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Richard Dawkins' God Delusion a Curiously Inept Answer to Religious Fundamentalism An essay by Gavin Evans (excerpted with permission by Christian Faith and Reason Magazine from www.gavinevans.net.)  Gavin Evans is a London based writer, teacher, and film editor who grew up in South Africa. Everywhere I look, fundamentalism is on the rise: radical Wahabi Sunni Islam, feeding off the detritus of US foreign policy to take hold of hearts from the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa via Pakistan through Afghanistan, into the West and back to the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and beyond. Up against it is Shiite Islamism, given a foothold through the 1979 Iranian revolution and now spreading via Iraq, tapping into conflicts in the Middle East, where both variants compete against a revivalist form of Jewish fundamentalism, which has its most significant echo in the United States. It thrives with the spread of Pentecostal Protestantism, turning America into the most god-obsessed nation in the advanced industrial world. This radical form of Christianity is on the march, not just through the misadventures of a crusading president, but also the impact of its hell-fire preachers, challenging the Catholics in Latin America, while making fresh inroads into China, Russia and Africa. Sometimes forgotten in all this Abrahamic ferment, is the growth of Hindu radicalism in India - part of the problem in Kashmir and not exactly helpful in easing tensions with Pakistan. I don’t want to paint these demons with the same brush - as no more than variants of the same doomed anti-modernist shake of the lamb’s tail - but it would be churlish to deny common elements. Look at millenarian movements throughout history and one common factor leaps out: their emergence from periods of social disruption and from challenge by rival fundamentalist energy. The contemporary variants are no exception. Part of their appeal comes from the certainty they offer in an uncertain world – immutable values, a return to older, more godly ways of living, stricter demands on lifestyle, the promise of everlasting life and of everlasting punishment for the unfaithful. And yet, despite claims to scriptural authenticity, they are contemporary movements – of our time rather than of ancient times. Qutb and the rise of Islamism The first sparks that gave rise to contemporary Sunni Islamism are attributed to the extremist the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual force behind the Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood whose commentaries on the Qu’ran and advocacy of Jihad and a world-wide Umma were a powerful influence behind Al Qaeda. His hatred of Western ways, particularly the ways of Western women, was inspired in part by his spell in Greely, Colorado from 1948-1950 – hardly a liberated time or place, but deeply shocking for a virgin like Qutb who complained about the “animal-like” mixing of the sexes - even in churches. But it is too simplistic to reduce such a widespread phenomenon to one source. Sunni Islamism was fostered by the relationship between corrupt Saudi rulers, who retained power by buying off the Wahabi religious establishment, allowing them to control all dimensions of social and cultural life. Even today, this US ally is patrolled by religious police who rigidly enforce Sharia law. Women are banned from voting, driving, swimming in public and so on. But this was never enough. Younger men, not least wealthy ones like Osama Bin Laden, wanted more and for a while, their urges were channelled in Afghanistan because fighting the Soviets suited everyone. They made their mark by spreading their version of Islam via the Pakistani Madrasahs to their first client state, which became an Islamic Pol Pot hellhole - the worst place in the world for women. Then they returned to focus on American. 9/11, Iraq, Russian atrocities in Chechnya and, in particular, US backing for Israel against the Palestinians, helped fan their flames, providing local, regional and international causes to rally behind. But the spread of this form of Islamism is not simply a result of the confluence of circumstances. Its appeal is particularly strong to those who feel left behind or left out by the sweep of modernity, frustrated by powerlessness or fearful of its consequences. Islamism, with its stateless perspective of the Umma and vision of permanent struggle offers the surety, and purpose that Marxism offered earlier generations, but the parallel shouldn’t be stretched. First, this is a religion; Marxism was, at most, quasi-religious. The difference is huge. Second, this particular movement is committed to the destruction of modernity. It holds up Taliban Afghanistan as a success, and carries within its soul a profound antagonism to the liberation of women. Among the most striking images I’ve seen are those of unemployed Indonesian Muslim men cheering when professional women were whipped for not being sufficiently covered up. Accounts from Taliban Afghanistan pointed to an obsession about countering advances in women’s lives introduced during the Soviet era: not just wearing of Burkhas (as if to deny not just female sexuality but the very existence of women), but even their presence in schools. The recent emergence of Burkha-wearing women in Western cities surely owes something to this impetus – a deep-seated fear of women (even if women are among its propagators – as they have been with other forms of oppression, from female circumcision to Chinese footbinding). More generally, opinion polls of young Western Muslims consistently point to alienation from the prevailing motion of society – part of it but apart from it. Islamic, Christian, Jewish fundamentalism: common ground It is in Israel and Palestine where the obsessions of radical variants of the three Abrahamic religions coincide. Radical Christians, Jews and Shia Muslims are all big on prophetic arrivals or returns. For some Jews it is the arrival of the anointed one, the Messiah, heralding a messianic age and gathering the Jews back to the land of Israel. For Shia fundamentalists (and some branches of Sunni Islam) it is the second coming of the ‘saviour Imam’ Mehdi, the 12th grandson of Muhammad, who will return to rule before Judgement day. For many evangelical Christians it is the second coming of the Jesus, seen within the context of an apocalyptic version of the final days – the Tribulation (when the Anti-Christ rules), the Battle of Armageddon (which takes place in Israel), the Rapture (where all the Christians ascend into heaven), Judgement Day and the end of the earth. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that their competing Apocalyptic visions become self-fulfilling prophesies. But more of that later. What is also striking about each of the radical forms of Abrahamic fundamentalism is their reliance on scriptural literalism. For example, speak to a religious Zionist radical and the argument will soon resemble that of Christian or Islamic fundamentalists - reaching the point of the promises made by ‘G-d’ about the Land of Israel in the Torah, which is viewed as an immutable historical record. For anyone outside the religious realm the idea of a collection of writings thousands of years old being passed off as a historical document would seem absurd, but that was certainly the view I was raised with. It was only in 1985 – seven years after abandoning Christianity – that this was challenged. I was lying in a detention cell in Johannesburg Prison (detained under the apartheid regime’s Emergency Regulations) and was passed a book through the bars by a common law prisoner. It was on Biblical archaeology, written by a Christian archaeologist. The only other book I had was the Bible and so I read both with great interest, and was rather surprised by what I found. Neo-atheism: a futile crusade Which brings me to another point - about the energetic but futile crusade of a new breed of atheist. Personally, I prefer the approach taken by the late Stephen J. Gould, who argued that religion and science occupy “non-overlapping magisteria” – that you can’t use the one to challenge the other. But this is not the approach taken by the neo-atheists responding with such vigour to the spread of religious fundamentalism. Its proponents are British and American intellectuals (I use this term loosely – some are very silly men) and their vehicle is the book. To take some examples from the past year, there’s Christopher ‘I was right then, and I’m right now – it’s just that everyone else has moved’ Hitchens’ God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a double-blast from Sam Harris – The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation Dawkins on God: philosophically inept I don’t dispute the conclusions reached by Dawkins about the unlikelihood of the existence of a divine creator but I seriously doubt he has persuaded any true believer to abandon faith – not least because he doesn’t understand the religious mindset, and for that matter, doesn’t understand theology or philosophy. Perhaps these weren’t things he encountered when getting his second class BA in zoology, or perhaps his logic is blurred by passion, but he consistently misses the point in presenting his curiously superficial case. For example, he enthusiastically endorses one of Bertrand Russell’s weaker arguments: the ‘celestial teapot’. It goes like this: if I said a celestial teapot was orbiting Mars but you couldn’t see it, nobody could disprove me, “but if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.” To Dawkins, belief in god is no more reasonable than in a celestial teapot. “What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t), but whether his existence is probable,” he writes. “Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probably than other undisprovable things.” But faith in god is nothing like belief in a celestial teapot; to most people the former seems a whole lot more reasonable (which is why I have yet to meet a teapot-worshipper). In other words, Dawkins makes an elementary logical error – drawing an analogy between things that don’t belong together, suggesting a failure to understand belief. It gets worse: he makes the absurd case that if God existed he would need to have evolved (impossible because every effect must have a cause, and so on). The stupidity of this argument is astounding: quite obviously, if you have faith in an omniscient creator you do not consider this creator an evolved creation. This relates to another flaw – Dawkins’ tendency to conflate evidence of evolution with evidence against creation. In this respect, he is arguing against a straw man. The Christians I grew up with – Biblical literalists all - were enthusiastic evolutionists. They saw it as God’s magnificent way of creating our world, and the six day creation of the Bible presented no problem: the word ‘day’ was a translation of ‘period of time’, which could be a billion years. This remains the majority position within Christianity. Creationism (viewed as 60000-year-old a six-day wonder) remains a minority taste. More of a challenge is to ask where the first strand of the building block of evolution, DNA, came from. Creation, say the theists. Chance, say the atheists: a mute point – a question of faith. This quandary goes all the way to the Big Bang. What preceded it? Stupid question, says science, because without space there can be no time. But, if nothing else, it is in this very timelessness, this nothingness, that faith in a force that can create something out of nothing is impossible to dispel through rational argument. Matter cannot be created or destroyed; only changed from one form to another, says science. To which the religious mind says, yes, unless you are God. Why this kind of creator would have any interest in, say, how we choose to have sex, or what we wear on our heads or even whether we choose to praise ‘him’ is beyond me, but still, Gould’s idea of non-overlapping magisteria makes sense here: no point arguing. Dawkins’ failure to understand the religious mindset is surprising considering his own spell of religious ecstasy. As he put it in one interview: “At the age of about 13 when I was being confirmed, I did have a fairly active fantasy life about a relationship with God, and I used to pray and I used to have fantasies about creeping down to the chapel in the middle of the night, and having a sort of blinding vision and things.” Eventually, aged 16, he discovered Darwin and turned his back on childish things but his current view of the religious impulse coincides with that of the born-again Christians I grew up with. They would talk of a ‘God-centred gene’ in all of us – that we are all born with this longing for communion with our Lord. As a genetic fundamentalist, who reduces the cultural terrain to the odd notion of gene-mimicking ‘memes’, Dawkins rejects cultural explanations and reaches for the familiar: concluding that religion evolved through natural selection – not for its own sake but as a by-product of other needs. It boils down to this: we evolve to believe what we’re told by our elders because our elders are usually right and those who believe what they’re told benefit from their experience. Sounds feasible until you ask why it was that religion, rather than something else, was passed on by elders. Again, the lack of follow-through is telling. But even more surprising is that Dawkins seems oblivious to evidence against the view (shared by Christian evangelicals) that the religious impulse is universal. I could point to contrary examples in the industrialised world (40 percent of British people do not believe in god), but, even more interesting, are the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, who have no concept of god, the afterlife or the spiritual realm – and don’t even have the capacity for this in their language. Why people believe in God What this suggests is two things: first, that the impulse towards spiritual belief is contingent rather than inevitable; second, that if fulfils a powerful cultural role and therefore is very widespread. I would suggest the reasons are found in the idea put forward by Gould and Lewontin of non-adaptive evolutionary side consequences (‘spandrels’ as they call them), which I discussed in my first blog. Evolution equipped us with large, sophisticated, imaginative, empathetic, creative, questioning brains that wanted answers to questions ranging from ‘why are we here?’ to ‘what’s that big fiery ball in the sky?’ to ‘what happens to us when we die?’ The answers provided relate to the form and development of society, which is why beliefs shift from animism to pantheism to monotheism. Once formulated, these systems develop lives of their own while also changing according to the climate of the times. One reason is that human beings are social creatures, and religious belief systems play important roles within the fabric of societies – in securing discipline, control and complicity and in providing hope, purpose and direction, which is why they tend to be perpetuated. Which brings me to my penultimate point of whether the book-writing broadside from the neo-atheists serves any purpose beyond keeping creationists at bay within the American school system. Dawkins and his doppelgangers want to create a world free from superstition, and there is no doubt that they are right to point to the damage religion has caused. To take Christianity’s contribution, we could move from the Crusades, Conquistadors and Spanish Inquisition, step over its complicity in slavery, dictatorship, genocide and apartheid, and round off with more recent contributions like, say, the Lord’s Army in Uganda. But it is also worth mentioning that most of the charity work and voluntary community work throughout the world, and most of the money donated to charity, comes from religious people. And if we are to take the credit and debit accounting approach, it would be fair to mention history’s only example of a system where atheism was a founding principle – Soviet and Sino socialism - which did not seem to contribute to making people any happier with their lot - one reason why the churches (and congregations) are back with a vengeance in each of those countries. Opiate of the people? Even if we could forgo compulsion and persuade everyone through rational argument that their faith is rubbish, I’m not convinced the result would be a better world. Is Britain a happier place today than when 80 percent of its people believed in God? Are atheists more fulfilled than believers? Are they better, kinder, more altruistic people? The best one could say is, well, sometimes. But other times the vacuum left by loss of faith - or simply the lack of interest in faith - is filled by nihilism. When I see the yobs from down the road coming down our street on a steaming attack, mugging everyone in their path, just for the hell of it, I can’t help thinking that a bit of godly belief wouldn’t be such a bad idea. And to take a different kind of example, when my father was dying of motor neuron disease it was comforting to know he believed he would spend eternity with his maker, even if I didn’t share this faith. In other words, it seems that the opiate of the people is not such a terrible idea after all. Unless, that is, it’s the form of opiate that turns people into addicts who’ll do anything to satisfy the urge, which, I’m afraid, is precisely the kind we’re seeing more of today. And far more of in future because there is sound reason to fear that climate change will exacerbate these tensions and encourage the spread of religious fundamentalism. If even the more conservative prognoses of the climate scientists are correct then we will see famine, drought and starvation at unprecedented levels along with huge-scale human migration – from south to north, away from equatorial and sub-tropical regions towards cooler climates. This will affect all regions in the world. Europe may do the brunt of the absorption but the impact may be even more profound elsewhere. Take the Middle East. Faced with drought, water shortages and a decline in agriculture, it will not be able to sustain its current population, which means we can expect a Diaspora of Arabs and Jews, while those who remain will be compelled to fight over the scraps – village tap politics on a grander scale than currently seen in Darfur. So, then, to wrap it all up, it is one of the unfortunate conundrums of the modern world that a time when extraordinary advances in science, technology and most of all collective economic and political will are needed to prevent climate change from threatening us with the global equivalent of meltdown, is also a time of rapidly spreading superstitions which aim to take us back to a world that never existed. Past issues - Print edition - Media Kit - About Christian Faith and Reason ©2007 Christian Faith and Reason
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