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Dawkins and Hitchens on…

Religious Child Abuse…

Religion’s Hostility to Science…

The Stupidity of Intelligent Design…

and The Ultimate Boeing 747…

Hitchens and Harris and Dawk,
Three mice ran up the clock,
They admired the gears,
Gave the main-spring three cheers,
While the Maker they heartily mocked.
(An Atheist Nursery Rhyme. Anon.)

Like their fellow humbug Scrooge, Dawkins and Hitchens are “men of business”, except that their business is cold, hard science. Science, however, like atheism itself, is another victim, in their view, of the lethal hostility and repression of the religious establishment. Every scientific discovery, every technological advance, from the wheel to the pill, has been made in the teeth of an ecclesiastical hierarchy determined to preserve its “monopoly”. For Dawkins and Hitchens, the man of science is a Promethean hero. Personally, I am disappointed that neither cites the myth of Prometheus’ theft of fire from heaven, for which Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock and dispatching the Olympian vulture to feast on his ever-regenerating liver. But then, Galileo’s heresy trial is so much better known.

Hitchens’ focus is on the science of medicine, whose cures he contrasts with the snake-oil merchandised by shamans and faith-healers. In a separate chapter, he enumerates the mortal threats to public health posed by religion: the vaginal mutilation of young girls on the Indian subcontinent; imams in Calcutta and Afghanistan, and witchdoctors in Africa, demonizing the polio vaccine; the Vatican’s preference for abstinence over condoms; the rabbis of an obscure Hasidic sect in Jerusalem who remove the foreskins of the infant penises they circumcise with their lips. (An unsavoury practice, to be sure. But given his denial of the link between AIDS and anal intercourse, Hitchens’ indignation over it seems somewhat selective). Such examples, indiscriminately culled as usual from the archives of cultural anthropology, prove to Hitchens that religion, jealous of its “monopoly”, is always “hostile” to medical science, and “is not just amoral but immoral”. The vestigial pre-historic and third-world barbarities that Hitchens catalogues might well, in another context, make the argument for the conversion of the world to Christianity. Indeed, the Vatican’s sin of opposing the distribution of condoms seems mild in comparison to the other more lurid examples, but that does not prevent Hitchens from inculpating the Catholic Church by association in a whole range of sadistic crimes against children: “if I were [guilty] of raping a child, or torturing a child, or infecting a child with venereal disease, or selling a child into sexual or any other kind of slavery…I would welcome death in any form that it might take.” I gather that the question mark at the end of his chapter title, “Is Religion Child Abuse?”, is rhetorical.

Both Hitchens and Dawkins demonstrate a touching solicitude for the welfare of children insofar as it is deliberately jeopardized by religion, a major theme of their books. The recent scandal in the Catholic Church makes religious “child abuse” all that much more topical, and therefore, irresistible to the writers of best-sellers. Naturally, in their discussion of this scandal, the homosexuality of the offending priests never comes up, since if it did, their horror and revulsion at the priests’ “alternative lifestyles” might implicate them in “homophobia”, than which, in the religion of progress, there is no greater sin.

One index of liberal intellectual conformity is the curious obsession with the story of Abraham and Isaac that Dawkins and Hitchens both exhibit. There are any number of other Old Testament loci that reveal the Hebrews’ tribal strongman Yahweh in an even more murderous light. But insofar as it illustrates the faithful’s sadistic penchant for “child abuse”, both Dawkins and Hitchens are especially wroth with him, and with the obedient Abraham, whose “voices” told him to take his son Isaac “on a long and cruel walk”. Once again, they write as if Abraham and Isaac were actual historical personalities, rather than characters in a didactic allegory intended to exemplify the theological doctrine of God’s mercy. (Even the literal point of the narrative is that Abraham didn’t “barbecue” Isaac, after all). The doctrine of divine mercy may be a naive rationalization and existentially false (and Yahweh may be the last biblical character one would choose to model it), but it’s equally naive to take offense at Abraham’s psychotic cruelty and affect solicitude for poor little traumatized-for-life Isaac, the prototypical victim of religious child abuse, when both, obviously, are literary fictions.

Anyone objectively interested in the phenomenology of religion must find it unfortunate that the examples Hitchens collects arouse only his ghoulish polemical imagination. Genuine scholars of the history of religious ideas have studied ancient rites of initiation and sacrifice (most of which turn out to be mimetic, rather than actual – the legend of Abraham’s “sacrifice” of Isaac being the dim recollection of just such an initiation rite) for the light that they shed on the universal human preoccupation with the theme of death and rebirth, an inherited psychic factor (an “archetype”, as Jung calls it) that, along with innumerable other mythological symbols and complexes, continues to erupt into consciousness from the nascency of the race in a thousand ways. But for Hitchens and Dawkins, they are merely dull proofs that religion can be dangerous to one’s health. In their anti-theist histories of medicine, Dawkins and Hitchens seem to have overlooked the fact that, long before the secular welfare state, it was principally the churches and convents that operated the hospitals upon whom the sick and the poor depended for their lives. Nor has medical “science” been much more salubrious than religion in its impact upon public health. In the late eighteenth century, during that golden age in which science and reason had supposedly emancipated themselves from religious quackery, physicians were still letting blood, blistering skin, sniffing stools, and diagnosing disease as an imbalance of the humours. The history of science, like the history of any human activity or department of knowledge, can be relied upon to furnish its share of lethal follies, quite without the contribution of God or his monopolistic ministers.

The opposition between religion and science has been a longstanding trope of anti-Christian polemic, and by the time that Dawkins and Hitchens joined the Church of Atheistic Reason, it was already a hallowed article of faith. The idea took root in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century and is now dismissed by historians of science as “the conflict myth”. In reality, science and religion have only rarely been at mutual enmity, nor have the attitudes of theists and rationalists been as irreconcilable as Dawkins and Hitchens pretend; on the contrary, the Rational Science to which its atheistic hagiographers intone hymns of praise as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, arose – and could only have arisen – in the Graeco-Christian West.

In classical antiquity the rudiments of astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics, and biology were discovered by natural philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes, Pliny) whose rational investigations merely ratified their belief in the existence of a divine Principle of Order. In the Christian Middle Ages, the most brilliant natural scientists (Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon) were monks, bishops, doctors of the Church, saints, or combinations thereof, whose discoveries were made with the imprimatur and under the patronage of the Papacy. The Church’s sponsorship, and religion’s inspiration, of science hardly diminished in the humanistic Renaissance. While Galileo was shamefully persecuted by the Inquisition, and the works of Copernicus were intermittently placed on the Index, the latter were first published with the wholehearted approbation of Pope Clement VII. Kepler records that he was led to his three laws of planetary motion by the mystical doctrines of Christian Neoplatonism, and throughout his career he extolled the rational order of the universe as a manifestation of the intelligent Being of God. In England, Francis Bacon was an uncontroversially orthodox member of the Established Church, and Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, wrote a series of religious treatises asserting the essential congruity between the new scientific method and the Christian faith. In his Naturalis Principia Mathematica, there is no doubt that Newton infers the existence of God from the rational laws that govern the universe, while acknowledging divine transcendence, omnipotence, and perfection. And far from being the free-thinking, rationalist, anti-religious sceptic that Dawkins and Hitchens envisage, for Descartes the first “clear and distinct idea” that the thinking ego knows outside of its own existence is the idea of God, an idea that is unaccountable except on the assumption that God exists.

These lacunae aside, the least that one should expect from the arguments of our authors (men of reason and logic) is that they should be free of internal contradictions. Yet, as one of the fathers of modern science, Newton invariably appears on the anti-religious honour role, while as a believer in God, he is ridiculed by Hitchens as a “spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind”. Hitchens never deigns to wonder how a mind so credulous of religious flim-flam could achieve such scientific lucidity.

Dawkins himself enumerates a list of modern (i.e., post-Darwinian) eminences of science who simultaneously credited the fables of Christianity: Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin; and in the twentieth century: Francis Collins, Peacocke, Stannard, and Polkinghorne. Of the latter three, Dawkins “remains baffled…by their belief in the details of the Christian religion”, but adds, with a wink of innuendo, that they all “either won the Templeton Prize or are on the Templeton Board of Trustees” (see below). Similarly, Dawkins concedes that the father of Genetics, Gregor Mendel, was an Augustinian monk, but then explains: “but that was in the nineteenth century, when becoming a monk was the easiest way for the young Mendel to pursue his science. For him it was the equivalent of a research grant.” Really? So much, then, for the supposed hostility of the Church toward independent scientific inquiry.

Dawkins might have gone on to name other modern scientists – the originator of the Big Bang theory, for example: a Belgian priest – who, far from regarding their religion as an impediment to science, saw in its symbols and doctrines the types and shadows that pointed the way to their own proofs and theories. It is a measure of their polemical desperation that both Dawkins and Hitchens devote significant sections of their books to disproving the common opinion that Einstein believed in God, arguing that he was merely a Deist or Pantheist – as if Deism or Pantheism were purely scientific, extra-religious categories of thought.

In general, Dawkins and Hitchens betray an egregious ignorance of the most basic facts of the history of Western civilization and thought. Like Newton, Socrates is a culture hero for those who wish to extol rational science as the great deliverer of mankind from its long religious night; inevitably, Hitchens depicts him as an atheistic martyr. Unfortunately, the most cursory acquaintance with Plato’s dialogues not only reveals that Socrates was an unquestioning believer in an eternal God who created and sustains the universe with his goodness and justice, but also the exponent of the most esoteric speculations about the celestial pre-existence of souls, their transmigration through plant, beast, and astral forms, the purgation of their sins in the afterlife, and their final, beatific reunion with God in the Other World. (Rather worse for Hitchens’ Christianity-is-the-cause-of-our-“sexual-repression” thesis, on the subject of the temptations of the flesh and the world, Socrates makes Paul sound like a Middle Eastern Hugh Heffner.)

Hitchens is, moreover, still retailing the shopworn nineteenth-century historical myth of a “benighted Christian Europe” that did not arise from its Dark Age slumber until the works of Aristotle were re-introduced in the twelfth century:

When they got hold of the material and reluctantly conceded that there had been intelligent discussion of ethics and morality before the supposed advent of Jesus, they tried their hardest to square the circle. We have nothing much to learn from what they thought, but a great deal to learn from how they thought.

Hitchens simply has a lot to learn, including that it is not a good idea to advertise one’s ignorance with such conspicuous and self-congratulatory pride. The doctrines of Aristotle were never “lost”; they were the subject, for example, of numerous treatises written by Boethius, a “Dark Age” philosopher and theologian whose works inspired Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and everyone else down to the time of Pope. Early and medieval Christians were so well aware that there had been “intelligent discussions”, not only of ethics but also of cosmology and theology, before Christ, that they revered – to offer only a partial list – Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Statius, and Macrobius, all of whom were perennially invoked as auctores and inspired rafts of learned commentaries that, cumulatively, constituted a body of exegesis as important as that which attached to Scripture.

While the Church has traditionally fostered rational inquiry (to the extent that reason is exalted as the second person of the Trinity), scientists have never been above the uncritical certitudes and sectarian zeal that Dawkins and Hitchens impute exclusively to the adherents of organized religion. As a celebrated biologist, Dawkins in particular affects to write about faith from the superior perspective of objectivity and reason. Yet it is obvious that he is both personally and passionately invested in the theory of evolution, and defends its postulates with a nervous conviction that equals that of any Bible-belt creationist. Evolution, he chides, is a “fact”, and it explains everything. With the same righteousness with which the current orthodoxy (a.k.a. “consensus”) on global warming has been preached and defended against “deniers” (a term of opprobrium that, ironically enough, was first used by early Christian heresiologists to describe the infidels who denied the divinity of Christ), Dawkins attacks the motives of any amongst his fellow scientists who dares to question the smallest article of Darwinian Truth, or consider that the facts of science might be reconcilable with the existence of a Creator.

Dawkins devotes much of one long chapter and scores of pages throughout his book to compiling what can only be described as a scientific blacklist. Biologists or astrophysicists who are concomitantly receptive to the arguments of intelligent design, Dawkins calls “appeasers”. They belong, he charges, to the “Neville Chamberlain School” of science. In giving aid and comfort to the enemy, they must have ulterior motives: to propitiate grant-giving governmental agencies who have to answer to their “ignorant and prejudiced” Christian constituents, or to win lucrative prizes offered to researchers sympathetic to religion by the Templeton Foundation. The aforementioned Peacocke, Stannard, and Polkinghorne (whose names sound like those of “the senior partners in a firm of Dickensian lawyers”), along with Freeman Dyson and unnamed others, have taken the “Faustian road to a future Templeton Prize”. When the late Stephen Jay Gould argues that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria” (i.e., that science has nothing to say about the ultimate questions of which religion treats), Dawkins accuses him of being an astronomical Uncle Tom who “bend[s] over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent”. The only motive Dawkins can’t imagine is that a genuine scientist might actually disagree with him. In a calumny that is scurrilous even by his own modest standards of truthfulness and decorum, Dawkins accuses Richard Swinburne, professor of religion and science at Oxford, of trying to “justify the Holocaust” – thereby bravely denouncing another sort of “denier” – when Swinburne was merely attempting to reconcile the enormity of human evil with the existence of a benevolent God. Had Dawkins read Jung, rather than merely mined him for cheap satirical asides, he might have recognized in his own Darwinist certitudes and determination to crush dissent the “absolutist” attitude of the prophet of a modern religion.

In the central chapters of their books, both Dawkins and Hitchens profess to refute the traditional arguments for the existence of God (the ontological, cosmological, and argument from design), and to show that Darwinian natural selection either disproves the God hypothesis or renders it superfluous and therefore vulnerable to Occam’s razor. To Dawkins, the medieval proofs are simply “vacuous” and risible. He dismisses Anselm’s ontological argument as “infantile”, and to illustrate its infantilism, “translates” it for us into the “appropriate language of the playground”. What follows is an imagined debate between two children which begins with “Bet I can prove God exists–Bet you can’t” and ends with “Nur Nurny Nur Nur. All atheists are fools”. I’ve already mentioned Dawkins’ own curious penchant for linguistic infantilism, so one ought not be surprised that an Oxford professor should want to write lines of dialogue for children in a schoolyard. Plato, of course, put arguments into the mouths of his philosophical antagonists for Socrates to demolish, but at least the interlocutors of the Platonic dialogues were the leading thinkers of their day.

In any case, it is interesting that while Dawkins parodies Anselm’s syllogism and dismisses it as “dialectical prestidigitation”, he doesn’t anywhere expose the fallacy in its logic, even as he expresses his bewilderment that so great a thinker as Bertrand Russell (“no fool”) could have been taken in by it. Conveniently, Dawkins prefers to spar with old Anselm than to get into the ring with more contemporary and sophisticated exponents of the ontological argument. Or rather, as I should say, he prefers to make fun of it by reproducing half a dozen “hilarious” sproofs (if I may be allowed my own neologism, a la Dawkins) he found on the Internet (godlessgeeks.com, to be exact), such as the “Argument from Non-belief: The majority of the world’s population are non-believers in Christianity. This is just what Satan intended. Therefore God exists.”

The “central argument of [Dawkins’] book” (to which Hitchens pays full-throated tribute in his own) is that

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything [that complex] would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape.

Thus the God hypothesis is “very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability”: a Creator, being necessarily more complex than his creation, is necessarily more improbable.

Dawkins’ thereby refutes “the creationists’ favourite argument”: that the universe is so complex as to make it infinitely improbable that it could have been assembled by chance. His own favourite “creationist” straw man is the thought experiment of Fred Hoyle, who posited that the probability of life originating on earth is equivalent to that of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard and having the good fortune to thereby assemble a Boeing 747. Dawkins triumphantly turns the argument on its stupid head: God is “The Ultimate Boeing 747”. Not only must God be logically more complex than the universe he has created; but consider that, as the faithful claim for him, he is capable of monitoring the movements and thoughts of all his creatures, and answering their prayers, a feat beyond the wildest dreams of our most powerful supercomputer. “Such complexity…Such bandwith!”, as Dawkins mockingly exclaims.

The improbable complexity of life on earth has come about, as Dawkins never tires of saying, neither by chance nor intelligent design, but through the painstaking and aeons-long process of evolutionary natural selection. Thus, for “creationists”, natural selection ought to be a “consciousness-raiser”, on the model of feminism, which finally dragged male consciousness kicking and screaming to a higher alertness to the sensitivities of women, who have had to endure such exclusionary terms as the “Rights of Man” and “history”:

Feminism shows us the power of consciousness-raising, and I want to borrow the technique for natural selection. Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.

I needn’t belabour the point that Dawkins’ invocation of the example of feminist consciousness-raising is unfortunate for any scientist who wishes to be seen as having risen above the irrational passions of fundamentalist ideology or religion. In any case, Dawkins does not demonstrate why a theory that explains the trajectory of life from the simple to the complex should be transferable from the sphere of biology to that of physics or cosmology. In physics, as I understand it, the law of entropy suggests that the universe is continually devolving from states of order to disorder; accordingly, if you insist on explaining its present condition in terms of an antecedent one, you are obliged to explain the simple and probable in terms of the complex and improbable. It is hardly obvious which paradigm is more apposite to the ultimate question of the creation of the cosmos itself, and it is only after that question is finally settled that we will be able to decide between the theological definition of the Creator as irreducibly simple and Dawkins’ definition of him as improbably complex (the “ultimate 747”).

Above all, Darwinian evolution cannot even purport to answer the question that vexes the theological and scientific mind alike: Why does the universe exist, and how has it come into existence, in the first place? A theory that posits the evolution of life from the simple to the complex cannot trace the evolution of something from nothing. The transition from nothing to something is not amenable to conceptions of Darwinian gradualism; the universe cannot be (to invoke the human biological parallel) “a little bit pregnant”. Who or what created the matter from which, by “natural” combination or selection, the present cosmos has evolved? If matter is eternal, as the ancients believed, who or what fertilized the cosmic womb?

As H. Allen Orr has pointed out in his devastating 2007 review in the New York Review of Books (not exactly an organ of right-wing Christian fundamentalism), Dawkins is “not very good at reasoning philosophically”, in part because “he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he’s determined to arrive”. This explains why he uses “any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there”, and judges its merits on the basis of how quickly and painlessly it conveys him to his destination. His unseemly reliance on the Internet may be accounted for in this way, although I see it more generally as indicative of a combination of intellectual laziness and undergraduate amateurism.

Orr is less charitable. He notes that Dawkins is merciless in deriding the traditional proofs for God as “infantile”, “dubious”, and “perniciously misleading”, but asserts that his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument is “unanswerable”. “So why, you might wonder, is a clever philosophical argument for God subject to withering criticism while one against God gets a free pass and is deemed devastating?” Where is Dawkins’ usual skepticism when it comes to his own feats of “dialectical prestidigitation”? Orr points out two fundamental problems with Dawkins’ argument that “one needn’t be a creationist to note”. First, no scientific hypothesis can stand on its aprioristic reasoning alone; it needs to be ratified by data. Second, the fact that scientists find a hypothesis question-begging (as when Dawkins asks, “Who designed the designer?”) does not preclude its veracity. “It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging that may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn’t that question-begging?”

It is especially hypocritical of Dawkins and Hitchens that, possessing no empirical data that proves the “evolution” of matter and the cosmos by natural selection, they demand such data from those who profess “the stupid notion of intelligent design”, as Hitchens calls it. This, for our authors, is the most damning indictment of religion: that its incorporeal postulates have not been demonstrated empirically. One wonders if that is really the best they can do. Surely the fact that science cannot detect something hardly proves its non-existence. Until relatively recently in the history of mankind (not to say of the universe), we lacked the means by which to measure the force of gravity. From the age of the Pre-Socratics, philosophers, theologians, and mythological poets alike inferred ts existence from its effects, even if their mysterious cause could not yet be perceived or quantified by the experimental method. Gravity existed all the same, and only a simpleton would now say that it was a “myth” until the epiphanic moment when it was rationally explained by Newton.

Can anyone predict with certainty that in some future decade, century, or millennium science will not finally possess the instruments sensitive enough to observe and measure such equally ineffable phenomena as God, spirit, or soul? When critics of religion such as Dawkins declare their pessimism about such a possibility, they demonstrate an odd lack of confidence in the very science in which they otherwise invest so much hope and trust. Or rather, they betray the odd certitude that only phenomena that can be observed by the senses can be real. Odd, in part, because for at least two millennia before the dawn of modern Empiricism, philosophers insisted on quite the reverse. With Relativity, String Theory, Sub-Atomic Physics, and neurological researches into the mind-body continuum, scientists have already moved beyond the empiricist hypothesis and the reassuring materialist certitudes that it temporarily provided. The universal pre-modern world-view that prevailed from Pythagoras to Pico, and which credited only incorporeal entities as ultimately “real” and “true”, may have been narrow and one-sided, but science seems to be retrogressing in its direction with each new “advance”.

To recall Orr’s phrase, the entire debate may well be “question-begging”. One wonders how many Christians or adherents of any other religion were first converted by the dessicated scholasticism that begets such arguments as those of Anselm or Aquinas, and how many will be un-converted by Darwinian natural selection. In spite of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ absurdly reductive theories about the origins of religion–whether the result of “cargo cults” or Dawkins’ virus-like “memes” that multiply by infecting the credulous brains of children–, its existence and perdurance are themselves immutable facts of the human psyche, and wholly un-deluded responses to man’s everyday experience of a non-corporeal dimension of reality (from dreams, to thoughts themselves, to literature, to art, to the very world of philosophical ideas in which Dawkins and Hitchens live).

The Atheist’s Progressive Gospel: Dawk and Hitch on…

The Church’s Victorian Prudery…

Repression of Homosexuals…

and…

Speciesist Love of the Human Embryo…

Both Dawkins and Hitchens think that the Church’s most malevolent bequest to mankind is (in Hitchens’ phrase) a “dangerous sexual repression”. If Hitchens’ own erotomaniacal feats weren’t so well known, I’d say he ought to get out more. Attend some raves or rock concerts; see some Hollywood films; watch some reality T.V.; look at the ubiquitous Calvin Klein ads on billboards, buses, and in magazines. As the urban underclass throughout America and Europe is being ravaged by epidemics of teenage pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births, absentee fatherhood, and the consequent epidemics of welfare-dependency, poverty, crime, and incarceration, about the only people besides our authors who would still argue that the main problem of our culture is its sexual prudery are Dr. Ruth and Larry Flynt.

In the presence of such widespread social pathologies (a poison for which post-religious secularism is at least partly to blame), it is bizarre that Hitchens should be appalled by the fact that at various times throughout history certain religious sects have had the effrontery to prohibit anal sex(!) If they genuinely believe we live in a puritanical society whose citizens have been systematically “indoctrinated” in the repressive morality of Mother Church, Hitchens and Dawkins are more deracinated from reality than any psychotic who deludedly imagines he hears the voice of Jesus.

No one will be surprised to learn that both of our authors vehemently disapprove of the Church’s disapproval of homosexuality. After noting that several bishops “made the fatuous point that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ “, Hitchens’ outrage boils over: “Who are the clerics to interpret nature”? Who indeed? Clerics ought not to meddle in science, just as they ought to keep their religious convictions in cathedra and out of the public square. Here the shrill sonorities of secularist bigotry resound as clearly as Joshua’s genocidal trumpet.

How many monumental scientific discoveries, I wonder, have been made by “divines”? But let’s leave that aside for the moment, since the “interpretation of nature” is, in any case, not a subject for science. Like so many of the questions that really matter, it is quite beyond science’s purview.

Interpreting nature is precisely, however, a problem for theology, or more generally for philosophy, of which theology was once a department. Nature herself is a mythological allegory (the personified abstraction with which Western philosophical speculation began), and hardly an object of empirical observation and measurement. As the brilliant classicist Francis Cornford demonstrated almost a century ago, the Physis of the earliest Greek philosophers was a religious datum inherited from pre-Homeric pantheism; it was the Pre-Socratics’ “philosophical” name for God or the hidden Soul-Substance that indwells and rationally governs the cosmos. Even when modern empirical science employs the term, it refers to something elusively incorporeal, unlocalizable, ineffable, immeasurable: in other words, a mythologem, little different from those other religious postulates (God, the soul, heaven and hell) that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. dismiss as vain fantasies. Yet from such fantasies science cannot apparently extricate itself.

What ultimately irks Hitchens is not that the Church should be so out of her element as to call homosexuality “unnatural”, but that in so doing She merely echoes the overwhelming consensus of Western philosophical thought. In every epoch and culture including our own, moral philosophers, natural scientists, and ordinary human beings have recognized the banal unnaturalness of homosexuality. Even the Greeks, in spite of the modern progressive myth to the contrary, abhored it. In the Laws, Plato condemns homosexuality as a detestable Spartan aberration, and in the Symposium, Socrates rebuffs the advances of Alcibiades politely, but unambiguously.

Nor was the ancients’ abhorrence of homosexuality dictated by “revelation” or clerical decree; it was based on what the hard-headed likes of Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius called “right reason in harmony with nature”. Throughout antiquity, both Platonists and Stoics defined “natural” as that which conduces to the realization of a thing’s essence, telos, and final good; and in accordance with that definition, they observed, matter-of-factly, that the male rectum is conspicuously ill-suited for use as a sexual organ. As an adherent of the fastidiously “scientific” theory of evolution, Hitchens should realize that he is on rather thin ice in condemning tradition’s judgment that homosexuality is unnatural: if propagation and survival of the group are one’s Darwinian metrics of what is natural, homosexuality fails rather miserably.

And if you really want to look into the credulous countenance of blind, uncritical, reason- and science-defying faith, surely nothing can compare with the modern fable, evangelized by Hitchens and his liberal co-religionists, that homosexuality is wholly unrelated to the AIDS epidemic. Nothing to do with bath-house promiscuity; with the decidedly unhygienic practice of inserting the male member into an orifice from which issues human waste (one wonders how the nanny governments and international health agencies that are constantly reminding us to wash our hands after going to the loo can so breezily overlook this breeding-ground of germs); nothing to do with the statistically disproportionate incidence of AIDS in the gay community.

If promoting scientific truth and public health are your only desiderata, no measure would more effectively reduce the spread of AIDS – neither better nor cheaper vaccines, nor more condoms, nor more “awareness”, nor even programs promoting abstinence – than the total cessation of homosexual activity. (The same is true of the scandal of clerical “pedophilia”, about which Hitchens affects equal indignation in his chapter “Is Religion Child Abuse?”). No one is calling for homogenocide here: only the rational, untrammeled, open-minded discussion of the “facts” that Hitchens and his fellow scoffers at faith pretend to revere. But progressive ideology has recently sacralized another alternative lifestyle, and the reason and science that free-thinkers such as Hitchens and Dawkins claim are their only authorities must inevitably bow the knee to the gods of moral fashion and political correctness.

Transcendently the worst of the Church’s sins, however, is her opposition to “freedom of choice”. Writing about abortion, Hitchens at least acknowledges that the old feminist definition of the embryo as a mass of protoplasm parastically attached to the mother’s body is “nonsense” that “seems to have stopped”. It is science, once again (specifically the sonogram) that has been the agent of enlightenment. Naturally, Hitchens gives no credit to the benighted religionists who somehow knew the feminist euphemism was nonsense all along. (To do so would be to admit that “faith” can apprehend truth after all.)

But having stripped this whited sepulcher of one layer of imposture, Hitchens then adorns it with another. Nature, he says, already “aborts” (in the form of miscarriage) a great number of pregnancies that would otherwise end in “deformed or idiot” children. Moreover, “our ancestors on the savannah”, unable to survive “with a clutch of sickly and lolling infants to protect against predators”, sensibly practised both abortion and infanticide. Oh dear. Throughout his book, Hitchens derides “our ancestors on the savannah” for a whole range of backward superstitions and savage rituals, including, but especially, child sacrifice. Now their resort to infanticide – prompted not by “faith” but by their intuitive understanding of the Darwinian imperative, I suppose – is somehow reasonable.

Of course, we no longer live on the savannah, and those parents who are burdened with sickly or mentally retarded children are no longer at the mercy of nature red in tooth and claw. In any case, these are the hard cases that anti-anti-abortionists are always bringing up. In fact, a miniscule percentage of abortions are performed in order to spare children the hardship of living with deformity or disease; the vast majority are elected as a form of eleventh-hour prophylaxis to spare casual paramours the hardship of caring for the children they have insouciantly conceived at an inconvenient stage in their lives.

Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins remains unembarrassed when he characterizes the nascent embryo as a “microscopic cluster of cells”. But then, even if he could bring himself to recognize that the unborn child is an autonomous human person, such an unremarkable status within the evolutionary continuum would confer upon it no special rights or privileges. Dawkins regards the idolatrous “contemplation of embryos” as the signal symptom, in fact, of religious psychosis. (Apparently, many pro-abortion activists agree with him: while participating recently in a silent protest against abortion, I kept hearing the same refrain, “F–k you, fetus-lovers”, screamed by passers-by: the demotic version of Dawkins’ argument.)

So peculiarly enamoured of fetuses are they, according to Dawkins, that many of those people of faith “who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life [i.e, capital punishment]”. It is the exhumation of such mouldering canards that prompted one reviewer of Dawkins’ book to write that his “reasoning” would have made a first-year philosophy student cringe. No Christian theological defence of the sanctity of human life has ever failed to mark the ethical, and therefore, ontological, difference between a life of serial homicide and that of an embryo; just as no Christian theological defence of the sanctity of human life forbids the killing of would-be rapists or murderers in self-defense, or enemy combatants in times of war. Dawkins accuses Christian anti-abortionists of being “absolutists”, but it is he who is the absolutist here. There are any number of moral and even utilitarian (e.g., deterrence) reasons why one might support the death penalty while opposing abortion. The very fact that within the pro-life movement there are vigorous disagreements over capital punishment demonstrates that these are two discreet philosophical problems.

Religious “absolutism” is nonetheless the organizing motive of Dawkins’ attack on the Christian pro-life movement – I count several dozen instances of the word within the scope of eight pages –, even if it more aptly characterizes the other side. Most opponents of abortion would be grateful to see some – any – tiny restrictions placed upon an almost absolutely unfettered abortion regime; but the mere suggestion automatically evokes from abortion rights activists nightmare scenarios of “back-alley” butchery with “coat-hangers”. (Note that when anti-abortionists display graphic images of aborted fetuses, they are accused of misogynist “insensitivity” and “sensationalism”; when the defenders of the status quo show images – invariably doctored, if you will forgive the pun – of mangled women abandoned in the streets with bloody coat-hangers lying beside them –, we are told that a little shock and awe is necessary to prevent a reversion to the Dark Ages.) So rigidly absolutist is the position of “pro-choice” activists that they have resisted even the outlawing of so-called “partial birth abortion” (the late-third-trimester procedure involving the withdrawal of the fetus’ head outside the birth canal so as to facilitate the insertion into its brain of the abortionist’s scissors) which, they maintain, would return us forthwith to the back alleys. Talk about slippery slopes(!)

By contrast to the absolutist opponents of abortion (a.k.a., the “American Taliban”, whose “ambition [is] to achieve what can only be called a Christian fascist state”), Dawkins identifies himself as a utilitarian or “consequentialist”. As a consequentialist, he explains that the only rational way to adjudicate the rightness or wrongness of abortion is “by trying to weigh up suffering”. (Dawkins is obviously fetched by the philosophical school of “consequentialism”, and imagines that in subscribing to it he is being very scientific and modern; but it was Epicurus, in the late-fourth century B.C., who first defined the good as whatever conduces to the greatest pleasure and the least pain, and so reduced complex moral problems to a matter of emotional book-keeping.)

As a consequentialist, Dawkins asks:

Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.) Does the pregnant woman, or her family, suffer if she does not have an abortion? Very possibly so; and, in any case, given that the embryo lacks a nervous system, shouldn’t the mother’s well-developed nervous system have the choice?

I doubt that the liberal Zeitgeist could be more perfectly encapsulated than in Dawkins’ framing of the problem as a suffering contest (which is how, after all, private disputes and public policy are so often decided these days). Of course, the pretense of compassion for the mother’s suffering merely obscures the monstrous ruthlessness of Dawkins’ syllogism. Anyone in possession of a “well-developed nervous system”, while inconveniently burdened with the duty to care for another with a “less-developed” nervous system or capacity to suffer (e.g., an infant; a toddler; someone who is mentally ill; handicapped; old; depressed; apathetic), is hereby entitled to eliminate the agent of his “suffering”. It does not matter that the neurologically immature, handicapped, or elderly dependent has done nothing to injure you; it matters only that his or her existence causes you pain, and that pain can (according to Dawkins) be calculated to be greater than that which the death of your dependent would cause him or her (insofar, that is, as his or her nervous system is under-developed or impaired). (But then, what are anaesthetics for? A good general, administered beforehand, should alleviate the suffering of anyone whose existence annoys you. In fact, why pay for anaesthetics? Bump off your charge in his sleep and he won’t feel a thing – certainly less than a cow in a slaughterhouse.)

Dawkins’ cow comparison is not by any means merely rhetorical, by the way. After noting that the Nazis justified their monstrous treatment of blacks, Jews, and gypsies on the grounds that they were “not fully human” – which is how Dawkins justifies the abortion of “less-developed nervous systems”, is it not? – he writes:

The philosopher Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brain power to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral Zeitgeist might move in future centuries. It would be a natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery, and the emancipation of women.

Dawkins is already a post-speciesist, of course. He really does regard the killing of a baby in the womb as ontologically and morally indistinguishable from the killing of a cow in the slaughterhouse (as is evident from a subsequent passage):

Notice now that “pro-life” doesn’t exactly mean pro-life at all. It means pro-human-life. The granting of uniquely special rights to cells of the species Homo sapiens is hard to reconcile with the fact of evolution. Admittedly, this will not worry those many anti-abortionists who don’t understand that evolution is a fact…The evolutionary point is very simple. The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with…every species on the planet….There are no nature borderlines in evolution….Absolutist moral discrimination is devastatingly undermined by the fact of evolution.

But here is another troubling “fact”. If evolutionary gradualism means that every biological system, no matter how advanced and complex, already exists in statu nascendi, in some earlier or lower stage of evolution, where on the ladder of life or in the fossil record can Dawkins empirically identify the germinal origins of human consciousness? Of art? Or music? Of literature? Or religion? Of philosophy? Or science? Or reason itself? The very subject of his book ought to have persuaded him that there is something discontinuously novel about the human person.

As we all know, the real reason that the mother is morally justified in aborting her fetus is that she can; the fetus is powerless to stop her; there is a lethal disparity in their “power relationship”. Liberals are supposed to be uniquely sensitive to such inequities. Above all, the very foundation and purpose of moral philosophy is to advance the human species beyond the primitive ethos of might-is-right, and replace such merely arbitrary and accidental criteria with those founded in reason.

What, for instance, about the monstrous disproportionality (to use another liberal buzz-word) between the taking of a life and the endurance of nine months of “suffering”? What about the question of the moral responsibility of the mother and father whose actions were the cause of their “suffering” in the first place (consequentialism, anyone?)? And if you insist on basing your moral philosophy in an Epicurean calculus of pain and pleasure, what about the incalculable quantity of pleasure that has been pre-emptively annulled (pleasure that would have accrued to the baby, his family, friends, and associates) by aborting a life? All such considerations are blithely left off Dawkins’ ledger of pain and pleasure.

Like Hitchens and Dawkins, almost all anti-religionists seem to be social liberals. Yet there is no inherent reason why this should be so. If, as Hitchens and Dawkins argue, the moral and legal codes of Western Civilization have arisen independently of divine revelations or priestly creeds, why blame religion if you think that our secularly-begotten social ethic is insufficiently progressive?

As a matter of fact, one does not need, nor ever has needed, to be religious to oppose, let us say, our current, modish attitudes toward homosexuality or abortion. (I count both as morally wrong, though I have never been a member of any religious communion.) The ancient Stoics argued that our moral laws are founded upon certain rational and innate (i.e., “natural”) prolepseis or “pre-notions” about right and wrong; and that, insofar as reason is a universal human endowment, just laws will naturally transcend all merely accidental differences of ethnicity, religious culture, geography, or time.

In the West, our ancient and nearly universal revulsion of homosexuality and abortion are undoubtedly rooted in such rational pre-notions; like homosexuality, abortion has also been regarded as “unnatural”, insofar as mothers are presumed to be the champions and defenders of children, rather than their executioners. In ridiculing the Church’s unprogressive moral doctrines, therefore, Dawkins and Hitchens are not really arguing with the troglodytes of faith, so much as with a traditional secular consensus omnium. As progressives (and not coincidentally, as Darwinians), they are as reflexively hostile to traditional ethical norms as they are to ancient religious beliefs, both of which they apparently deem useless appendages left over from the infancy of the race.

In addition to such easy targets as Iranian mullahs, Polynesian tribesmen, and Aztec priests who eviscerated live victims every morning before breakfast to ensure that the sun would rise, Dawkins and Hitchens sneer at more or less everyone and everything (whether they are relevant to “religion” or not). The list of those who offend their moral and intellectual sensibilities is too long to reproduce here, so I offer this brief sample, in more or less reverse chronological order:

They amuse themselves thoroughly at the expense of George Dubya, of course, a Bible-thumping cretin who, abetted by the “Christian Fascists” of the Religious Right (the “American Taliban”) narrowly failed to impose a medieval theocracy upon an unsuspecting Republic. (So unsuspecting was I throughout the Bush administration, that I quite failed to notice the public scourgings of heretics and adulterers, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, or the proclamation of Evangelical Christianity as America’s Established Religion; even as I failed to recognize the supposedly purely secular, atheistic values of the Founders.) When Dawkins writes of Bush that “God told him to invade Iraq” just as the Yorkshire Ripper “distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women”, of what, precisely, does he mean to demonstrate his disapprobation? Of God, for counseling such an ill-considered policy? (But God doesn’t exist; he’s a delusion.) Of Bush, for being so conceited as to think God speaks to him, or so cynical as to exploit religion to further his political agenda? (In either case, it’s an indictment of Bush, not “religion”) Of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (fair enough, but I thought it was oil, rather than doing the Lord’s will, that Bush was after)?

Pope John Paul II’s devotion to the Virgin was indicative of his “polytheistic hankerings”. When he attributed his survival of an assassin’s bullet to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima, Dawkins wonders – this is his best quip – “why she didn’t guide it to miss him”.

About Mother Teresa (with whom his obsession may have become clinical), Hitchens tells the story for the umpteenth time of her complicity with the “silly British evangelist” Malcolm Muggeridge in the merchandising of her fake miracles. (Along with Orwell, whom Hitchens professes to admire, Muggeridge was reporting on the Party purges, vast network of penal colonies, murderous campaigns of repression, and man-made famines engineered by Lenin and Stalin, and refuting their useful idiots in the West, long before the silly Hitchens, heeding neither, became a card-carrying Communist.) Recommending Hitchens’ book The Missionary Position (another cutely irreverent titular flourish) to “anyone tempted to be taken in by” her, Dawkins calls Mother Teresa a “sanctimonious hypocrite”, and adds the following (which I quote, in order to give the reader a sense of his unerring ability to make the significant (the debate about abortion) seem trivial and the trivial (the Nobel Peace Prize) seem significant:

The contemplation of embryos really does seem to have the most extraordinary effect upon many people of faith. Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually said, in her speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.’ What? How can a woman with such cock-eyed judgment be taken seriously on any topic, let alone be thought seriously worthy of a Nobel Prize.

(As worthy as Gore and Obama? Dawkins might be forgiven for believing that the definition of a SERIOUS candidate for the Nobel Prize is any fellow liberal, inasmuch as that has certainly been the impression given by the Nobel Committee of late. But the fact that in spite of her illiberal views, they could not deny the candidacy of Mother Teresa – probably her greatest miracle –, merely proves how heroic her work on behalf of the poor and powerless must have been.)

The incomparably learned Swiss psychiatrist and authority on myth and religion C. G. Jung is derided by Dawkins as one who either suffered from hallucinations or believed in fairies. He scoffs at Jung’s claim to have had direct experience of the Divine in visions and dreams as another self-delusion inflicted by blind faith (“Jung also believed that books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang”). If he had actually read the works of Jung, as any serious critic of religion surely must, Dawkins might have noticed that his entire twenty-volume corpus is an indictment of religious fideism.

As Hitchens refers to him, St. Francis is the “mammal” who “used to lecture to birds”. St. Augustine “was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus.” To these insults, Hitchens adds his ubiquitous, all-purpose disqualifier, anti-Semitism, and notes that Augustine believed that the earth was six thousand years old (!). Having been a “personal authority” on the subject, Augustine, according to Dawkins, merely exemplifies Christianity’s “nasty little preoccupation” with sin. Notably Dawkins’ sole quotation from Augustine is culled from another recent anti-religious polemic, which suggests the extent of his familiarity with Augustine’s opus, and his curiosity. Augustine’s usefulness is in any case limited to his providing a few more anti-religious talking points, such as might be passed on from one atheist manual to another.

St. Paul was a misogynist whose vision on the road to Damascus was the product of an epileptic fit, and his letters are a “wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and bullying”. He so despised the world that, along with St. John, he had “deranged fantasies” about its destruction, “one of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species” being “the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught”. (Hitchens)

I cite these examples merely to illustrate the breathtaking superficiality with which Dawkins and Hitchens treat of minds as complex, imaginatively rich, and monumentally influential as those of Jung, Augustine or Paul. It is instructive that while the ideas of obscure cult leaders, Ozarkian scriptural literalists, and self-anointed prophets Googled on the Internet are given page after page of careful exposition, the works and legacy of Augustine are dispatched with a few barbs of what their writers regard as devastating wit. As Professor Peter Harrison (Chair of Science and Religion at Oxford) observed in a 2007 review of The God Delusion, “the case presented violates a standard principle of academic debate – that the most powerful critiques are those that succeed against the strongest version of the opponent’s position”. Dawkins and Hitchens do not mention, let alone intellectually contend with, the religious thought of Origen, Meister Eckhardt, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Nicolas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, More, or (amongst modern Christian thinkers or theologians) Simone Weil, Tillich, Maritain, Gilson, Danielou, de Lubac, or Hugo Rahner, before whose intellectual sophistication, greatness of soul, erudition, and humanity, they would surely tremble. I do not here accuse them of deliberate suppression, as Professor Harrison seems to do; the suppression of ideas requires that the suppressor has heard of their authors.

The Bible for Idiots: Dawkins and Hitchens as Biblical Exegetes

The sneering of Hitchens and Dawkins ascends to full cruising altitude whenever they cast their Menippean gaze downward upon the moral enormities, historical anomolies, and logical impossibilities of Scripture and Christian doctrine. Dawkins infers from the story of Noah’s Flood that “God took a dim view of humans”, drowning the lot including innocent children. He disapproves of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah principally on the grounds that it betrays an unprogressive attitude toward homosexuality; moreover, Lot’s “halo” is somewhat tarnished by his offer to hand over to the Sodomites his virgin daughters instead, which “tells us something about the respect accorded [sic] to women in this intensely religious culture”. In Judges 19, Dawkins finds another illustration of the Old Testament’s “misogynistic ethos”, in an analogous narrative whose didactic message he epitomizes with his usual, too-obvious irony: “Enjoy yourselves by humiliating and raping my daughter and this priest’s concubine, but show a proper respect for my guest who is, after all, male.” Aside from his strange inability to recognize in these biblical loci inflections of ubiquitous mythological archetypes (as they have been recognized by theologians for two millennia), Dawkins exults in the decidedly unscholarly habit of viewing a three-thousand-year-old text through the anachronistic prism of modern liberal ideology. Clearly he would have been much better disposed to the Old Testament had the Bronze Age Hebrews held Gay Pride Parades and included the Equal Rights Amendment as an appendix to the Decalogue.

In a chapter of twenty-plus pages, Dawkins flogs himself through the Old Testament in search of moral anachronisms, exhaustively re-telling the patriarchal narratives for the benefit of what he assumes is a scripturally illiterate readership, and coaching his readers along the way as to when they should be properly horrified (“Yes, you read correctly”[!]). Since Abraham is the founding father of three religions, surely, Dawkins reasons, he ought to be “a role model”. But when he went to Egypt to “tough out a famine”, he expediently “passed off” his wife as his sister. Sarah thus entered Pharaoh’s harem and Abraham consequently “became rich”, but God disapproved of “this cosy arrangement, and sent plagues on [sic] Pharaoh and his house (why not on Abraham?)”. Angry that Abraham had deceived him about Sarah, Pharaoh “then handed her back to Abraham and kicked them both out of Egypt”. “Weirdly”, Dawkins adds, “it seems that the couple later tried to pull the same stunt again”. After narrating the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in his usual patronizing detail and puerile style, Dawkins accuses God of “bullying” and Abraham of “child abuse” (one of the leitmotives of the contemporary attack on religion), and quips that Abraham’s is “the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: ‘I was only obeying orders’ “. Later when discussing the “barking mad” Christian doctrine of the Redemption (“If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed?…Who is God trying to impress?”), Dawkins says that the Crucifixion is even more “sado-masochistic” than the story of “Abraham setting out to barbecue Isaac”. Our author animadverts sarcastically upon the childishness of “faith-heads”, as he calls them, but that unfortunate locution, along with “barbecue”, “tough out”, “suck up to God”, and other similarly infantile usages leap with such alacrity to his lips as to indicate a mind permanently stuck in adolescence. Notwithstanding the portrait on the dust-jacket of a man greying around the temples, I am often moved to wonder, by the cool colloquialism of these biblical paraphrases, whether The God Delusion was ghost-written by a ten-year-old.

Hitchens’ exegetical prose is somewhat more adult, but his humour is equally juvenile, and his substance no more edifying. If God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, what, Hitchens affects to wonder, did he do on the eighth? Do you want proof that Genesis was not written by “god” but by “ignorant men”? One paragraph, declares Hitchens, is all he needs: In Genesis, man is given dominion over all the beasts, “but no dinosaurs or plesiosaurs or pterodactyls are specified, because the authors did not know of their existence…” (!) (In the ensuing paragraph, Hitchens goes on to list marsupials, bacteria, and germs, amongst the species of which “god”/the human writers of Genesis were ignorant.) The whole of the Pentateuch is in fact “an ill carpentered” fiction that could not have been written by Moses (!), since it sometimes refers to him in the third-person, and even includes a record of his death and burial. (“It is to be presumed that the account of the funeral was not written by the man whose funeral it was, though this problem does not seem to have occurred to whoever fabricated the text.”) “Moses” then goes on to record other events (which Hitchens carefully enumerates) post-mortem. In Deuteronomy, Moses assembles his followers and delivers the decalogue all over again. But then the Pentateuch contains two discrepant accounts of creation, two genealogies of Adam, and two naratives of the Flood. (But then, how ignorant, indeed, must Hitchens assume his “theist” readers to be, that they would find this information shocking or revelatory.)

The Gospels fail the test of historicity no less miserably. Both Dawkins and Hitchens alight triumphantly upon the chronological impossibilities and narrative inconsistencies in the Evangelists’ accounts of the Nativity and Flight into Egypt. (Dawkins – never one to miss an opportunity for vulgarity – notes that in dating the census, Luke “screws up” ). Both point out the discrepancies in Jesus’ genealogy, about which Dawkins impatiently inquires: “Why don’t [Christians] notice those glaring contradictions?”. (To which the only response is that they do, the Fathers of the Church having recognized them in the second century A.D., and discovered several that Dawkins has missed.) For Hitchens, the Virgin Birth is the clearest possible proof that “humans were involved in the manufacture of a legend”. But having declared it a myth, he still devotes two long paragraphs to the logical absurdities that make it historically incredible (i.e, mythological):

Jesus…never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her…She herself appears to have no memory of the Archangel Gabriel’s visitation…telling her that she is the mother of god. In all acounts, everything her son does comes to her as a complete surprise…What’s he saying when he curtly reminds her that he’s on his father’s business? One might have expected a stronger maternal memory, especially from someone who had undergone the experience, alone among all women, of discovering herself pregnant without every having undergone the notorious preconditions for that happy state…Then there is the extraordinary matter of Mary’s large brood…

But what does one do with “wit” that is so pleased with itself and yet so hopelessly trite? Must it be proven that the Virgin Birth is a myth? As early as c. 160 A.D., the Christian Apologist Justin Martyr enumerated the systematic analogies between the Christian narrative of the birth of Christ and the pagan myths of the miraculous conception of Perseus, Hercules, Bacchus, et al. Who does not now know that the cosmogony in Genesis, the stories of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, the Flood, the patriarchal narratives, the Mosaic cycle, are myths? Dawkins and Hitchens besport themselves at the literalism of religious fundamentalists, but in their mocking deconstructions, they analyze the Bible as if it were a modern scientific record of historical events. They are no less tone-deaf to the music, mystery, and universal truth of mythological symbols than the Pharisees were to the spirit of the Law.

In exposing the logical absurdities and inconsistencies of Scripture, Dawkins and Hitchens seem to be wholly unaware that Jewish and Christian exegetes have known about them since the time of Philo and Origen. Hitchens ridicules the “insanely detailed regulations” of the Law concerning ear-piercing, the goring of oxes, the punctilio of sacrifice and propitiation, and so on, but in doing so he has apparently forgotten that St. Paul had repudiated the legalism and piety of gesture of Pharisaical Judaism two thousand years earlier in that “wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and bullying” that are his letters. (In decrying the logical inconsistencies of Scripture, you would think Hitchens would be more careful not to contradict himself within the scope of his own small work. At least the multiple human authors of the Bible had the excuse of having lived in different centuries.) Hitchens knows so little about early Christian history and New Testament criticism, in fact, that, while scoffing at the Church’s choice of four authentic Gospels as merely arbitrary, he uses the term “synoptic” as a synonym for “canonical”.

While exhaustively demonstrating that the Old Testament was not written by Moses or “god”, and that the Gospels contradict one another, surely Dawkins and Hitchens ought to have recalled – if Patristics is too arcane a subject for them – that the multiple human authorship of Scripture has been a settled question since the “higher” or “form” criticism of the nineteenth century. Every first-year seminarian now knows about the Old Testament redactors “J”, “E”, “P”, and “D”, and about the uncertain relations amongst the synoptics, between the synoptics and the Gospel of John, and between all four and the ur-gospel “Q”. But Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ breathless expositions, replete with exclamation marks, read as if they are revealing these mysteries for the first time. They are as excited about their exegetical discoveries as pre-pubescent children who, having learned that babies aren’t really delivered by storks but are engendered by more interesting means, are furious with their parents for having lied to them, and intent upon divulging the shocking details for the wonder and gratitude of their peers.

It’s been several years since the publication of the frontal attacks on religion by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006) and Christopher Hitchens (god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007). At the time, they caused quite a stir, even if they failed to usher in the Copernican shift away from God that their authors yearned for and dreamed about. Certainly atheists sensed that they had finally found their voice. Some, indeed, may have been emboldened to “come out of the closet”, just as (so Dawkins analogizes in his preface) after millennia of vilification and ostracism, homosexuals were emboldened to come out of the closet a couple of decades ago. Outside of the official atheist victim groups, however, far from the faculty clubs and fair-trade coffee houses, and especially in those atavistic pockets of Amerika where, as the soi-disant “Christian” President Obama lamented, people cling bitterly to their religion and guns, people still clung bitterly to their religion and guns. The reaction of the “theist” community was vigorous and swift. While genuine scholars of the history of religious ideas largely ignored them; while, no doubt in tacit sympathy, the more liberal Protestant denominations of Unitarians, Methodists, and United Churchmen – but then, no one including its congregants is sure that the United Church is a religion – did likewise; and while fundamentalist Muslims demonstrated their utter scorn for Dawkins and Hitchens by declining, for once, to issue fatwahs against them; the response of the conservative Catholic and Evangelical communities was so defensive as to strike me at the time as over-wrought. Having belatedly read The God Delusion and god Is Not Great, I continue to think so. Not because these occasionally articulate – in the case of Hitchens, at least – rants aren’t as shrill and hateful as their reviewers have alleged; but because their treatment of religion is so profoundly unserious and intellectually dishonest that they are likely to be forgotten as quickly as the nutty anti-Christian conspiracy theories of Dan Brown or James Cameron.

Religion has been almost too fortunate in its enemies. In the second century A.D., nearly two millennia before Obama, the pagan philosopher Celsus lamented sorely as he gazed across a public square swarming with priests, prophets, diviners, mantics, mystagogues, and hierophants of a hundred different cults. It tells you something about the man that Celsus’ own work was modestly entitled The True Doctrine. In the late-nineteenth century, Nietzsche (who was hardly an enemy of religion but is popularly perceived as such) ended his life in madness, one symptom of which was so egregious a psychological inflation that he imagined “Zarathustra” (i.e., God) speaking to an unenlightened world through him. (God may be dead, but He is ever-resurgent in the psyches of His critics.) Within a few decades, Freud was dismissing religious belief as the epiphenomenon of infantile sexual urges incompatible with bourgeois morality, and thereby requiring sublimation in sacred rituals – a theory that, as Jung observed at the time, Freud preached as zealously as any religious dogma.

The anti-religious invective of Dawkins and Hitchens is scarcely more judicious. Their thesis is that all religious propositions are irrational, unsupported or refuted by the evidence, and persuasive only to childish and credulous minds. They regard believing in God as either tantamount to believing in the existence of elves and garden gnomes, or merely psychotic. Religion, moreover, is not only false, it is pernicious: historically inimical to science (the ominous signification of the biblical prohibition of the Tree of Knowledge), hazardous to one’s health, a sanctimonious cloak under which all manner of greed, cruelty, and immorality are permitted, and the principal cause of genocide and war.

The overwhelming bulk of their books is filled with the evidence that ostensibly proves these claims: a treasure-trove of anthropological sordida, liberally punctuated with exclamation marks and often sophomoric satirical asides, exposing the murderous rites and fantastical teachings of a rogues’ gallery of rabid fundamentalists, gap-toothed rubes, machine-gun-toting fanatics, oleaginous televangelists, conjurers of cheap tricks, fakers of miracles, special-effects mediums, prognosticators of apocalypses that never come (!), insufferable moralists who ascribe natural disasters to heresy or sin (!), astrologers who pretend to know the future without even knowing that the earth revolves around the sun (!), and medecine men unacquainted with basic human anatomy(!). (As Dryden said of Chaucer’s pilgrims, “Here is God’s plenty” – except that neither of our authors has Chaucer’s art or humanity.)

Significant portions of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ books (including the most interesting parts) read, in fact, like Frazer’s Golden Bough, Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity, or Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think – though, sadly, again, without any of the scholarly acumen or sympathy for the material. (At one point, Dawkins praises Frazer for documenting “the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual” and recommends his opus to those who wish to “marvel at the richness of human gullibility”. But this wholly misrepresents the attitude of Frazer, who points out in his concluding chapter that “rational” science and “irrational” religion have innumerable affinities, including their common ancestry in magic, and that all three are merely “theories of thought”. Then he ends with the sort of unscientific, quasi-mystical speculation of which our authors sternly disapprove: “as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena…of which we in this generation can form no idea”.)

Oddly enough, thundering scolds such as Amos, Hosea, and Elijah are the real polemical allies of Dawkins and Hitchens. The indignant sermons they preach against religious “superstition” can’t help but put one in mind of the bigoted diatribes of these Iron-Age Prophets of Yahweh who, obedient to their jealous God, and jealous of their own prelatical privileges, fulminated against the irrational beliefs and wicked practices (polytheism, idolatry, etc.) of the pagan high places. But this is not a comparison that Dawkins and Hitchens would welcome, I imagine. They are above all disinterested men of science; and if they are jealous defenders of the truth, they are the defenders of a verifiable truth, one that is purely rational, impartial, ratified by the evidence, etc., etc. (How often, in the history of religion, have we heard that before[!]) Unfortunately, their own violently skewed treatment of the phenomenology of religion does not inspire confidence – faith is perhaps the better word – that modern men of science are any less prone to zealotry, misrepresentation, and manipulation of the data than prophets and priests.

Progressive “Methodology”

Readers will search their works in vain for the delicate “shades” and subtle “nuances” that are the special ornament of advanced thought. Neither of these delusion-busters deigns to make the requisite distinctions, lumping together under the same rubric of “religion” the Christianity of the saints and mystics, the Islam of the Taliban, the human sacrifices of the priests of Baal, and the flaky “spirituality” of Madonna. Our authors seem to suffer from the perverse inability to distinguish between Osama bin Laden and Mother Teresa, between mana and Manicheanism. Scholars have spent lifetimes anatomizing the infinite varieties of religious experience, but to Dawkins and Hitchens every “theist” looks alike. Dawkins actually proffers this prejudice as an index of his own impeccably relativist credentials and multicultural sensitivities: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural…” Making fun of “religion” in this way is a little like scoffing at the uncertain science of meteorology, while counting everything from Doppler radar to the rain dances of the Mau Mau as examples.

The title of Hitchens’ book, god Is Not Great – throughout the work, Hitchens takes his stand against convention by refusing to capitalize the G in God, resurrecting the mood of dangerless defiance of the dress-up revolutionaries of the Sixties – illustrates the strategy. It’s a play, of course, on the mantra of today’s radical Islamists, whose primitive sensibilities Hitchens thereby imputes to all religions, including, and above all, Christianity. Both authors see only religion’s shadow, and define the whole by its most spectacular aberrations and atavisms (the honour killings, suicide bombings, witch-hunts, child-abuse scandals, abortion-doctor murder [sing.], etc.), upon which they dwell lovingly. Once again, don’t hold your breath for any of the so-called “balance” or “fairness” that the Progressive Axis is always bragging about. The “Everything” in Hitchens’ subtitle betrays a mind severely disequilibrated by hatred (surely there is something that religion doesn’t poison); the subtitle ought really to have read, “How the Rhetorical One-sidedness of Religion’s Enemies Poisons Everything”.

Their argument – if that is what you would call it – against religion is in fact a sorites: Dawkins and Hitchens prove that in generally barbaric times and uncivilized places, religious practices have also been barbaric and uncivilized; that in illiberal societies, religious ideas are illiberal. It shocks and outrages them that religion has its snake oil salesmen, hypocrites, sleazy seekers after power and wealth. Of course, for every example of sleaze, hypocrisy, and greed they adduce from the orbit of ancient, third-world, or contemporary religion, they could have found two from local D.C. politics. Whether naively or mischievously, they seem to expect that religion should be the only sphere of human action exempt from the taint of original sin.

A-Sneering They Will Go

A glance at the tables of contents of these two nearly contemporaneous works reveals such striking symmetries in their organization and polemical themes as almost to suggest plagiarism or collusion; in fact, they merely demonstrate the pre-conscious instinct that regulates the liberal “Hive” (as Tom Bethel has called it), ensuring that its drones will be able, through independent thinking, to find their way home to the same politically correct opinion on all the issues of the day. In the characterization of Bethel’s friend and fellow reactionary Joseph Sobran, contemporary liberalism is not a set of ideas, so much as an attitude, encapsulated in a sneer.

The real subject of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ books is indeed their own moral and intellectual superiority, and the sneering contempt that they and every other thinking person ought to feel for the modern primitives who still credit the myths and dogmas with which a depredatory clergy has enslaved them. As Dawkins writes in his preface, though “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument”, it is the earnest hope of its author that The God Delusion will help those “whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious,…or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it”, to “break free of the vice of religion altogether”. The reek of messianism that emanates from Dawkins’ mock sympathy for the captives of religion is overwhelming at times. Like the nineteenth-century Christian missionaries amongst the brown-skinned savages of Africa, he will lead the religious heathen out of their long, dark night of superstitious ignorance. One should like to pay Dawkins the compliment of hypocrisy, but the irony of his own messianic condescension seems to have completely escaped his superior intellect. Dawkins calls himself an atheistic “consciousness raiser”, but alas, hypocrisy requires a quantum of consciousness of which the apostles of Progress are too often incapable.