The New Religion: An Apologetic

The New Religion is out in force. Its holy book, though published comparatively recently in the grand scheme of things, has now become a sacred text to adherents, to which they must refer on any matter of faith. Their prophet is dogmatically insistent that religion and reason are completely incompatible, and undertakes grand designs to write the moderate out of his vision. Prone to gross oversimplification of the rich complexity of human life, he has a selective view of history that omits the inconvenient for the sake of promoting dogma. Their Supreme Being a wise old man with a beard whose pronouncements destroyed the idols of the past. The aggressively seeks converts, describing all who disagree with him as The Enemies of Reason, on which he holds an absolute and incontestable monopoly. No challenge, no criticism, no argument with his worldview is acceptable; those who dare to are clearly a lower order of delusional beings.

The Followers tend to wander round with an air of smug self-righteous moral superiority. Intolerant of other religious practices, they are keen on impressing on everyone else how backward and delusional they are. Like the best of intolerant fundamentalists, they are now “unnerved” that anyone might question their beliefs in public, and are launching a campaign of propaganda.

I am, of course, referring to the Atheist Bus Campaign.

One can understand their motivation: the fire and brimstone adverts on the sides of buses were distasteful to say the least. Nonetheless, there is nothing wrong with challenging someone’s faith or lack thereof. The idea that one should not put up religious adverts is facile. The Book of Dawkins has had enough adverts in recent months: why shouldn’t the New Testament get a few in as well? If society censored all ideas that were “unsettling”, then Ariane Sherine, the founder of the campaign, would most likely not have the vote. It is also not the most unsettling advert carried by London’s buses: the rather gruesome pictures of severed heads that accompanied adverts for the latest Saw film were far more disturbing than the idea of being sent to a hell you don’t believe in. If Ms. Sherine is so worried that her atheism cannot withstand the threat of condemnation by a figure she does not believe in to a place she does not believe exists, perhaps she ought to engage in some critical self-reflection?

The proposed adverts reflect the very same moral blindness that these pop-atheists accuse religion of. Let us bear in mind that they only inserted the word “probably” into the adverts to satisfy the Advertising Standards Authority. That absolute moral certainty, unassailable by any form of reason, is one of the very things for which Dawkins criticises religion. The second half of the advert, “stop worrying”, can loosely translate as “stop thinking”. Combine that with Dawkins’ claim that “thinking is anathema to religion”, and this atheism becomes very much a religion in its own right. If it were not for “worrying” about the great moral issues, civilisation would never have advanced. The poster is reminiscent of someone saying “Stop thinking about God”. If Dawkins’ brand of atheism is so strong and rational, why can it not bear someone thinking about it? It is arrogant to assume that the matter is a question settled for all eternity. That, ultimately, is a restriction on rational enquiry.

One need look no further than Dawkins’ spurious assertion that “thinking is anathema to religion” to witness the ahistoric and narrow-minded worldview behind his atheism. Perhaps he has forgotten the origins of his own scientific tradition, rooted in the tradition of natural theology. Science has its originated in the belief that discovering how the world works is to better understand the beauty of God’s work. A vast body of scientific and civilisational advancement exists thanks to the efforts of believers and theologians, who conducted their research in the firm belief that by doing so they were serving God. Dawkins himself ought to be no stranger to this. The gene-centred theory of evolution that he is a prominent exponent of would not exist were it not for the research of the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel. Let nobody claim that such discoveries were despite Mendel’s religiosity; he was inspired to conduct his experiments, and subsequently supported by, his monastic colleagues. The discoveries of the devout lay preacher Michael Faraday in the field of electromagnetism were born of his theology. Like the best fundamentalist leader, Dawkins ignores what his revered hirsute old man says when it flatly contradicts him. In his letter to John Fordyce in 1787, Charles Darwin declared that “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist”

The great religions of the world have strong traditions of reason and critical enquiry within them. It underlies the very concept of Theology. Anyone who examines the vast body of Christian thought over the centuries will be amazed at the level, range, quantity and quality of debate. The Jews have the Talmud, a vast discourse on the teachings of the Torah. Rabbi Maimonides, one of Judaism’s prominent thinkers, was not only a theologian and philosopher, but also a physician. The Jewish community is renowned for their reverence for lawyers and doctors; professions reliant on reason and logic. In Islam, the Qur’an commands its adherents to “not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them” (17:36); a clear demand for empiricism.

In many of the great struggles against injustice, religion has been at the fore. William Wilberforce and John Newton’s campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was rooted in their evangelical Anglicanism. The first anti-slavery group was founded not by scientists drawing their arguments from cold reason, but by Quakers armed with the moral authority of the Book of Exodus. The most remembered leaders of the American Civil Rights and South African anti-Apartheid movements are a Baptist Priest, an Anglican Archbishop, and a devout Methodist. Of particular interest, evangelical Protestants were some of the foremost advocates of a secular United States. Our ideas of what constitutes a just war, a discussion as alive as ever, are based not on the writings of scientists, who tended to focus their efforts on creating obscene engines of mass destruction, but the Christian thinkers Grotius, Augustine and Aquinas.

As any epistemologist knows, the scientific method is not the only way of thinking about the world. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals the atheist David Hume acknowledged the limits of reason in our moral understanding of the world. In philosophical terms the scientific method is based on what is called a posteriori inductive reasoning; the drawing of conclusions of varying probability from empirical evidence. The limited nature of evidence means that it will never reach any “proof”, but rather only a probability. It is why dismissing evolution as “just a theory” is utterly inane: it is the most probable theory we have at present. It is however not the only form of logical reasoning available to humanity. For example, mathematics is based on a completely different system of a priori deductive reasoning, starting from first principles and working through to conclusions. In these systems, as long as the underlying principle is sound, so too is the conclusion. These alternative forms of reasoning separate from science permeate our daily lives. We could not conceive of the rights of men or ideas of justice on empiricism alone. The US Declaration of Independence opens with an article of faith: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is not an empirical statement. Science, for all its wonders, is not the only way of thinking about the world. As Faraday knew, it can account only for the how of existence, not the why.

Religion does not believe that the existence of God is a settled question. The very idea of faith is reliant on uncertainty. Were we to know with absolute certainty that God existed, faith and morality would become meaningless. Choosing God is impossible if one is certain about His existence. Atheism has to be a credible alternative if faith is to have any meaning whatsoever. It has also been instrumental in holding the teachings of God to account. In posing the difficult questions atheism has provided religion with its means of renewal and continued relevance. It is a disloyal opposition, but a no less necessary one for that. The vast numbers of works made to advance the idea of belief in God demonstrate anything but complacency on the part of thinkers such as Paley, Aquinas and Kant, and the theodicies demonstrate that religion is not ignorant of the apparent paradox of a just deity presiding over a manifestly unjust world.

The history of the twentieth century ought to provide sufficient evidence to dispense with the notion that religion is uniquely responsible for the suffering of this world. The barbarism of the atheist Soviet Union and the anti-Christian, anti-Semitic Nazi Germany demonstrated the capacity for any fundamentalism to dehumanise and murder. Looking further back, the violent excesses of the French Terror were based not on religious concepts, but on what was considered to be the exercise of reason. Religion may have contributed to the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War and al-Qa’eda, but science gave us the atomic bomb, mustard gas and Josef Mengele. Is this sufficient reason to dispense with either? Their excesses, contingent but not inherent, do not provide sufficient reason to abandon them.

It may seem something of a cheap shot to ask whether this is a good way to spend money, but then atheism tends to feel smug about not wasting money on such “trivia” as paying vicars and maintaining churches. So far the campaign has raised over a hundred thousand pounds. On a purely teleological analysis, is it really worth it? The subtitle of the adverts, as argued earlier, oppose the spirit of enquiry about religion in favour of complacent certainty, and is unlikely to win itself any converts. It is simply there to preach to the converted rather than spark any debate, which has been in response to the proposal rather than the adverts themselves. Spending that amount of money for negligible gain is immensely wasteful.

I have no problem with people being atheists, or with the promotion of religious debate. Ms. Sherine has inadvertently raised awareness of the issues of faith in public life and provoked a worthwhile discussion. It certainly prompted me to subject you all to this rather long and complex piece of apologetics. In that sense it has been an unqualified good. But I object to the narrow-minded stereotyping of religion the proponents have put forward as their justification of the campaign, to the nihilistic message the buses are proposing, and the colossal waste of money it will be.

Tagged as: Apologetics, Atheism, Richard Dawkins