Delusion delusion #4

Thank you thank you thank you!

Last in a series responding to Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine¹

See also Delusion delusion #1; #2; & #3

Image via Wikipedia

An hour or so ago I published Delusion delusion #3. The WordPress engine automatically threw up a link to Book Review: The Dawkins Delusion, by Alister McGrath.

Then in the extensive correspondence at the foot of that review was a link to Deluding Who About What?

I agree with most of what both of these have to say about McGrath’s critique of The God delusion.² So much so that they have saved me hours of work trying to put it all into my own words. I fully recommend them!

References

¹ Alister McGrath (with Joanna Collicutt McGrath), The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, SPCK, London, 2007.

² Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Delusion delusion #3

Suffer little children

Third in a series responding to Alister McGrath‘s The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine¹

See also Delusion delusion #1 & #2

Alister McGrath

In Chapter 1 (Deluded about God?) McGrath attacks Dawkins’ argument that ‘faith is infantile’:

In earlier works [Dawkins] emphasized that belief in God is just like believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. These are childish beliefs that are abandoned as soon as we are capable of evidence-based thinking…

…Yet the analogy is obviously flawed. How many people do you know who began to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood? …Those who use this infantile argument have to explain why so many people discover God in later life, and certainly do not this as representing any kind of regression, perversion or degeneration…

I do not see why the analogy is ‘obviously flawed’. The fact that there are people who start believing in God in later life is neither here nor there. There are also people who believe in God as children and abandon their faith in adolescence, never to return. The point of the analogy is that God, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus can all be seen as culturally-communicated, fictional characters. People learn about them because in the culture they grow up in they hear them being talked about as if they really existed, and are exposed to explanations of certain phenomena in terms of their activities and powers.

An analogy is not an identity. Of course belief in God is different in some respects from belief in the Tooth Fairy. Belief in the Tooth Fairy is different in some respects from belief in Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy doesn’t come once a year pulled by a team of reindeer. Santa Claus doesn’t swap presents for baby teeth.

A Tooth Fairy

The differences between God and both the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are certainly more significant. The phenomena which are explained to the child as the actions of the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are all actions performed by the child’s parent. There comes a time when the parent comes clean, typically after the child discovers the truth for him or herself. The God explanation is not an alternative for something parents do. It is more likely to be an explanation for things for which parents, teachers or priests have no other explanation for. Entire institutions have been set up to prolong and support belief in God.

These are major differences, but far from destroying the analogy, they are what give the analogy its power. The parent who fills the stocking on Christmas Eve and who exchanges the tooth for a coin is directly manipulating the child’s reality and also manipulating the child’s understanding of that reality. The parent is not being truthful: the parent knows the truth and can conceal it or reveal it at will. Parents, teachers or priests who tell children that God created the world, that Granddad went to God when he died, and that God hears every child’s prayer, is manipulating the children’s understanding of reality, and therefore indirectly manipulating the children’s reality. They are not being truthful: in this case they do not know the truth but they let the children think they do.

This is the point of the analogy. From the child’s perspective being told about God is like being told about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Parents, teachers or priests should see telling children about God as analogous to telling children about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy – but with the added caveat that they do not actually know the truth.

I can understand that McGrath rejects the analogy. He rejects it because he does not see God as a fictional character, and because he, like Antony Flew (see Another Flew over the cuckoo’s nest), moved from atheism to belief, not the other way round. But this does not mean the analogy is ‘obviously flawed’. Dawkins maps the domain over which the analogy is particularly relevant:

If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination. Mutatis mutandis if you were born in Afghanistan.²

Change, if you like, ‘victim’ to ‘product’ and ‘indoctrination’ to ‘education’. But the overall point stays the same. The statement seems so obviously true of the world as barely to need saying, and it defines the domain over which the analogy is both relevant and powerful. It is the domain within which it is considered perfectly acceptable to refer to a ‘Christian child’ or a ‘Muslim child’ rather than a ‘child of Christian parents’ or a ‘child of Muslim parents’. (Dawkins gives the example of a newspaper photograph from a school nativity play where the Three Wise Men are all played by four-year-olds, described in the caption as a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Christian.³)

McGrath acknowledges that Dawkins is

surely right to express concern about the indoctrination of children by their parents.

But this ‘reasonable point’

gets lost in the noise of the hyped-up rhetoric, and a general failure to consider its implications.

McGrath’s next moves get a bit close to hyped-up rhetoric themselves:

Having read the ludicrous misrepresentations of religion [in] …The God Delusion, I very much fear that secularists would merely force their own dogmas down the throats of the same gullible children… [T]his whole approach sounds uncomfortably like the anti-religious programmes built into the education of Soviet children during the 1950s, based on mantras such as ‘Science has disproved religion!’, ‘Religion is superstition!’ and the like.

There is indeed a need for a society to reflect on how it educates its children. Yet no case can be made for them to be force-fed Dawkins’ favoured dogmas and distortions…

Of course there are believers who will see descriptions of religious belief in The God delusion which are ludicrous misrepresentations of what they themselves believe. Alister McGrath is probably one of them. But that does not mean those descriptions are ludicrous misrepresentations of what every believer believes. (See for example Touched by an angel #8 for results of a 1991 international survey. In that year 34% of those interviewed in the United States agreed with the statement: The Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word.)

Dawkins has actually given us a very clear description of how he thinks children should be introduced to religious belief (‘A prayer for my daughter: Good and bad reasons for believing’⁴). I would urge McGrath to read or re-read this and then ask himself if his own talk of force-feeding dogmas and distortions may not itself be a ludicrous misrepresentation.

McGrath talks of

…the need for high-quality religious education in the public arena, countering the crude caricatures, prejudicial stereotypes and blatant misrepresentations now being aggressively peddled by atheist fundamentalism.

For many years, I gave a series of lectures at Oxford University entitled ‘An introduction to Christian theology’. I cannot help but feel that these might have been some use to Dawkins in writing his book.

This is where he repeats Terry Eagleton’s swipe about the Book of British Birds (see Delusion delusion #1).

First comment is that if McGrath’s lectures were given at Oxford University they were unlikely to be aimed at children, which is the context of this section.

More importantly I would like to repeat the point (see Delusion delusion #1) that Dawkins’ target in The God Delusion is not theology per se but the phenomenon of belief in a supernatural god. This point often seems to be missed, perhaps because Dawkins is so critical of theology as an academic discipline.^{5 6} But these are two separate issues which should not be conflated.

Some theologians believe in a supernatural god, some do not. Some theologians may well see in The God Delusion nothing but a travesty of what they themselves believe. If so they may be guilty of falsely assuming that their god is the same as the god of other believers. The god of The God Delusion is the god of the ‘God Hypothesis’, ie that

there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.⁷

How many or how few theologians share this conception of god is not particularly relevant, considering the relatively small proportion of believers who could be described as theologians.

Read on…

References

¹ Alister McGrath (with Joanna Collicutt McGrath), The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, SPCK, London, 2007.

² Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006, p3.

³ Richard Dawkins, 2006 (see ² above), p337.

⁴ Richard Dawkins, ‘A prayer for my daughter: Good and bad reasons for believing’, in: A devil’s chaplain: Selected essays, Phoenix, 2004.

⁵ Richard Dawkins, ‘The Emptiness of Theology’ in: Free Inquiry, Spring 1998 v18 n2 p6(1): [http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/emptiness_of_theology.shtml]

⁶ Richard Dawkins, Letters: ‘Theology has no place in a university’, 1 October 2007:  [http://richarddawkins.net/article,1698,Letters-Theology-has-no-place-in-a-university,Richard-Dawkins]

⁷ Richard Dawkins, 2006: see ² above.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Delusion delusion #2

We need to talk… about the charge of fundamentalism, explicit in McGrath’s subtitle.

Second in a series responding to Alister McGrath‘s The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine¹

See also Delusion delusion #1 

Alister McGrath: The Dawkins delusion?

McGrath repeats the accusation a number of times inside the book, eg:

The total dogmatic conviction of correctness which pervades some sections of Western atheism today – wonderfully illustrated in The God Delusion – immediately aligns it with a religious fundamentalism which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged… [My emphasis]

Can the Richard Dawkins of The God delusion² be described as a fundamentalist?

My trusty Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines fundamentalism like this:

The strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religious beliefs or doctrines; esp. belief in the inerrancy of Scripture and literal acceptance of the creeds as fundamentals of Protestant Christianity.³

In the same interview we quoted from last time, Dawkins responds to the ‘atheist fundamentalist’ charge in these words:

“Fundamentalist” usually means, “goes by the book.” And so, a religious fundamentalist goes back to the fundamentals of The Bible or The Koran and says, “nothing can change.” Of course, that’s not the case with any scientist, and certainly not with me. So, I’m not a fundamentalist in that sense.⁴

You could shrug this off with a ‘well he would say that wouldn’t he?’ But there does seem to be something fundamentally (sorry) inaccurate about the ascription which Dawkins’ response and the dictionary definition both point to. 

Richard Dawkins: The God delusion

A fundamentalist takes something which has been stated – typically but not necessarily in writing – both as the literal truth, and also as something whose truth takes priority over any other approach to the truth. If apparent counter-evidence is found, the fundamentalist tests the evidence against the creed, rather than the other way round.

I doubt if I can expand on this any better than Dawkins himself does:

By contrast [with religious fundamentalism], what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence… Books about evolution are believed… because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.

Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning, …may raise a tiresome red herring at this point: a scientist’s belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. [But a]ll of us believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on…

…Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by ‘truth’. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to dispute it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that… [M]y belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming. [My emphasis]⁵ 

Richard Dawkins: A devil's chaplain

Dawkins makes similar points in the essay ‘What is true?’ (published in A devil’s chaplain). Here he defends confidence in evidence-based scientific truth against attacks from the perspective of cultural relativism, and against the argument that because science is intrinsically falsifiable, scientific knowledge can only consist of provisional hypotheses:

It is simply true that the Sun is hotter than the Earth, true that the desk on which I am writing is made of wood. These are not hypotheses awaiting falsification; not temporary approximations to an ever-elusive truth; not local truths that might be denied in another culture. …It is forever true that DNA is a double helix, true that if you and a chimpanzee (or an octopus or a kangaroo) trace your ancestors back far enough you will eventually hit a shared ancestor. …Strictly, the truth that there were no human beings in the Jurassic Period is still a conjecture, which could be refuted at any time by the discovery of a single fossil, authentically dated by a battery of radiometric methods… [But even] if they are nominally hypotheses on probation, these statements are true in exactly the same sense… as it is true that you have a head, and that my desk is wooden.⁶

But maybe counterarguments like these miss the point. McGrath is accusing Dawkins of being fundamentalist about atheism, not about science. What would be good is an explanation justifying the charge, because I am not yet sure McGrath provides one. As I work through the book I shall keep an eye out for a possible explanation, so I may not be able to settle the issue until I reach the end of this series.

Interestingly, in the Introduction at the beginning of the book we get something close to an acknowledgement that Dawkins is not a fundamentalist:

Dawkins and I… are both Oxford academics who love the natural sciences. Both of us believe passionately in evidence-based thinking, and are critical of those who hold passionate beliefs for inadequate reasons. We would both like to think that we would change our minds about God if the evidence demanded it. [My emphasis.]

Probably just what Dawkins would also say, except of course ‘I would like to think I would change my mind’ is not quite the same as ‘I would change my mind’. Remember that Dawkins is not claiming to know of evidence that God (ie the supernatural God of the ‘God hypothesis’) does not exist, just that there is insufficient evidence to justify a claim that God does exist; that the ‘God hypothesis’ is not the explanation it is claimed to be; and that, on the basis of the evidence, ‘there almost certainly is no God’.⁷ 

Jurassic Period

But perhaps we can use these statements which are ‘simply true’ as a test case to flesh out the charge of fundamentalism. Dawkins draws a parallel between evidence-based scientific knowledge (DNA is a double helix; humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor; no human beings in the Jurassic Period) and publically observable truths of experience (you have a head; my desk is made of wood). For the sake of argument we can assume that McGrath would agree with all five of these statements.

But Dawkins is also claiming that a further statement ‘there almost certainly is no (supernatural) God’ is not only true, but is true on the basis of the available evidence just like the other five statements. McGrath would presumably disagree with some or all of this.

It could be that Dawkins is right on both counts and McGrath is wrong to disagree. In that case the charge of fundamentalism would fail. (It is not fundamentalist to claim that DNA is a double helix or that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor – or at least McGrath would not say it is.)

Or it could be that Dawkins is right that the statement ‘there almost certainly is no (supernatural) God’ stands or falls on the basis of the available evidence, but he is wrong about the evidence or in his arguments from the evidence. In that case again Dawkins could only be fairly described as fundamentalist if every other scientist who happened to believe something which turned out to be false could also be described as fundamentalist.

In the context of this test case I think Dawkins can only be fairly described as fundamentalist if he is wrong in believing that the statement ‘there almost certainly is no (supernatural) God’ stands or falls on the basis of the available evidence, like any other scientific hypothesis. The fundamentalism would therefore be a kind of blindness, in that he would be failing to see that the statement is not that kind of statement – failing to see the true nature of the statement.

Although the dictionary definition quoted above makes no reference to it, we could possibly make a case that fundamentalism entails a kind of ‘blindness’. The religious fundamentalist is blind to the broader context; and/or the possibility that texts of any kind are open to multiple interpretations; and/or the fact that texts can be written, copied, translated and edited for all sorts of reasons and motives and against all sorts of standards; etc. (The ‘blindness’ could of course be completely deliberate. A proud and self-confessed religious fundamentalist could claim that the broader context and all the possible features of written texts are just irrelevant to the sacred truth of this one particular text.)

The charge could therefore be that Dawkins is fundamentalist in being blind to the possibility that a statement about the existence of a (supernatural) God is anything other than an evidence-based, falsifiable ‘scientific’ proposition. ‘Scientific’ here means scientific in a broad sense which would include historical statements and statements of everyday observation. For Dawkins to be ‘fundamentalist’ in this sense he would have to be both wrong in his classification of statements about God, and also stubbornly resistant (indeed blind) to any proof that he is wrong. 

Stephen Jay Gould

McGrath gives us a telling comparison with Stephen Jay Gould. McGrath describes Gould as an atheist, but as one who

was absolutely clear that the natural sciences – including evolutionary theory – were consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief.

Furthermore:

Whereas Gould at least tries to weigh up the evidence, Dawkins simply offers the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching, substituting turbocharged rhetoric and highly selective manipulation of facts for careful, evidence-based thinking.

The clear implication is that Gould, unlike Dawkins, is innocent of ‘atheist fundamentalism’. This could be for two reasons. First: Gould thinks that science is consistent with both atheism and ‘conventional religious belief’. (For the purposes of this comparison we need to assume that ‘conventional religious belief’ equals, or at least includes, belief in a supernatural God, as that is Dawkins’ explicit scope). Second: Gould weighs up the evidence rather than indulging in hellfire preaching, turbocharged rhetoric, selective manipulation of facts and the like.

Now if Dawkins thinks science (or at least some science) is inconsistent with conventional religious belief (= belief in a supernatural God) and Gould does not, that in itself does not make Dawkins a fundamentalist. After all, Dawkins could be right and Gould could be wrong.

So, for now, the ‘atheist fundamentalist’ charge seems to come down to this. According to McGrath, Dawkins wrongly classifies statements about God, and he is also stubbornly resistant (blind) to any proof that he is wrong. And he behaves like a fundamentalist evangelist (hellfire preaching, turbocharged rhetoric, selective manipulation of facts).

We will need to bear this proposed explanation in mind as we work through the book, to assess for ourselves whether the charge stands. But first some baby steps…

References

¹ Alister McGrath (with Joanna Collicutt McGrath), The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, SPCK, London, 2007.

² Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006.

³ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Fifth edition, OUP, 2002.

⁴ Richard Dawkins, quoted by: Terrence McNally, ‘Atheist Richard Dawkins on The God Delusion’, AlterNet, January 18, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/story/46566/?page=entire, retrieved 19 April 2009.

⁵ Richard Dawkins, 2006 (see ² above), p282.

⁶ Richard Dawkins, ‘What is true?’, in: A devil’s chaplain: Selected essays, Phoenix, 2004.

⁷ Richard Dawkins, 2006 (see ² above), p111.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Delusion delusion #1

When I first read Alister McGrath‘s The Dawkins delusion?¹ several months ago I was underwhelmed. I have since re-read both The God delusion² and The Dawkins delusion? and find my original reaction hard to replicate.

First in a series responding to Alister McGrath‘s The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine. 

Second time round I seem more sympathetic to McGrath’s criticisms – without, however, being any more convinced that Dawkins is wrong about the really important issues.

Alister McGrath: The Dawkins delusion

Many of the criticisms cite areas of knowledge I am unfamiliar with, so I can only give McGrath the benefit of the doubt. What I would like to do here is respond to specific points in his book where they touch on issues I find interesting.

First a possible answer to one of McGrath’s early questions:

Like so many of my atheist friends, I simply cannot understand the astonishing hostility that [Dawkins] displays towards religion.

A quote from one of Dawkins’ earlier books, A devil’s chaplain,  could provide a clue:

My last vestige of ‘hands off religion’ respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the ‘National Day of Prayer’, when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place…³

This could however be just more of that ‘anecdotal’ material which McGrath complains The God delusion has too much of: aggregation of convenient factoids… Anecdote is substituted for evidence… etc.

Richard Dawkins: A devil's chaplain

McGrath could be right that Dawkins has misinterpreted Martin Luther, Tertullian, and even Thomas Aquinas. But on the other hand McGrath offers no refutation or rebuttal of, say, Dawkins’ litany of statements by American right-wing fundamentalists, the reported cruelties under Islamic extremism, or the chilling study of attitudes among Israeli schoolchildren.⁴ I am not saying he should have done, or that it would have been feasible. But Dawkins seems to have been deliberately aiming at a very diffuse target, one for which an anecdotal approach may not be inappropriate.

I am reminded of Terry Eagleton‘s opening complaint, which McGrath also quotes:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.⁵

It does not seem quite accurate to describe The God delusion as ‘Richard Dawkins on theology’. His target is more the phenomenon of belief in God as he experiences it – or rather as he experiences its effects. What the great mass of believers think and believe does not map 100% to what theologians think and believe. Not only that, but ‘delusion’ itself refers to a very specific category of ‘god’:

…bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.

…My title… does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists… I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

…I am not attacking the particular qualities of …any …specific god… Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.⁶

Richard Dawkins: The God delusion

There are many modes of religious faith which do not require endorsement of this kind of supernatural entity, and which Dawkins very clearly excludes from his attack.

On the subject of Yahweh, McGrath rightly points out that Dawkins’ references to the Old Testament are ‘highly selective’. In an endnote he calculates:

Twelve of the 14 references Dawkins cites are taken from the Pentateuch or Torah. The remaining two are from Judges; none are cited from the remaining 36 books of the Old Testament.

McGrath may be right that we should

appreciate that these ancient texts arose within a people who were fighting to maintain their group or national identity in the face of onslaughts from all sides, who were making sense of their human situation in relation to a God about whose nature their thinking became more and more developed in the millennium over which the material that makes up these Scriptures was being produced, orally and in writing.

This is effectively saying that, for whatever reason, those earlier books misrepresented the true nature of God. My own recollection – again purely anecdotal of course – of Old Testament stories from school and Sunday School is that the early books were predominant. If I were to list off the top of my head all the Old Testament stories I could, the majority would be from Genesis and Exodus.

Rembrandt: Abraham and Isaac

I tested this by Googling old testament bible stories for children and picked http://www.mssscrafts.com/oldtestament/ and http://www.trainupchildren.com/children/bible-lessons.php at random. www.mssscrafts.com listed 64 stories, of which the first 32 finished with Joshua and the fall of Jericho. www.trainupchildren.com was more representative: 61 out of a total of 145 were stories up to and including the death of Joshua. But the story entitled ABRAHAM OFFERS ISAAC: GENESIS 22:1-18 contained no suggestion that the God who was testing Abraham to see if his obedience would trump his love of Isaac was in any way a primitive misrepresentation or an undeveloped conception. The http://www.mssscrafts.com equivalent linked through to http://www.childrensermons.com/sermons/isaac.htm which included:

God realized that Abraham was obedient, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his only son…

…Are we willing to offer our ‘Isaac’? Are we willing to give to God the one thing we cherish most?⁷

Remember these are resources designed for children, some at least of whom will see the story, not from God’s point of view or from Abraham’s, but from Isaac’s:

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son…⁸

Google results can all be dismissed as ‘selective Internet-trawling’ of course. But the point remains that the entire bible is regarded by many believers as not just important but as sacred ‘scripture’, even as in some way the ‘word of God’. The idea is quite a sophisticated one that the ‘word of God’ could include undeveloped conceptions or primitive sketches – and therefore inaccurate depictions – of the very God whose word it is. What age a child needs to be to appreciate such a subtlety is not the issue. The issue is that no attempt is made here to qualify or contextualise the God who is being portrayed. God is God is God – a God claiming authority over the child’s developing moral sense.

The sort of biblical literary criticism McGrath is urging on Dawkins requires both a capacity and an appetite for flexibility, doubt, and the ambiguities inherent in self-reference. Not the kinds of things you would immediately associate with the believers Dawkins is referring to here (in an interview following the publication of The God delusion):

…Why not just say, “Oh, well, if people want to believe that, that’s fine.” Of course, nobody’s stopping people believing whatever they like. The problem is that there’s not that much tolerance coming the other way. Things like the opposition to stem-cell research, to abortion, to contraception – these are all religiously inspired prohibitions on what would otherwise be freedom of action, whether of scientists or individual human beings.

There are religious people who are not content to say, “Oh, well, my religion doesn’t allow me to use contraceptives, but I’m quite happy for anybody else to.” Instead, we have religiously-inspired prohibitions on aid programs abroad, including in areas where HIV AIDS is rife, prohibiting aid going in any form that might be used to help contraception. That is religion over-stepping the bounds and interfering in other people’s freedom….

…The other thing is that, as a scientist and an educator, it is impossible to overlook the fact that, especially in America, there is a vigorous and virulent campaign to suppress the teaching of scientific biology. In state after state, there are court battles being fought. Scientists have to go out of the laboratory and waste their time responding to these know-nothings who are trying to stop the teaching of evolution or give equal time to creationism or intelligent design, or whatever they like to call it. They actually are trying to interfere with the freedom of children to learn science and the freedom of science teachers to teach their science properly.

… [I wrote The God Delusion] because I felt that the world actually is drifting, parts of it anyway, towards theocracy in very dangerous ways. Education in my own field of Evolutionary Biology was under threat. There are all sorts of reasons why one might worry about the looming rise of religious influence, especially in the United States of America and in the Islamic world.⁹

If the books of the Old Testament were generated by people whose understanding of God was developing – and therefore changing – at what point can we say that that understanding was fully developed? How do we know whether the development was all in the right direction? What criterion do we have to assert that any particular section of text anywhere in the bible or in any religious work is now a fully accurate representation of God?

It is not that this kind of thinking invalidates religious faith or religious texts. But it calls into question the right to deduce any public policy decision – or even any support for any public policy decision – from articles of faith or sacred writings. This is particularly so where the decisions affect people with different beliefs.

Next time we talk about fundamentalism.

References

¹ Alister McGrath (with Joanna Collicutt McGrath), The Dawkins delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, SPCK, London, 2007.

² Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006.

³ Richard Dawkins, ‘Time to stand up’, in: A devil’s chaplain: Selected essays, Phoenix, 2004.

⁴ John Hartung, ‘Love thy neighbor: The evolution of in-group morality’, Skeptic, 3(4):86-98, 1995. [http://strugglesforexistence.com/?p=article_p&id=13]

⁵ Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’, London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 20, 19 October 2006.

⁶ Richard Dawkins, 2006: See ² above.

⁷ http://www.childrensermons.com/sermons/isaac.htm, retrieved 20 April 2009.

⁸ Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version, OUP, 1989: Genesis 22, 9-10.

⁹ Richard Dawkins, quoted by: Terrence McNally, ‘Atheist Richard Dawkins on The God Delusion‘, AlterNet, January 18, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/story/46566/?page=entire, retrieved 19 April 2009.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.