The Case for God (52 page)

But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could work only with natural explanations. Gould had no religious ax to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians— Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky—had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of
accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

Gould also revived, in new form, the ancient distinction and complementarity of
mythos
and
logos
in what he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). A “magisterium,” he explained, was “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”
²³
Religion and science were separate magisteria and should not encroach on each other’s domain:

The idea of an inherent conflict between religion and science was false. They were two distinct magisteria that “hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life; and … remain logically distinct and fully separate in lines of inquiry.”
²⁵

But the new atheists will have none of this, and in his somewhat immoderate way, Dawkins denounces Gould as a quisling. They adhere to a hard-line form of scientific naturalism that mirrors the fundamentalism on which they base their critique: atheism is always a rejection of and parasitically dependent on a particular form of theism. The work of the new atheists has been exhaustively criticized, notably by John F. Haught, Alister McGrath, and John Cornwell.
²⁶
Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of the Higher Criticism. Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually “written by God.”
²⁷
Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent upon a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falsity of Christianity: “Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that.”
²⁸
Like Protestant fundamentalists,
Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with “role models,” which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate.
²⁹
He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins’s only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.

It is not surprising that Dawkins is incensed with American creationists who are campaigning against the teaching of evolution, and the proponents of a new, quasi-scientific philosophy that has tried to revive the theory of intelligent design (ID). These include Philip E. Johnson, professor of law at Berkeley and author of
Darwin on Trial
(1991); the biochemist Michael Behe, author of
Darwin’s Black Box
(1996); and the philosopher William Dembski, author of
The Design Inference
(1998). These theists do not all posit God as the Designer, but they do argue that ID is a viable alternative to Darwinism and cite a supernatural agency in creation as if it were scientific evidence. But as Dennett points out, the ID theorists have not devised any experiments or made any empirical observations that challenge modern evolutionary thinking. ID, he concludes, is therefore not science.
³⁰
ID is also theologically incorrect to make scientific statements.
Mythos
and
logos
have different fields of competence, and, as we have seen, when they are confused you have bad science and inadequate religion. But while Dawkins’s irritation with creationists and ID theorists is understandable, he is not correct to assume that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical of either Christianity or religion as a whole.

This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundamentalist mentality. It is also essential to the critique of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris to present fundamentalism as the focal core of the three monotheisms. They have an extremely literalist notion of God. For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that
“there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.”
³¹
Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood
the term” God.
³²
He is also wrong to claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, that is, a conceptual framework for bringing intelligibility to a series of experiments and observations.
³³
It was only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept.

The new atheists all equate faith with mindless credulity. Harris wrote
The End of Faith
immediately after 9/11, insisting that the only way to rid our world of terrorism was to abolish all faith. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as “Belief without Evidence,”
³⁴
an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse “faith” with “belief” (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness. But like other atheists and agnostics before him, Harris goes on to declare that faith is the root of all evil. A belief might
seem
innocent enough, but once you have blindly accepted the dogma that Jesus “can be eaten in the form of a cracker,”
³⁵
you have made a space in your mind for other monstrous fictions: that God desires the destruction of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or the 9
/11
massacres. Everybody must stop believing in anything that cannot be verified by the empirical methods of science. It is not enough to get rid of extremists, fundamentalists, and terrorists. “Moderate” believers are equally guilty of the “inherently dangerous” crime of faith and must share responsibility for the terrorist atrocities.
³⁶

Our civic toleration of faith must therefore be eliminated. “As long as we respect the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is real faith,” Dawkins insists, “it is hard to withhold respect for Usama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” The obvious and self-evident alternative is to “abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith,” because “the teachings of ‘moderate religion,’ though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.”
³⁷
This rejection of the Enlightenment principle of toleration is new. It is, surely, itself extremist. “The very idea of religious tolerance,” Harris maintains, “is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
³⁸
In this lack of tolerance, they are again at one with the religious fundamentalists, even though they must be aware that the absence of respect for difference has led to some of the
worst atrocities in modern times. It is hard to hear talk of elimination without recalling the Nazi camp and the Gulag.

As its critics have already pointed out, there is an inherent contradiction in the new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of “evidence” and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically. As Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins’s hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though it had not been definitively verified. Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth—a claim that Hume or Kant would have found questionable.

All three of these proselytizing atheists present religion at its absolute worst. It is very important to remember the evils committed in the name of religion, and they are right to bring them to our attention. All too often, people of faith like to enumerate the sins of other traditions while ignoring the stains on their own. Christians, for example, are often eager to criticize Islam for its intolerance, showing not only an embarrassing ignorance of Muslim history but total myopia toward the crusades, persecutions, and inquisitions conducted by their own coreligionists. But claiming that religion has
only
been evil is inaccurate. Science is the child of
logos
and we should, therefore, be able to rely on scientists, with their finely honed reasoning powers, to sift the evidence in a balanced, impartial way. But Harris, for example, finds it quite acceptable to assert emphatically that
“most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith.”
³⁹
This type of remark is just as biased and untrue as some of the religious rhetoric he condemns.

It is also misleading to insist that all the problems of the modern world are entirely due to religion, if only because at this perilous moment in human history we need clear heads and accurate intelligence. At the beginning of his book, Dawkins asks us to imagine, with John Lennon, a world without religion.

But not all these conflicts are wholly due to religion. The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.

Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This makes the critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth.
⁴¹
It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, Ingersoll, or Mill, these new atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice, and humiliation that have inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the means of creating a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.

Dawkins argues that we are moral beings because the virtuous behavior of our ancestors probably helped to ensure their survival. Altruism was, therefore, not divinely inspired but simply the result of an accidental genetic mutation that programmed our forebears to behave more generously and cooperatively than others. But, he continues, there are many such “blessed” evolutionary misfirings in human behavior, one of which is “the urge to kindness—to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity.”
⁴²
Many theologians would have no
difficulty with this view. It is surely characteristic of our humanity to take something basic and instinctual and transform it in such a way that it transcends the purely pragmatic. Cooking, for example, probably began as a useful survival skill, but we have gone on to develop haute cuisine. We acquired the ability to run and jump in order to get away from predators, and now we have ballet and athletics. We cultivated language as a useful means of communication and have created poetry. The religious traditions have done something similar with altruism. As Confucius pointed out, they have found that when they practiced it “all day and every day,” it elevated human life to the realm of holiness and gave practitioners intimations of transcendence.

In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach; Bultmann, Tillich, and Rahner were all influenced by Heidegger.
⁴³
But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens because their theology is so rudimentary. We should, however, take careful note of what we might call the Dawkins phenomenon. The fact that these intemperate antireligious tracts have won such wide readership not only in secular Europe but also in religious America suggests that many people who have little theological training have problems with the modern God. Some believers are still able to work creatively with this symbol, but others are obviously not. They get little help from their clergy, who may not have had an advanced theological training and whose worldview may still be bounded by the modern God. Modern theology is not always easy reading. Theologians should try to present it in an attractive, accessible way to enable congregants to keep up with the latest discussions and the new insights of biblical scholarship, which rarely reach the pews.