in Books & Culture, May/June 1996.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html
Naturalism ad absurdum.
by Alvin Plantinga
Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal...
Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God doesn't return the compliment.)
The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown twins of current academic atheism.1 Dawkins has written his book, he says, partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith—at any rate its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.
Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term) and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects. As the above quotation suggests, one shouldn't look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?) If Dawkins ever gets tired of his day job, a promising future awaits him as a writer of political attack ads.
Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.
Chapter 3, "Why There Almost Certainly is No God," is the heart of the book. Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhood—so small as to be negligible for all practical (and most impractical) purposes. Why does he think so?
Here Dawkins doesn't appeal to the usual anti-theistic arguments—the argument from evil, for example, or the claim that it's impossible that there be a being with the attributes believers ascribe to God.2 So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create. Putting it another way, Dawkins says a designer must contain at least as much information as what it creates or designs, and information is inversely related to probability. Therefore, he thinks, God would have to be monumentally complex, hence astronomically improbable; thus it is almost certain that God does not exist.
But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is? Before looking more closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows that our world has not been designed—by God or anyone else. This thought is trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.
How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the universe is without design? Well, if the universe has not been designed, then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided, unorchestrated by any intelligent being.
But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all, couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution? What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided? What he does in The Blind Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.
Suppose he's successful with these three things: how would that show that the universe is without design? How does the main argument go from there? His detailed arguments are all for the conclusion that it is biologically possible that these various organs and systems should have come to be by unguided Darwinian mechanisms (and some of what he says here is of considerable interest). What is truly remarkable, however, is the form of what seems to be the main argument. The premise he argues for is something like this:
1. We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes;
and Dawkins supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way. His conclusion, however, is
2. All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.
It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like
We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
Therefore
p is true.
Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.
Here is where that alleged massive improbability of theism is relevant. If theism is false, then (apart from certain weird suggestions we can safely ignore) evolution is unguided. But it is extremely likely, Dawkins thinks, that theism is false. Hence it is extremely likely that evolution is unguided—in which case to establish it as true, he seems to think, all that is needed is to refute those claims that it is impossible. So perhaps we can think about his Blind Watchmaker argument as follows: he is really employing as an additional if unexpressed premise his idea that the existence of God is enormously unlikely. If so, then the argument doesn't seem quite so magnificently invalid. (It is still invalid, however, even if not quite so magnificently—you can't establish something as a fact by showing that objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)
Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?
Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.
So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true.
So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.
A second example of Dawkinsian-style argument. Recently a number of thinkers have proposed a new version of the argument from design, the so-called "Fine-Tuning Argument." Starting in the late Sixties and early Seventies, astrophysicists and others noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life—at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think it actually happened. For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed. Equally interesting in this connection is the so-called flatness problem: the existence of life also seems to depend very delicately upon the rate at which the universe is expanding. Thus Stephen Hawking:
reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 1012 at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 1010 K would have resulted in the Universe's starting to recollapse when its radius was only 1/3000 of the present value and the temperature was still 10,000 K.6
That would be much too warm for comfort. Hawking concludes that life is possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate required to avoid recollapse. At an earlier time, he observes, the fine-tuning had to be even more remarkable:
we know that there has to have been a very close balance between the competing effect of explosive expansion and gravitational contraction which, at the very earliest epoch about which we can even pretend to speak (called the Planck time, 10-43 sec. after the big bang), would have corresponded to the incredible degree of accuracy represented by a deviation in their ratio from unity by only one part in 10 to the sixtieth.7
One reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is to see them as substantiating the theistic claim that the universe has been created by a personal God and as offering the material for a properly restrained theistic argument—hence the fine-tuning argument.8 It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God.
Now in response to this kind of theistic argument, Dawkins, along with others, proposes that possibly there are very many (perhaps even infinitely many) universes, with very many different distributions of values over the physical constants. Given that there are so many, it is likely that some of them would display values that are life-friendly. So if there are an enormous number of universes displaying different sets of values of the fundamental constants, it's not at all improbable that some of them should be "fine-tuned." We might wonder how likely it is that there are all these other universes, and whether there is any real reason (apart from wanting to blunt the fine-tuning arguments) for supposing there are any such things.9 But concede for the moment that indeed there are many universes and that it is likely that some are fine-tuned and life-friendly. That still leaves Dawkins with the following problem: even if it's likely that some universes should be fine-tuned, it is still improbable that this universe should be fine-tuned. Name our universe alpha: the odds that alpha should be fine-tuned are exceedingly, astronomically low, even if it's likely that some universe or other is fine-tuned.
What is Dawkins' reply? He appeals to "the anthropic principle," the thought that the only sort of universe in which we could be discussing this question is one which is fine-tuned for life:
the anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us. Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks [life-friendly] zones.
Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha is fine-tuned? One can't explain this by pointing out that we are indeed here—anymore than I can "explain" the fact that God decided to create me (instead of passing me over in favor of someone else) by pointing out that if God had not thus decided, I wouldn't be here to raise that question. It still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they do have; it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should have just those values; and it is still much less improbable that they should have those values, if there is a God who wanted a life-friendly universe.
One more example of Dawkinsian thought. In The Blind Watchmaker, he considers the claim that since the self-replicating machinery of life is required for natural selection to work, God must have jumpstarted the whole evolutionary process by specially creating life in the first place—by specially creating the original replicating machinery of DNA and protein that makes natural selection possible. Dawkins retorts as follows:
This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing that we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating machine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity… . But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself… . To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage from Dawkins and declares it an "unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier." Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins) is entirely correct.
Here there is much to say, but I'll say only a bit of it. First, suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover machine-like objects that look and work just like tractors; our leader says "there must be intelligent beings on this planet who built those tractors." A first-year philosophy student on our expedition objects: "Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are." No doubt we'd tell him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two. For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we can concede for the moment) that intelligent life would have to be at least as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren't trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, and we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general; we are only trying to explain one particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of another. Similarly, in invoking God as the original creator of life, we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only a particular kind of it, i.e., terrestrial life. So even if (contrary to fact, as I see it) God himself displays organized complexity, we would be perfectly sensible in explaining the existence of terrestrial life in terms of divine activity.
A second point: Dawkins (and again Dennett echoes him) argues that "the main thing we want to explain" is "organized complexity." He goes on to say that "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity," and he faults theism for being unable to explain organized complexity. Now mind would be an outstanding example of organized complexity, according to Dawkins, and of course (unlike with organized complexity) it is uncontroversial that God is a being who thinks and knows; so suppose we take Dawkins to be complaining that theism doesn't offer an explanation of mind. It is obvious that theists won't be able to give an ultimate explanation of mind, because, naturally enough, there isn't any explanation of the existence of God. Still, how is that a point against theism? Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. Of course the same goes for any other view; on any view explanations come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn't have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles: they just are. So to claim that what we want or what we need is an ultimate explanation of mind is, once more, just to beg the question against theism; the theist neither wants nor needs an ultimate explanation of personhood, or thinking, or mind.
Toward the end of the book, Dawkins endorses a certain limited skepticism. Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely, he thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don't contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?
From a theistic point of view, we'd expect that our cognitive faculties would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable. God has created us in his image, and an important part of our image bearing is our resembling him in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he'd have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.
If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; natural- ism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.
The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins' naturalism, his belief that there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is that one can't rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism, therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.
The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a "delusion."
The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.
Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
1. A third book along these lines, The End of Faith, has recently been written by Sam Harris, and more recently still a sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation, so perhaps we should speak of the touchdown triplets—or, given that Harris is very much the junior partner in this enterprise (he's a grad student) maybe the "Three Bears of Atheism"?
2. Although Dawkins does bring up (p. 54), apparently approvingly, the argument that God can't be both omniscient and omnipotent: if he is omniscient, then he can't change his mind, in which case there is something he can't do, so that he isn't omnipotent(!).
3. See my Does God Have a Nature? Aquinas Lecture 44 (Marquette Univ. Press, 1980).
4. The distinguished Oxford philosopher (Dawkins calls him a theologian) Richard Swinburne has proposed some sophisticated arguments for the claim that God is simple. Dawkins mentions Swinburne's argument, but doesn't deign to come to grips with it; instead he resorts to ridicule (pp. 110-111).
5. What about the Trinity? Just how we are to think of the Trinity is of course not wholly clear; it is clear, however, that it is false that in addition to each of the three persons of the Trinity, there is also another being of which each of those persons is a part.
6. "The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times," in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Springer, 2002), p. 285.
7. John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (Random House, 1989), p. 22.
8. One of the best versions of the fine-tuning argument is proposed by Robin Collins in "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument," in Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 47-75.
9. See my review of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea in Books & Culture, May/June 1996.
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