I am deeply, no in fact eternally, grateful to Richard Dawkins for all the free publicity he has given to the question of the existence of God with his latest book, The God Delusion. Clearly, however, a quick look at my profile will indicate that I disagree with Mr Dawkins on a few key points.
I am not going to embark on a comprehensive critique of the book itself, largely because I haven’t read it. Nor am I going to try to prove the existence of God in the space of one blog entry when the finest theologians and philosophers the world has ever seen have utterly failed to do so despite trying for several millennia. I do want to comment on a couple of issues raised by an interview with Mr Dawkins in the Age a couple of weeks ago (which I will not quote directly from because I very diligently recycled the stupid thing before I got around to writing this) and on some of the more interesting aspects of the discussion of this book on the December edition of First Tuesday Book Club, and particularly some very interesting thoughts from Germaine Greer on the whole topic.
Mr Dawkins is a pretty intelligent guy, so I was a bit surprised that Ms Greer, as well as some of the other book clubbers, was so critical of the construction of his arguments, but after reading the interview with him in the Age I concluded that there might be some basis for their concerns.
For example, the Age interviewer put to Mr Dawkins the argument that not many soup kitchens and drug rehab centres are run by committed rationalists, the implication being that Christians, Moslems, Jews and other religious types do more good in the world than Atheists.
This is a stupid argument, and I would have thought Mr Dawkins could have handled it quite easily. I don’t think there is actually any evidence that shows that Christians do more good things than atheists, on average. I spent a little over two years working for an organization that existed primarily to do some good in the world, by providing legal services to those who most needed help and could least afford it. Most of our clients were drug addicts or otherwise in need of intense support. All of us working there could have made more money working just about anywhere else (including, say, at Nandos).
I went to work there because I believe that helping the most disadvantaged in our society is a vitally important aspect of Christian faith. However, I was the only Christian in the place for most of the time that I worked there. My boss, who was there for over ten years, was a committed atheist.
To be fair, it is possibly that Mr Dawkins has not been following my career all that closely and therefore this example was not available to him, but surely he could have come up with some sort of similar example.
The other very valid criticism of this argument is that it misses the point of Christianity almost entirely. We have spent decades, possibly centuries, trying to get away from this stupid notion that being a Christian is in any way about being better than everyone else. It’s not. The point is to be better than I would be if I was not committed to this faith. In other words to be the best “I’m not Craig” I can possibly be. (Yes, I know that was a ridiculous sentence, but the point is valid).
Mr Dawkins instead produced a surprisingly half baked response. He suggested that the tendency of Christians to do more good than atheists might actually be an indicator of something quite ignoble in human nature, in that we all tend to be more inclined to do good things when someone is watching. He suggested that Christians believe that God sees what we do 24 hours a day so we tend to spend more of our time doing good things.
This is a surprisingly weak argument. Leaving aside the raft of assumptions about how Christians think and what motivates us (and the quite significant possibility that we don’t all think exactly the same way), the central fallacy of the argument can be easily demonstrated by watching an episode of Big Brother. If Mr Dawkins is right, the Big Brother house should be the most prosocial place on the planet. These people are literally being watched 24 hours per day and they well know it and yet they seem to do less of the fund raising for charity and more of the turkey slapping than Mr Dawkins might expect.
As I said at the outset, I have not read the book, but if the above discussion is indicative of the quality of his reasoning generally, I’d be better off re-reading Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian”. At least it took more than five minutes to find the flaws in the reasoning in that particular text.
The question of Mr Dawkins logical reasoning skills brings us neatly to the discussion on First Tuesday Book Club, which I found fascinating. I am always interested in hearing what Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger have to say about a book (or any issue really) and they were joined on the panel by the slightly unusual pairing of Frank Brennan and Germaine Greer, together with the ever enthusiastic Jennifer Byrne.
I have previously been critical of many of Germaine Greer’s views, said criticisms usually involving a lot of swearing and getting cross. However, I have never questioned her intelligence and on this occasion she had, as ever, several interesting things to say.
Ms Greer described the tone of the book as “shrill” and said that it contained some very bad science, and also said “it’s a mess. It’s not properly organized intellectually”. Jason Steger said he was not convinced by Dawkins’ arguments, Marieke Hardy said Dawkins was a fundamentalist in his own regard and Jennifer Byrne noted that he was surprisingly intolerant. Frank Brennan also declared himself unconvinced, although that is possibly to be expected.
For me, the most interesting part of the book club’s discussion came when Frank Brennan raised the question of how atheists can have a sense of the transcendent, and (in the context of a discussion about weddings) how they can find an expression of love and commitment beyond themselves and beyond time.
Germaine Greer’s comments were fascinating. She said “That’s the annoying thing. Atheism hasn’t been able to… imbue the idea of people as autonomous with anything like the mystic power that religion can give. We haven’t been able to build any aura around it. Atheists have got to imbue this real world (in their view) with resonance. And they can’t do it.”
I would be curious to hear from my atheist readers, or anyone really, as to whether this is truly the case, but I suspect that it is a serious problem for atheists.
G K Chesterton had a few interesting things to say more or less on this topic, such as this:
“I feel in my bones, first that this world does not explain itself… Second, I began to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art… Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons…
And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.”
The world is a beautiful and magical place. The existence of natural beauty, science can explain. But for me, my sense of awe on seeing the magic of a stunning sunset over Loch Ard Gorge, the awesome experience of falling in love with a true soulmate, the wonder of being kissed on the cheek by one’s beautiful two year old son, and a million other things of beauty can only be explained by the existence of God.
It’s not just that such things are beautiful, but that we have within us the capacity to feel the awe and wonder inspired by such beauty. To live without a sense of the divine seems, to me, profoundly sad.
I quite like Frederick Buechner’s definition of what it means to be a Christian.
“A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank”.
I found myself agreeing with Germaine Greer twice in one day when she went on to talk about current approaches to religion, saying “We have reinvented DIY religion which is thin, stupid, ugly, vulgar, plastic, awful; and people are going for it like mad. It’s a flight from reason. I find it extremely annoying.”
This seems like a bit too much of a generalization, and rather unfair to any number of very sincere people, but the central point is a sound and indeed vitally important one.
Faith is not, of course, solely an intellectual exercise. The essence of Christianity lies in loving people, in the sense that we put the needs of others ahead of our own, and then working out what it means to live according to that principle.
It is also, of course, about belief in the transcendent, something bigger than ourselves. Whilst we all agree that we can’t actually prove that God exists, a belief in God is not a suspension of disbelief or an abandonment of science and reason, it’s a recognition that there is an awful lot that we don’t know about the universe and a belief that it all makes a lot more sense if one accepts the supernatural as a part of our reality, even if science can’t define it, measure it and explain it.
Germaine Greer is entirely right that there is no place for a flight from reason in any of this. In my view, many, possibly most, Christians need to abandon their neurotic desire to have all the answers all the time, embrace the uncertainty and messiness of life, be intellectually honest even when it does not suit our purposes, and see where we end up. I suspect the answer is that we will end up with a set of beliefs that is much more robust than the type of Christianity doing the rounds in the churches I’ve been attending lately.
So, there you have my little contribution to the questions that have been asked again and again since the beginning of time. I would be fascinated to hear what all of you, and particularly my atheist readers, made of it. And to anyone who actually read this entire post, thank you.
