Foxholes are unnecessary. There are no atheists in the dentist’s chair. That’s my theory at least.
After getting four teeth drilled on the other day in Charlotte, I had the only slightly greater pleasure of driving my Novocain-paralyzed face down to Columbia, South Carolina to see the infamous Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist. Dawkins, a British biologist, is part of the controversial neo-atheist movement. Neo-atheism itself is a highly vocal, if not outright shrill, atheist philosophy that seeks to argue, insult, and humiliate believers of all stripes into abandoning their faith—or at least ostracizing and ejecting them out of having any cultural influence. Dawkins’ last book and a key intellectual bulwark of this view, was politely named The God Delusion in honor of anyone moronic enough to have any belief of the divine.
I waited among thousands of students in Columbia with baited breath, for the neo-atheist circus ringleader to shock the crowd with resounding statements of intellectual superiority from his new science-oriented book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I anticipated enough fire and brimstone to replace a Bunsen burner. I was instead stunned to hear a soft-spoken English gentleman request that ministers, priests, and pastors live up to their responsibility as community leaders by educating their flocks about the reality of evolutionary truth.
Dawkins rightly pointed out that many in clergy see no conflict between Darwinian evolution and their faith, but fail to make that clear to their congregations. Using the story of Adam and Eve as an example, Dawkins conjectured that many preachers cite the story without thinking of it as 100% literal. However, they do so without making those in the pews aware of this nuance. This in turn leads to misinformed religious parents and students resisting a science curriculum at their school in the name of their faith, even though their pastor would have no qualms about it.
In an odd sense of revelation, I felt spiritually convicted by this plea. Many of us in ministry have been unwilling to address this controversial issue because we are unwilling to expose ourselves to the potential fallout. It’s much easier to use the same words found in the opening of Genesis and allow for different meanings, especially when identifying those meanings may uproot deeply seated assumptions about the Genesis account. So let me do my part in this. I believe in Darwinian evolution—in essentially every sense that Dawkins would understand it—and I see no conflict between believing in that and believing in the inspired and authoritative Word of God. Furthermore, I am publishing a version of this article to my congregation this week.
I probably would go on longer about evolution and theology if it hadn’t been for Dawkins tangling himself in a web of strategic and philosophical contradictions the rest of the evening. Strategically, it seems highly counterproductive for him asking religious leaders to help him out in his educational crusade shortly before returning to his usual rhetoric of labeling religion as: “a kind of virus of the mind”, suggesting God is a sadist, and roundly declaring that “if someone is getting their morality from the Bible, you don’t want to be around that person!” It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that clergy are so reluctant to promote the same science that often holds hands with rabid anti-spirituality. But Dawkins can’t for the life of him figure out why.
I wonder if Dawkins replayed the tapes of his own lecture would he answer his own question?
Philosophically, Dawkins does more intellectual gymnastics than well, a gymnast, swinging from bold dictum to dictum without much logic connecting the points between. Comically, Dawkins states that he is not the last gasp of Enlightenment thinkers, refusing to address the evidence that indicates neo-atheists are really “hyper-modernists” tenuously held together by the internet and a zealous faith in science. Granted, that he “doesn’t follow the zeitgeist”, but does “notice the opinion polls”. He concludes “We [atheism] are winning.” Yet, even accepting the juvenile terms of “winning” and “losing”, the reality is that this is only true in the United States (1) and nowhere else in the world. In contrast to this, the Global South is exploding in religion, with Christianity at the forefront. Christianity is still steadily flourishing in spite of the state-enforced secularism of China. Even in post-Christian Europe (where atheism was assumed to have already won), we are beginning to see a dedicated Christian resurgence (e.g. Holy Trinty Brompton)
Maybe it’s just me, but winning sure looks a lot like getting your ass kicked not doing so well.
Yet, with less humor and more irony, he claims evolutionary psychology has no bearing on forming social norms between race and gender. Defending himself to one questioner, he declared “You can do whatever the hell you like…you’re free!” However, when responding to (deep breath) a secondhand straw-man question delivered by an atheist on whether a world of atheists would degenerate morally, Dawkins proclaims that an atheist society would be a good society. Not only good, but that they “would do good for the sake of being good and not out of fear from some God, some cosmic spy camera, watching your every move and knowing your every thought.” The linguistic assumptions he makes about the meaning of value-laden words are painfully evident. The very concept of “good” is relative to individual perception in a atheistic worldview, so a world full of atheists doing whatever is “good” in their own eyes could range anywhere from helping end genocide in Africa to being the one perpetuating it.
Not to mention I once heard a man once say (about ten minutes earlier) that when you’re free, “you can do whatever the hell you like”.
Richard Dawkins reminds me a bit of Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Not because they believe any of the same things. It’s actually hard to imagine two people who might disagree more. However, both share a unique commonality of being very good in one field only to find they may be overreaching into another field where they really don’t belong. Dobson has some fine thoughts on child-rearing. He has mind-blowingly dubious (my friend Amanda wouldn’t let me use the word stupid) thoughts on politics. Likewise, Dawkins is superb at explaining complex science in common vernacular. He is woefully ill-suited for engaging in real philosophy beyond preaching to an atheist pep rally.
Hopefully, his new book on evolutionary science is an indication that he intends to stay in field that God made him for.
1. Crossman, Cathy L. “People With No Religion Gain on Major Denominations.” Religion. USA Today, 22 Sept. 09. Web. .
About Colin Kerr
I disagree. I think Richard Dawkins is great and I have been blogging about him as I have been reading the God Delusion and now The Greatest Show on Earth.
I think for religious people, rather than be defensive about him, we ought to consider what he is saying. I think he is right on about religious superstition and the harm that comes with it.
You can read some of my posts about him here…
http://www.shuckandjive.org/search?q=dawkins
Anyway, thanks for bringing up the topic.
Just read your article on Richard Dawkins being in my home town of Columbia. I’ve never heard of him, but I do not have any interest in atheists and what they have to say. I did not see anything in the local news about his being here.
However, I was very much intrigued about your breath being “baited” and wondered what you were trying to hook and what you used for bait. Or did you mean to say “bated” breath?
Mr. Boyd, you got me. This is what I get for never taking an English class in college.
As for Mr. Shuck, I did consider at length what Dr. Dawkins said–and endorsed it! I just didn’t buy his philosophy of ethics or find his insults to Christians an effective vehicle for converting Christians to his cause.
Colin, you wrote:
“The very concept of “good” is relative to individual perception in a atheistic worldview, so a world full of atheists doing whatever is “good” in their own eyes could range anywhere from helping end genocide in Africa to being the one perpetuating it.”
You can’t really mean that can you, that atheists can’t know, be or do good as much as theists? That is insulting and wrong. And you have never seen an atheist in a dentist’s chair? There are about a billion of them worldwide and I would guess some of them survived a visit to the dentist with their integrity intact.
Talk about Dawkins being condescending.
But Dawkins is strong medicine. A book I recommend is Greg Epstein, “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” He is not strident like Dawkins tends to be and he sees progressive and emergent religious people as allies. He makes the case for humanism that I think many readers of this blog would claim as their own philosophy.
Peace friend…
@ John: I’m not sure that’s the point that’s being made here. It isn’t so much that atheists can’t know, be, or do good. It’s just that they can’t make any non-subjective statements about what is or is not good. “Goodness” is, in a non-theistic context, something recognized as inherently contingent, being mediated by sociolinguistic or anthropocentric expectations.
Most of my atheist pals would recognize this and accept it as a given. It is not, however, a limitation recognized by faith, which posits a transcendent ground for moral assertions.
A lot of very large words that I don’t think I can unpack. I don’t know what you are saying but I sense an insult in there somewhere.
How do you know your transcendent ground is good?
I can’t see how a belief in God helps us find anything we cannot find on our own.
@ John: I know, I know. If I were a supervillain, my name would be Doctor Vocabulario.
The question you ask is, in essence, the core of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma. Um. Perhaps that ain’t helpin’.
Ultimately, I trust that my transcendent ground is good because I have, in moments of deep contemplation and ecstatic experience, felt my participation in it.
Belief in God is indispensable to us as moral agents because it radically orients us outside of self and culture. Faith is, as Tillich famously put it, the state of being ultimately concerned, and the greatest shatterer of idols. Reason can serve a similar purpose, but the structures of rationality are often so deeply informed by ingrained cultural preconceptions that they impede our ability to act in grace towards the Other.
Belief in god is dispensable. I have dispensed with it. “God” is our own creation as are our morals. You can be ultimately concerned with doing good with the need of a supernatural figure that we created in the first place to tell us what good is. We figure it out. There is nothing that “God” can give us that we cannot get without that hypothesis.
correction:
Belief in god is dispensable. I have dispensed with it. “God” is our own creation as are our morals. You can be ultimately concerned with doing good without the need of a supernatural figure that we created in the first place to tell us what good is. We figure it out. There is nothing that “God” can give us that we cannot get without that hypothesis.
@ John: Much of the morality that is necessary to human existence can be, as they say, “self-evident” to rational persons. But that you have dispensed with God does not mean that God is dispensable.
To that end, define “doing good.”
I would assume that you define the good in much the same way that I do, meaning justice for all and a radical application of the Golden Rule. Feel free to correct me if that assumption is wrong.
But that ethic is not held by all human beings as “good.” What grounds would I have for asserting that over and against someone who felt that their own individual pleasure was the highest good? Or for someone who argued that what is good is to assert power over others? Or for arguing against the profit-seeking “good” of corporate America? Each of those claims presents a radically different understanding of what “good” means.
If we each create the “good,” and it is therefore a category that has no fixed meaning, then the term is meaningless.
All of that is fine. We have a challenge if we wish, to create a definition of good and to do it. Postulating “God” doesn’t solve that problem.
@ John: Again, that assumes that goodness has no reality. From that perspective, there is no difference in actual, material value between my “good” and the “good” of the greedy or the despot or the libertine. They are, existentially speaking, of equal value.
I do agree in one sense. “Postulating” God does not solve that problem. But postulating is not what faith does.
Faith does not solve the problem either. Just because you think “good” is some objective reality doesn’t make it so. Even if it were so, it takes human beings to define it and explain it. People with “faith” in supernatural beings are in no better position than anyone else to define, explain, and be good. All believers in supernatural deities have going for them is obedience to some text or tradition which of course was created by human beings in the first place.
@ John: Sure it does. You should try it some time.
Faith is, in fact, necessary to make that assertion. That’s not to say that those without faith cannot pursue the good. It’s just that in that pursuit, those without faith have to say: “I am doing this in the recognition that my actions are essentially meaningless.” To put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, that’s the way of the Knight of Infinite Resignation. It’s a noble path, albeit one laced with existential isolation for those who are philosophically honest. Been there, done that, as they say.
I’m interested by your statement that faith is simply “obedience to some text or tradition.” You have spent too much time in the company of fundamentalists, my friend. To be quite frank, that ain’t what Jesus taught, and it ain’t what Paul taught.
I am enjoying this thread…but perhaps we should carry it on elsewhere. Blogs at forty paces, perhaps? You can fire first, if you’d like.
You said that I have to say: “I am doing this in the recognition that my actions are essentially meaningless.” No, I don’t. There can be a variety of things that give my life meaning. I can create a supernatural being to give my life meaning I suppose, which is what people of faith do.
I have spent 20 years as a minister, not just with fundamentalists. I don’t particularly care to argue with you. My original objection to this post was the statements: “there are no atheists in dentists’ chairs” and “so a world full of atheists doing whatever is “good” in their own eyes could range anywhere from helping end genocide in Africa to being the one perpetuating it.”
In the end, if a belief in a supernatural being helps folks do good, then I am all for it. If you need a supernatural being to keep you from robbing my house, selling drugs, starting wars, then by all means believe in one.
It is just that for an increasing number of folks, God is not necessary either to explain things to help cope with life.
On the other hand, I happen to like the structure and the tradition and the symbols as part of my past. The ancestors do have wisdom and the gods they created get a voice, just not THE voice.
The problems we face today are our problems. The good we do today needs to be good that relates to our time, not the time in which the gods were making pronouncements about the good in their time.
In our contemporary conversation about the good, whatever is said must be evaluated on its own terms. People of faith don’t get a free pass by saying God said this is good therefore it is more good than your good.
So if people of faith want to say God said the good is for women to wear hats in church, that gays need to convert to straightdom, to whatever else, they have to show that it is good for the community and convince others.
Bottom line: Appealing to an absolute or supernatural authority to buttress your opinion gets you no further than simply having your opinion.
Humanity is never free from deciding what is good on its own.
@ John: Great! Well, let’s not argue, then! Though a bit of sparring is always fun, that suits me just fine. We can certainly leave disagreeing on this, ’cause I think even a delightful bout of jousting would leave us both unchanged. Twenty years, eh? As a minister? Given what you believe and how you express it, I’m sure you’re plenty tired of arguing. Better to save your energy for working for GLBT justice.
What helps us do good is not the belief in a god which we whittle for ourselves out of wood and words. It is, instead, our existential participation in a reality which tradition struggles to express because language and culture are inadequate vessels for it. There is a deeper purpose and intent for humankind, one which we often smother under our biases and predilections. Those who experience the Numinous grace that underlies all being…through contemplation or ecstatic moments…are able to step past those biases and move towards that purpose. That is the point of faith.
Your comments indicate you have absolutely no sense of this, but that’s fine. You seem a more or less decent sort anyway, and your community seems to like you.
Bottom Line: Atheists can be good. They just have no philosophical grounds upon which to make that a meaningful statement.
As the dear departed Kurt Vonnegut would put it: “Ah well. So it goes.”
Then I leave you with your superiority. Peace.
That wasn’t the point of this exchange, of course. But peace is a good place to be, so let’s both rest in His peace. And also with you.
Beloved
Got here by way of John’s site. Some observations:
1. I am always surprised when those who I would consider more “progressive” than I say they haven’t talked about literary historical method and creation narratives to their congregations. For nigh unto 30 years now I’ve been saying, Genesis 1 is a poem and what historical accuracy do we expect from poems? Then Genesis 2-3 has two human characters, one called man (or human) and later (split? interesting question) calls himself man and the other woman who he later names mother of all living. What kind of literature is this and what level of historicity should we expect? And the truly curious thing is that I consider myself an Evangelical and learned this at Fuller Seminary! Maybe it’s because I use the Kerygma materials.
2. I also think that evolution is the best explanation going. I might not use “Darwinian” simply because of the need for Mendel and others to make the story complete. I’m also more willing than others to admit that while there will most probably be incremental advance in the field I always hold myself open to a massive change of theory. Einstein convinced me. Of course I had the advantage of historical perspective in his case.
3. I’ve known John for a long time. I suspect if you replaced the word faith with world view you would get along better. Also if you conceded that atheists do indeed have moral systems like humanism. No they aren’t externally verified. In these days it helps to get all the compatriots one can when seeking to do the good.
Bob: Amen to both 1 and 2. And especially to 3…appreciate you speaking up for an old friend. I do concede that atheists have moral systems, albeit contingent ones. In fact, I thought I had. Ah well.
The excesses of relativistic postmodernism have obscured the obvious. We don’t need revelation to know that things like hunger and sickness are bad and that things like health, dignity, and security are good. Even psychopaths know as much — they just don’t care when it comes to others. The arguments about relativism and subjectivism ignore the obvious and go straight to the hard cases, such as where there are difficult tradeoffs and disputes about how to bring the good about justly (think about the health care debates: no one is arguing that health isn’t good — it’s OBVIOUSLY good.) When it comes to the hard cases — say honor and justice — there is at least as much dispute among theists as among atheists about what that means (again, health care debates, or the violent strains that run through all religions). Complexity doesn’t mean values are all merely culturally or personally subjective. If the reality we (in a sense do) create doesn’t mesh with reality itself, we will be in a world of hurt (and that’s not good!). Hey, gravity doesn’t apply to me.
I add, the central Christian commandment is to love, which means we are to care about the good, the flourishing, of others. The Law can’t cut it — life is too complicated to be guided by a bunch of specific rules. Love, and the Law will take care of itself. Of course, there’s always the problem of bad judgment and incomplete knowledge, so even if love means that we are acting for the right reason, it doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out the way we want or expect them to.
When Dawkins is not wearing his biologist hat, he’s really more of a provocateur than a philosopher. I think Christians (and other theists) can benefit a great deal from conversations with atheists or agnostics. It is good to be reminded that what one believes is not a given for others. Such conversations can require an improvisational re-framing of what one believes so that it is intelligible to others.
While I find figures like Dawkins, or Hitchens for that matter, witty and intelligent, they are not charitable interlocutors. I enjoy reading them, or hearing their debates, for their wit and intelligence, but I don’t expect anything constructive to come (directly) from these performances.