Tag: atheist-delusion

A Postscript

Being paragons of rationality, the enemies of religion affect genuine bafflement as to why anyone would practise it. Whereupon they proceed to enumerate a long list of what are usually evil or ulterior motives. It’s odd. If I were honestly unable to conceive of the reasons for some archaic habit or custom–why people take snuff, let us say–I wouldn’t set myself up as an authority on the subject. Yet atheists profess to know that theists worship God out of some vestigial anxiety to propitiate the forces of nature, or to take out insurance against the contingency of damnation, or, if they are clerics, to wield religion as an instrument of power. They are about as credible on the subject of the origin of religion as The League Of Offended Housewives To Snuff Out Snuff would be if they were to admonish that snuff-taking makes you blind. It is time, it seems to me, for the defenders of religion to begin speculating, mutatis mutandis, on the motives of its enemies.

As Joe Sobran has observed in his essay The Sins of Irreligion:

I can imagine one kind of atheist–let us call him the “pious atheist”–who arrives at his unbelief without joy, simply as an intellectual conclusion. I suppose such a man would regard Christian civilization with the kind of affection and respect a Roman convert to Christianity in Augustine’s day would feel for the dying Roman Empire, for Cicero and Virgil and Marcus Aurelius. He would feel that, although that world had passed away, it had left much of enduring value. We actually do see pious atheists who may regret the Inquisition but who also cherish Dante, Monteverdi, Spenser, Milton, Bach, Handel, and Dr. Johnson. To cease believing in the viability of this Christian civilization is not necessarily either to condemn it or to assume an attitude of enmity toward it.

Yet there is another sort of atheist who does regard himself as Christendom’s enemy. Far from cherishing its past, he condemns it and would wipe out every trace of it: the Catholic Church, the Moral Majority, the inscription “In God We Trust”. He thinks that humanity is now free at last from dogma and superstition, and he would get on with the business of creating a new world on progressive and scientific principles.

No one who cherishes the intellectual, literary, and artistic bequests of religion would object to the first group identified by Sobran. Aligned with them are any number of brilliant scholars of religious history and thought, including some of the most humane and capacious minds of the modern age: Jung, Bultmann, Tillich, Hugo Rahner, Simone Weil, to name just a few.

All such thinkers accept as a brute fact the sceptical scientific spirit of the modern epoch. All agree that a naively literal belief in the affirmations of organized religion is no longer intellectually possible, and plead, instead, for the renewal of a mythic or allegorical approach to sacred narrative that is already native to the Christian tradition.

Of this tradition, however, Dawkins and Hitchens are conveniently ignorant. To carry Christianity’s colours against their hollow challenge, they naturally prefer their own reductive caricature of the Bible-thumping Southern televangelist. When they limn the portrait of a rotten Christianity on such bases, they invite Chaucer’s Pardoner to sit as their model, as though his Parson, Clerk, and Knight were not also on the Canterbury road.

 

That sort of selectivity alone suggests that Dawkins and Hitchens are motivated by an animus that is less than objective or scientific. Unlike Sobran’s “pious atheists” or the scholarly taxonomists of religious ideas mentioned above, they are less observers of Christianity’s decline and fall than agents who yearn to hasten it. They arrive at their atheist position, not as an intellectual conclusion, but a morally triumphant one. Indeed, it places them squarely on the side the angels–to summon a theistic phrase–in the great millennial struggle between the forces of light and superstitious darkness. Nor does their atheism betray the least willingness to assimilate anything of the legacy of Christianity, not even those elements that Christianity itself willingly assimilated from its pagan past (including symbols as innocuous as Christmas trees).

In this regard, today’s atheists usually see themselves as “free-thinkers” and “progressives”. Save that free-thought is hardly ever progressive, except in the self-congratulatory sense in which that term is used. It cannot be so because, as Chesterton has observed, “it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction.” The only things that have “progressed” have done so by gradual “accumulations of authority”, advancing incrementally “in a certain definable direction”. (Christian Civilization is, in that sense, progressive; by contrast, the atheist desire to undo it is as unprogressive as that of the fantasist who decides to tear up the road by which mankind has advanced and recommend that we grow wings instead.)

 

Their furious antagonism toward religious tradition in general and Christian Civilization in particular tells us as much about contemporary atheists as it does about the object of their hatred. Sobran identifies the animus of the current militant sect of atheists as a species of that genus of thought which he calls “alienism”, the willful disaffection from the norms and institutions of society typical of Western intellectuals and so-called “minority” groups.

The modern alienist’s sense of estrangement need not, of course, have anything to do with historical oppression or ostracism by an unjust majority (indeed, his embitterment suggests that he wants in). The designation “minority” itself, as Sobran observes, alludes less to a real statistical fact than an ideological posture. Some “minorities” (e.g. women) are in fact majorities. Others, such as “gays”, are hardly condemned to their supposed alienation by the cruel accident of birth (like the victims of racism), but by voluntary choice. Meanwhile, any number of actual numerical minorities are never thought of as such; in this category, Sobran mentions Mormons–whom it is always safe to deride–, to which I would add native born whites in many large North American cities.

However imprecise the term, it invariably irradiates a palpable sense of disaffection, which is presumed to be justified by the minority’s victimization by a homogeneous majority. Historically (at least in the West), that means Christianity, so that “if we look more closely”, as Sobran argues, “we will find that the very idea of a minority in this sense is largely a rhetorical device for covertly attacking what remains of the Christian culture”.

In contemporary identity politics, it is obvious enough that minorities from non-Christian cultures have become stalking-horses for anti-Christian alienism. It was less than fifty years ago that non-Christian communities were expected, if not actively to adopt the beliefs and mores of the Christian Civilization to which they desired admittance, then at least not to object to them. Today, the mere existence of a native Christian remnant constitutes an affront to multicultural sensibilities, if not to the hallowed principles of equality and pluralism. The expectation that minorities should accommodate the dominant culture of their new homelands once seemed only reasonable; now it is the majority that must accommodate the minority.

Atheists function in this regard as a non-Christian “minority”. Because they once were so, Dawkins and Hitchens see atheists as permanent victims. It’s a truism, of course, that when public opinion finally rouses itself in indignant protest against the victimization of this group or that, their victimization is largely a thing of the past. When minorities are really being mistreated by majorities–systematically murdered, enslaved, lynched, or discriminated against–public opinion either fails to notice or actively colludes with what it regards as merely normative. Once the public gets around to expressing its collective moral outrage, one can be assured that it is already safe to do so.

So it is, of course, with those who now imagine theocrats hiding under every bed, and stand eternally vigilant in the defence of the temporal state against the phantom encroachment of spiritual powers: they are permitted to complain against “theocracy” only because there are no theocrats about with the power to silence them. (In the Middle Ages, Dawkins and Hitchens might have had a point, but no one could have heard them making it beyond the confines of their prison cells.)

If anything, the contemporary incarnation of the Spanish Inquisition is run by the priests of a militant secular orthodoxy who can abide no dissent from what they regard as religious heretics (i.e., heretics whose sin is believing in religion per se, rather than false religion). In the past several decades in Canada, every vestige of Christian symbolism has been extirpated from the public square, Christian teaching in schools has been officially proscribed by the State, and dozens of supposedly free citizens have been arraigned before our official human rights tribunals for professing their religious beliefs. Notably, during the same period, not a single atheist has had to appear before these human rights constabularies. If anyone has a right to fear the “establishment of religion”, it is the victims of the new secular orthodoxy.

Today, Christians remain one the few identifiable groups against which it is legitimate to be bigoted. When alienist intellectuals tell us that “the white race is the cancer of history”, or accuse Europeans of wholesale and deliberate genocide in the New World, or malign the masculine gender as war-mongering rapists–using “white race”, or “European”, or “male” as obvious proxies for historical Christendom–, “we are hearing something other than the voice of the disinterested intellect. We are hearing an expression of nihilistic hatred.” Mere intellectual dissent from the credenda of religion does not, as Sobran observes, inspire “this kind of fanaticism.”

Sobran wonders reasonably enough why we have been so slow to recognize and declaim against this sort of fanatical hatred as a real social problem, if not a psychopathology. The terms of alienist bitterness and grievance are by now epidemic in our language–“racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “anti-Semitism”, “nativism”, “Eurocentrism”, “Christocentrism”, “ethnocentrism”, “xenophobia”, “bigotry”, “prejudice”, “discrimination”, “stereotyping”. Even the word “hatred” itself has taken on the same victimological and anti-majoritarian connotations, though it should be entirely possible that enmity between social groups can have the opposite valency. Can minority races, cultures, or religions never be guilty of prejudice or hatred against majorities? If so, as Sobran points out, “we have no specific vocabulary at all to suggest this reciprocal possibility”.

Until recently, alienist hatred was recognized as a dangerous toxin, destabilizing not only to society but to the moral and psychological health of the subject. Sobran mentions Shakespeare’s villains Edmund and Iago–whose villainy consists precisely in their obsessive hostility to all social norms and traditions. “Almost without exception”, Sobran observes, “Shakespeare’s ‘alienated’ characters are villains”. Both Shakespeare and his audience evidently still considered such attitudes dangerous and deranged, and felt that Civilization had every right to defend itself against them. Thus, “The assumptions embodied in the very structure of these plays are directly opposed to the assumption that hatred and hostility are always to be imputed to society. The imputation itself expresses hostility, and we do well to raise our guard against it.”

We do well, that is, to expose and condemn the militant hatred of Christendom expressed by atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens as a poison just as lethal as any majoritarian “ism”.

Imagine…

With the puer aeternus John Lennon, Dawkins invites us to “imagine a world without religion”. All right. Then imagine it without architecture, sculpture, painting, or poetry. Imagine it without music, and inasmuch as Western music – even the insipid doggerel of the Beatles – is the product of an ancient liturgical tradition, imagine it without Lennon.

On the Singing Sage of Liverpool, it is hard to resist quoting the bravely non-conformist comments of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson:

But what did he mean by “no religion”, anyway? No religious institutions? Everyone but the personality-disordered anarchist understands that institutions are necessary.

No religious experience? Lennon constantly sought religious experience, through mysticism and psychedelic drug use.

No beliefs, of ultimate value? But Imagine claims that peace, brotherhood and unity are of ultimate worth, and that a heavenly utopia would arise, if they were properly valued.

Lennon’s beautiful [sic] song is, therefore, conceptually incoherent. Its lyrics also expose a lack of appropriate humility: How dare a multimillionaire satirize those who cannot imagine “no possessions”?

With what would Lennon replace religion, precisely? Atheists never deign to specify the nature of the godless order that would succeed Christian Civilization. Instead, they dare us to be sufficiently free-spirited and unconventional as to “imagine” how peaceful and beatific it would be, hoping that we will forget the inauspicious beginnings it had in Robespierre’s France or the gigantic prison of the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, Lennon was himself a fulsome sycophant of the Marxist-Leninist regime and ideology, a crime for which he ought to have spent the rest of his life seeking absolution from the ghosts of its former inmates, if not from God. But apparently atheists have faith, even when it is flatly contradicted by the evidence of things seen.

Chesterton once wrote that for a reformer to be credible he must first accept and appreciate at least certain aspects of the prevenient “form”. But like their progressive and revolutionary brothers, atheists have never been comfortable with the helter-skelter, unregulated (i.e., natural) way in which human society has evolved over the millennia. It is odd that they who confer so much dignity upon an agency as mysterious as natural selection do not pause to consider that a similar mechanism is certainly at work in anthropology, especially in the sphere of social traditions and institutions (marriage, the family, worship). Since these have surely “evolved” with man over every stage of human development, you would think atheists would put some trust in the wisdom of that process rather than pronounce Nature an abject failure and wish that She had never begun the experiment in the first place. No less than raccoons, squirrels, and other noxious pests, I suppose, homo Christianus represents the culmination of untold centuries of adaptation and refinement; yet, while few Darwinian atheists would want to “imagine a world” without the former, they would be insouciantly delighted to see Christian Civilization die without a trace.

 

The flower-childish mind that can imagine a world without religion is obtusely credited with “idealism”, when the imaginer is ideationally savouring an act of gross vandalism – one that would tear down every Church and temple in the civilized world, and empty every museum. The imaginers are the epochal heroes of modernity, but consider the deeds that their imaginings have already fathered. The agents of the Terror must have first imagined a world without aristocrats, the Bolsheviks, without property owners. Our G-20 anarchists feel justified in breaking windows, no doubt, because they have imagined a perfect world without retail or banks. (Under full disclosure, I must confess to having imagined a world without pontificating rock musicians.) Lurking behind the “idealistic” face of reform is usually the adolescent desire to smash the form to bits.

Today, radical Islam has in common with Lennon that it has likewise imagined a world without religion: specifically, without Christianity and Judaism. In their avidity to eradicate every vestige of Christian culture, from crucifixes in hospitals to Christmas trees in public squares, atheist visionaries have allied themselves more closely with the Old Testament Prophets, the seventeenth-century Puritans, and the Taliban than they care to admit. In their defence, the Prophets, Puritans, and Taliban have been intolerant of only certain kinds of religion; the atheist is intolerant of every kind.

Yet the vaunted tolerance of secularists is invariably contrasted with the intolerance of believers. This is surely one of the falsest dichotomies and most self-serving myths of our time. One can hardly conceive of a more rigidly and comprehensively intolerant dogma than Marxist atheism, which sentenced its refuseniks to the work camp for a proliferant range of heresies none of which would have discomposed the sleep of even the most paranoid of inquisitors. C.S. Lewis made the point long ago that Christians have always recognized at least the partial truth of every other religion – Platonism, Stoicism, Mithraism, the Eleusinian mysteries, the cult of Isis and Osiris – in competition with it. Atheists, on the other hand, confidently declare that every religion throughout history has been completely wrong.

 

It was Chesterton again who remarked that the real crime of suicide is not killing oneself but killing the entire world. The suicide arrogantly and ungratefully consigns to oblivion everything and everybody else as worthless. The deicide consigns to oblivion not only the sensible world but the entire metaphysical cosmos of gods, spirits, and daimons, of myths, images, and symbols, with which man has co-existed and through which he has contemplated the perennial questions from the beginning. In dismissing them as worthless, the atheist imagines that he is wiser and better than the vast majority of all men who ever lived, including mankind’s greatest luminaries and benefactors; and with such invincible hubris, he would abolish the Civilization that religion has engendered, and start again.

The atheist order has given us labour camps, psychiatric prisons, AIDS, and abortion clinics. We are still waiting for it to bring forth its Homer, Dante, Michelangelo, or Bach. Atheism has produced no lasting literature or monumental art (besides the tawdry propaganda of Pravda or the colossal statues of Lenin, Mao, and Kim Jong-Il). The atheist idea has never inspired anything remotely like a sculpture by Praxiteles, a Gothic cathedral, or a fresco by Raphael. Its intellectual seed has nowhere blossomed into a fifth-century Athens, a twelfth-century Paris, or a fifteenth-century Florence. Anyone who travels to Moscow need only visit one of its Byzantine churches and then walk past a Stalinist apartment block to decide whether medieval theocracy or modern secular humanism is more intellectually vibrant or humane.

It is a measure of its cultural and intellectual barrenness that Dawkins and Hitchens must invoke the relatively obscure Pre-Socratic cosmologist Democritus as atheism’s founding Prophet, notwithstanding that Democritus’ own disciples, Epicurus and Lucretius, effectively conceded that the Master’s atomism was still-born without some galvanizing spiritual principle. Atomism turned out to be as still-born a philosophical movement as it was a cosmogonic theory, and so Dawkins and Hitchens are forced to turn to such better-known names as Jefferson and Einstein, whom they borrow on short-term lease from Deism, or Occam, whom they steal outright from Christianity. With such a sparse and undistinguished field of candidates, it is no wonder that as a party atheism has languished on the fringes.

To slightly update a question that Malcolm Muggeridge once asked, who would not rather be wrong with Plato, Plutarch, Origen, Augustine, Eckhardt, and Pico, than right with Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Wells, Huxley, Dawkins, and Lennon?

 

Is there no relation between the fruit and the tree? Hitchens seems to think that it is possible to appreciate the genius of Dante, Monteverdi, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton while abominating their religious beliefs, as if their art came to birth not because of but in spite of their embarrassing Christianity. It’s his version, I suppose, of hating the sin and loving the sinner. But it does put one in a logical bind to have to explain how the most magnanimous, erudite, and humane minds (perhaps Hitchens will give me permission to call them spirits in this context) in the history of mankind could have simultaneously believed in and evangelized so risible and cruel a fraud as Christianity. How could the person who wrote Hamlet and Lear have subscribed to a faith so infantile as to have preached the Incarnation and Virgin Birth, and a moral doctrine so retrograde as to have condemned abortion and homosexuality as sins?

Like the rest of us, I have no knowledge as to whether or not God exists. I am considerably more certain that the image projected upon him by his various cultists has only a tenuous relation to his esse. The only truth of which I am absolutely convinced is that religion is the truest thing in the world. The best and most beautiful that man has ever wrought in the desert of human history has been nurtured, if not by God, then by the belief in God. If that is a delusion, then let us hope that we remain deluded. If recent history is any indication, the alternative is a dessicated wasteland.

Organized Irreligion…

and…

The Undergraduate History of Christianity…

In a brilliant essay, the late Joseph Sobran wonders why Christians, who have been incessantly “belabored” about the sins of organized religion, “have been so slow to turn the argument around and point to the record of what we may call ‘organized irreligion’ “.

It’s not as though atheism is sine macula. According to the highest estimates, the Inquisition claimed fewer than two thousand lives, and those over several centuries. In seventy years, by comparison, the guardians of Soviet atheist orthodoxy liquidated a hundred million of their own citizens for ideological impurity or belonging to a proscribed economic class.

Just or unjust, as Sobran notes, the Inquisition passed sentence against individuals for personal crimes, not membership in a group. Its authority was to that extent confined to the Christian-theological sphere, as opposed to caste, level of education, ancestry, ownership of property, private entrepreneurship, domestic arrangements, friends and associates, opinions about politics, and virtually everything else.

Given that all the drowned witches and burnt heretics in history have not yet come up to the foothills of the mountain of corpses heaped up by the post-religious Marxist State, one would think that the apostles of the atheist utopia and abominators of religion would have the decency to shut up. But as Sobran suggests, the narration of Christendom’s crimes against humanity has been for some time now a major cultural industry, especially in the media and the academy.

As a teacher in the university, I have been personally “belabored” on occasions beyond number by students retailing what I have come to call “the undergraduate history of Christianity”. It usually begins with the Evangelists’ defamation of the Jews (“endemic Christian anti-Semitism”), continues with the hierarchy’s suppression of doctrinal dissent and establishment of an “arbitrary” canon (“Christian theology as the instrumentality of political power”); moves on to the exclusion of women from the priesthood (“patriarchal misogyny”); next, we hear of forced conversions and baptisms; then the Crusades (“religious intolerance”); followed by the Inquisition; followed by Galileo’s heresy trial; followed by the Salem witch hunts (more misogny, as well as all of the above); followed by papal collusion with the Nazis (the Church’s congenital anti-Semitism, again); concluding with the sex-abuse scandal (“pedophilia”, but unrelated to homosexuality).

These, and only these, junctures in Christian history – for they know of no others – are recited by students with the alacrity of an incantational formula. When the undergraduate history of Christianity is repeated by writers of popular fiction such as Dan Brown and James Cameron – one is tempted to include Dawkins and Hitchens in this category –, one knows that one is in the presence of a contemporary culture-myth.

 

As others of their critics have observed, in enjoining its civilizational advantages, Dawkins and Hitchens never get beyond atheism as a Platonic concept, against which the inevitably mixed historical record of religion can hardly measure up. They make the same argument about atheism as that which Marxists have always made about socialism: like “true socialism”, atheism has apparently never been tried. Yet, even leaving aside the officially atheist Marxist State, the entire post-Enlightenment epoch has been a protracted experiment in organized irreligion.

Its record is not obviously more benignant than that of pre-modern theism. During those two centuries, more people died of unnatural causes than in the entire history of man’s inhumanity to man before them. I have already mentioned that the most murderous wars in history have been fought since the Enlightenment, and over anything but religious differences. As for the Church’s putative tyrannizing over private lives, her authority was always trifling by comparison to the tentacular grip and reach of the modern post-religious Welfare State. With their pitiful tithes, Byzantine Emperors and Patriarchs could only dream of the divine right of modern tax collectors to help themselves to more than fifty percent of a man’s labour. And at least the Inquisition’s thought police confined themselves to matters of theological doctrine, as opposed to our own human rights constabularies, who can arraign citizens for the crime of “offending” the orthodoxy of any interest group that demands immunity from criticism.

It is the oddly naive faith that (like “never-tried” socialism), “never-tried” atheism, once implemented, will usher in a world without end of tolerance and justice, that demands the absurd disavowal by Dawkins and Hitchens of any connection between atheism and the post-Enlightenment secular order, including Communism. Hitchens, for instance, dilates upon the rites and dogmas associated with the Communist cult of personality, and concludes that Communism was in fact just another religion(!) (Thus, even the atrocities of an officially atheist ideology can be imputed to a credulous belief in God.)

Hitchens’ argument is typical of the tortured logic of the anti-religious polemic, but in a way – one that Hitchens doesn’t understand, of course –, it’s rather compelling. Communism really was a religion (as Solzhenitsyn noted long ago), and atheism really is untried (and will continue to remain so.)

As Jung demonstrated over a lifetime of scholarship, the religious function of the psyche is a perennial and inalienable human endowment; what everything depends upon is its being authentically and salubriously engaged. Psychic energies that are not invested in the the linking back (i.e., religio) of the conscious ego with an immanent metaphysical order go dangerously underground, until they erupt into individual or collective neurosis. When they do, they propel into the empyreum everything from trivial earthly personalities to tawdry political ideologies. With the attrition of authentic religious forms, such as Christianity, the alternative isn’t atheism, but some ersatz theism – Marxism, Darwinism, or environmentalism –, with their ersatz saints and saviours – Mao, Kim, or Al Gore. Deracinated from the archetypes of an otherworldly heaven and hell, the post-religious consciousness attempts to create heaven on earth, and ends up, inevitably, reifying in the here and now the hell in which it no longer believes. How many more millions of lives would have been snuffed out in the cause of establishing the earthly paradise had it not been for the insistence by religions such as Christianity that the Kingdom of God is not of this world?

If the twentieth century was an experiment in post-religious political organization, it evidently failed. What that failure argues for is hardly the redemption from religion that Dawkins and Hitchens exhort and promise, but its opposite: a long-overdue liberation from the atheist delusion, with its deadly utopian fantasy of creating heaven on earth.

Atheism…

The “Zeitgeist”…

and…

The Church of Progress…

The modern atheist’s hatred of religion is one species of a generalized hatred of the traditions of the West, which for liberals is bred in the bone. Dawkins’ chapter on “The Moral Zeitgeist” is an impeccable example, while being a textbook statement of the supreme article of faith in the Church of Progress: that human society becomes ineluctably more enlightened and just with the march of time (and the converse: that erstwhile traditions and attitudes are noxious in direct proportion to their antiquity).

What follows is my best attempt at an epitome of Dawkins’ anti-religious reasoning: In the old days (when men still believed in God), slavery, racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, even hunting for sport, were normative and uncontroversial. Even those who were “ahead of their time”, such as Lincoln, H.G. Wells, and Huxley, held views that would have retrospectively horrified them, had they been born and educated in our time. As late as the “swinging sixties” people still objected to their young daughters reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (!). “How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes – and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world. Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from?…Certainly…not from religion.”

Dawkins includes amongst the catalysts of the progressive Zeitgeist activist judges, stand-up comics, and the script-writers of soap operas. Such avatars of enlightenment ought to make any thinking person nervous. But he is nevertheless gung-ho for the “Zeitgeist progression”:

Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the twenty-first century are are bunched together but way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century…would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakable….Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of the Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.

Dawkins appears to be as much in awe of this force for good as Calvin was of an inscrutably benign Providence. He calls it a “mysterious consensus”, admits that he can’t explain how it is constellated, and certainly has a more supine faith in Its Benevolence than I, for one, have in the biblical God. He can hardly imagine that someone could regard anything as ethically wrong (homosexuality, adultery, sexual promiscuity, abortion, for example) that this onward-moving “mysterious consensus” has lately sanctified. There is no doubt that for progressives what Dawkins calls the Zeitgeist (its demotic name is Public Opinion) is an almighty deity. What offends them is that the Deity of Christianity refuses to genuflect before It and “move on”. (The Zeitgeist is a jealous God indeed).

A writer of crude polemics might well deride those who blindly follow the Zeitgeist as “fundamentalists” or “absolutists”. They are certainly guilty of the “failure of imagination” of which Dawkins invariably indicts theists. We may rejoice that we are no longer guilty of racism and discrimination against Jews and other minorities, but regret the fact that the Zeitgeist has institutionalized them in the form of affirmative action, and that modern identity politics and multiculturalism have repristinated tribalism as a virtue. We may celebrate our sexual liberation, but take pause that the popular culture has made us slaves to sex itself. Surely it is credulous in the extreme to imagine that “the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist” is a good fairy, who brings only blessings, while exacting no payment in return.

Naturally, anyone whose whole philosophy of history and life can be encapsulated in Bob Dylan’s puerile Bolshevist lyric “The times they are a-changing…Get out of the new road if you can’t lend a hand”, is unlikely to be able to comprehend the difference between morality and moral fashion. Try to imagine Plato, Aristotle, or Kant defining virtue as conformity to whatever temporary “consensus” upon which Public Opinion has most recently conferred its imprimatur. (Strike Socratic reason; forget the categorical imperative; let’s just go with the Zeitgeist.) The whole idea of ethics is that it distinguishes the rationally necessary “ought” from the merely contingent “is”. It’s bizarre that Dawkins can’t see that, just as he can’t comprehend that blindly trusting in the wisdom of an ever-moving Zeitgeist would have made him a slaver and a misogynist had he lived but a hundred years ago. The problem with the Zeitgeist is that it is self-annihilating. Today’s moral Zeitgeist is tomorrow’s detestable ‘ism.

Some might describe “The Zeitgeist” as just a prettified term for the mass mind. If progressives wish to worship a potency of such brutely capricious unconsciousness, by all means, let them do so. But then, they ought to stop accusing the religious of being slaves to “irrational faith”.

Dawkins and Hitchens ask Rhetorical Questions:

Does Religion Makes Us Better People?…

Does Atheism Make Us Worse?

As should be obvious by now, both Dawkins and Hitchens start from the premise that religion is comprehensively malignant, and set out to “prove” it. Though it’s a rather unscientific methodology, it would be less objectionable if they simply owned up to the fact that they are writers of anti-religious propaganda, instead of affecting to be heroically independent minds following wherever reason and the evidence lead (by contrast to the slaves and dupes of “faith”).

It is easy, once you get the hang of it, to impute evil to religion and good to anything else. War is bad (unless you are a conservative funny-man like P.J. O’Rourke), and so religion must be its principal cause. In an age of Islamist jihad, Dawkins and Hitchens can rely on those who know little about history to nod in assent. (In spite of their liberal sensibilities, they are not above exploiting a little post-9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria in the religion-equals-war sections of their books.) And once again, it serves them all too well to blur the shades of religious militancy into a single monochromatic specter. The Islam of Al Qaeda and the Taliban represents a regression to the Age of the Prophet, whose own bellicose sectarianism was a regression to the tribalism of the Neolithic. Christianity, on the other hand, ceased to be a Church Militant nearly a millennium ago (though against the Church, Dawkins and Hitchens bear a particular animus).

In fact, the most murderous wars in history (the American Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam) have had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. (Neither have the bloodiest conflicts of antiquity: the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, the Roman Civil Wars). These, like most military conflicts, have been fought over social and political status, land, and empire. They have been incited, that is, by man’s congenital appetite for power and wealth, against which such otherworldly religious movements as Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity have provided the only persuasive moral and intellectual arguments. In any case, the highest mountain of corpses in the history of man’s inhumanity to man was heaped up during International Communism’s seventy-year long war against its own citizens, a crusade prosecuted by the Party in order to defend the doctrinal purity of official State Irreligion.

 

The sort of contradiction that ensnares Dawkins when he denies religion’s Darwinian advantage–while having little choice but to admit its universal “survival”–, besets both authors throughout their discussions of the relationship between faith and morality. In parallel chapters, they ask rhetorically if religion makes us better human beings (Dawkins, “The Roots of Morality: Why Are We Good?”; Hitchens, “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?”). Their answers come as foregone conclusions. We are good not because of, but in spite of religion; in fact, religion makes us worse. (An aside: When did it become obligatory to put chapter titles in the interrogative? And if there really is a question, why pretend that the matter is settled beyond doubt?)

It ought to be a problem for Dawkins and Hitchens that study after study has demonstrated that the religious are healthier, longer-lived, more prosperous and content, more likely to donate to charities, while less prone to drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and absentee fatherhood, incarceration, and any number of related social pathologies. Religious genes tend, moreover, to out-replicate those hosted by atheists. One would think that a Darwinian would concede the superiority of the religious life on that ground alone.

Both Dawkins and Hitchens are oblivious of this body of research on the moral and psychological benefits of faith, nor do they put forward any to support their contrary claims. Dawkins reproduces a slim paragraph from Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation which purports to show that rates of violent crime are higher in Republican states (whose inhabitants are more devoutly Christian) than in states that vote Democrat. Even a non-statistician will object that there are other variables involved here, which vitiate or at least qualify any simple correlation; but now compare Dawkins’ nuanced response to the monstrous crimes committed by Stalin and his atheist comrades: “We are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity.” Indeed we are not. We’re in the business of counting evil heads and compiling a single roll call of iniquity.

Where evidence is lacking Dawkins never fears to tread, relying instead on his own subjective intuition: “I’m inclined to suspect”, he writes, “that there are very few atheists in prison.” I’m inclined to suspect that there are even fewer Mennonites, but I should be embarrassed as a putative man of science to base any such assertion on personal suspicion. Dawkins must be privy here to “evidence of things not seen” (St. Paul, call your office; you have another “faith-head” in your waiting room.)

 

Hitchens’ chapter similarly eschews the hard facts that he otherwise demands of his religious opponents, and falls back instead on picturesque anecdote and heartfelt emotion. His answer to the question of whether religion makes us “better behaved” focuses on Lincoln and Martin Luther King, two of the best-behaved idols of modern liberalism. A perceptive historian of the religious imagination might be struck by the devotion with which these charismatic figures have been revered and exalted into demi-gods by their uncritical cultists, notwithstanding their feet of clay. Hitchens himself confesses his veneration of King, making a point of his being moved to tears whenever he reads his sermons. He calls King’s speech before the striking garbage workers in Memphis a “transcendent moment”. (Are atheists allowed to have transcendent moments?)

The problem for Hitchens is that King’s speeches and sermons swarm with references to Moses, the Exodus, Sinai, and the Promised Land. (If King were not one of the saints of the Church of Progress, one might expect Hitchens to sneer at his megalomaniacal delusion–or his hypocritical opportunism–in casting himself in the role of a latter-day Moses. He doesn’t, of course. He reserves that contempt exclusively for traditional Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.)

King poses a real moral dilemma for Hitchens, and for his Manichean atheist-good, theist-bad world-view. He is, after all, not merely good, but transcendently good. Hitchens resolves the dilemma by pretending that “in no real as opposed to nominal sense was he a Christian”; that “his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology”; that his biblical allusions were merely “metaphors and allegories”, which had been “forced upon him” by the circumambient biblical culture; that it was not Christianity that inspired King’s dream but his inner circle of “secular Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for decades”. (Similarly, while Lincoln paid lip-service to God, Hitchens notes that he had read Paine and other freethinkers, and was “privately an unbeliever”.)

 

Having studied the Christianity of the Fathers for some time, I am certainly prepared to believe that King’s religion was thin gruel by comparison, just as I am convinced that the “social gospel” preached to modern liberal Protestant congregations has more to do with political ideology than religion. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that King’s message of liberation would have been cast upon barren soil had his auditors in the Black Churches not had a deep connection to the the Exodus narrative. Perhaps for King it consisted in only “metaphors and allegories”. So what? For many of the most fervent and spiritually vigorous Christians, Scripture is gloriously fecund with metaphors and allegories. Notwithstanding the caricature of literal-mindedness that Hitchens projects upon his theist enemies, Christians know metaphors and allegories when they hear them (their Redeemer had a certain talent for them, after all), which is more than one can say for scientific rationalists and atheists. To paraphrase a sentence from a Robertson Davies novel, I have encountered many atheists in my lifetime, and they all fall down on metaphor.

It’s almost poignantly ironic to recall that the casual observation by King’s critics of his Marxist proclivities – as of any of his other intellectual impostures and moral dissipations – has automatically evinced from liberals charges of “racism” or “McCarthyism”. Hitchens, while impeccably liberal, is willing to concede the point, because it magically conjures King into an “atheist”, and makes secular humanism, rather than Christianity, the mother of civil rights. Conversely, Stalin’s atheism is, according to both Hitchens and Dawkins, equally “nominal”, and thus equally irrelevant to his murderous reign of terror. Stalin, as Hitchens notes ominously, attended seminary in his youth as an aspirant to the Orthodox priesthood. That’s where he learned to be an “authoritarian”, I suppose.

Isn’t it rather too conspicuously expedient for our authors to demote to the status of “nominal” Christians those whom they can’t help but admire, and exonerate as merely “nominal” atheists those they can’t help but revile? In the section of his book dealing with slavery and abolition, one would have thought that Hitchens might have mentioned William Wilberforce; but then this Evangelical’s Christianity was evidently too potent a brew for even Hitchens to rhetorically dilute into insipid nominalism.

Are atheists really “better behaved” than believers? Leaving aside the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the question itself is unedifying. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously conceded the possibility that believers might be less virtuous than non-believers. The Gospel, as he notes, has always attracted the poor, disaffected, and troubled of heart, populating the Church with sinners in disproportionate numbers. The relevant comparison is thus not between church-goers and atheists, but between the moral condition of the lives of people before and after they have embraced religion. As Lewis observes, patients in a doctor’s waiting room are less healthy on average than the general population; but that is hardly an indictment of medicine.

Dawkins and Hitchens may sneer in stereo at Dostoyevsky’s famous remark in The Brothers Karamazov that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”, but they and other atheists clearly recognize that Christians at least accept its truth. Why else would they mock them for being virtuous only because they fear hell-fire and anticipate rewards in heaven? Ancient pagan and Christian philosophers alike insisted that virtue ought to be an end in itself, wholly autonomous of such external, accidental considerations; but it is hardly consistent to mock Christians for behaving themselves under imperfect motivation and then assume that they would continue to do so after their raised consciousness ceased to believe in the myth of a retributive afterlife.

As self-anointed consciousness-raisers, both Dawkins and Hitchens write as though atheism exists only in some pristine theoretical order (against which they compare the inevitably mixed record of religion in practice). Someone should tell them that their battle has been won. The godless state was inaugurated some time ago, and it has brought us Robespierre’s terror, totalitarianism, council houses, drug wars, and abortion clinics. In Europe and North America (formerly known as Christendom), the twentieth-century ushered in the most protracted and extensive experiment in state secularism ever mustered in history, at a cost of upwards of three hundred million lives.

It may be the case that the monumental “misbehaviour” of the twentieth century does not follow directly from its denial of the existence of God. But the historical reality is nonetheless of an evil unprecedented in degree and scope–and in an epoch when, for the first time, the term Christendom ceased to have any meaning. As Marxists are wont to argue, there are no accidents in history. If it is fair to hold theism responsible for the putative crimes of Christendom–the Spanish Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, the Salem witch hunts, and all the other sins with which Christians are regularly belaboured–then it is equally fair to hold secularists and atheists responsible as well.

Dawkins and Hitchens conveniently ignore the wretched moral record of the post-Christian secular state. One wishes they had done the same for the officially atheist regimes of the Communist world. Their attempts to deny the connection between atheism and the murder of one hundred and fifty million of global Communism’s own citizens for ideological heresy are not merely hypocritical but obscene. According to Dawkins, “What matters is not whether…Stalin [was an atheist], but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does…Stalin was an atheist…Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” One wonders why, then, in the opinion of Dawkins and Hitchens, “individual Christians” who do wrong always do so as faithful exponents of Christian teaching. (Does either really believe that the Church’s squalid accommodation with the Nazis was “systematically influenced” by its theism, as they allege?) Indeed, there is not the “smallest evidence” that Christian doctrine influenced the preponderance of the crimes with which Dawkins and Hitchens inculpate it (unless you call its corruption an influence).

It tells you something about the arrogance of liberals that, while they would be horrified at anyone’s denial of the connection between racism and slavery, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, or fossil fuels and global warming, they are agnostic about the connection between atheism and the Gulag. It’s hard to believe that Stalin’s wholesale persecution, torture, and murder of Orthodox priests and nuns, his desecration of churches, or Mao’s elimination of every last vestige of Buddhist belief and culture, had nothing to do with atheism. If we lived in an age of genuinely equitable justice, this sort of denial would lead to prosecution or at least social ostracism. Is there any comparison more odious than Hitchens’ characterization of the extermination of religion under Marxism as one of a series of “anticlerical phases” in which ecclesiastical corruption is periodically purged (as under Henry VIII or Cromwell)?

Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ Fab Theories

of the Origins of Religion

Throughout the three-thousand-year history of the study of religion, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, psychologists, and political cranks have posited innumerable explanations for the genesis and worship of the gods: fear (Petronius; cf. Isidore of Seville); innate and universal ideas (Stoics; Platonists); veneration of history’s great and powerful (Euhemerus); homeopathic rituals to encourage agricultural fecundity (Frazer); totemic ancestor worship (W. Robertson Smith); the awe of the numinous (Otto); the projection of the tribal group-soul (Harrison; Cornford); consolation for misfortune and injustice (the Marxist opiate idea); subjugation of the underclass by the “power structure” (contemporary Deconstructionism). In the second century A.D., the brilliant Middle Platonist and father of the modern novel, Apuleius, affirmed the need for a multiplicity of religions on the grounds that no single one could express the inexpressible totality of the Divine. In the fifteenth century, the Christian mystic Nicholas of Cusa expressed the same idea in his formula, Una religio in varietate rituum (one religion in a variety of rites). So, it seems, the multiplicity of religious aetiologies suggests that no one of them could possibly be adequate to explain so ancient, fundamental, and mysterious a human endowment as religion itself. But at least the traditional theories, however narrow and reductive, are psychologically and anthropologically plausible, which is more than one can say for the bizarre confabulations of Dawkins and Hitchens.

Both anti-theists purport to explain the origins of religion on the principle that poisonous fruit can only fall from a poisonous tree. Hitchens’ chapter (” ‘The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin’: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings”) is an embarrassingly incoherent rant on the corrupt beginnings of: the Mormonism of Joseph Smith (early nineteenth century); the footnote religion of the infant prophet Marjoe Gortner (early twentieth century); modern American televangelism; and the so-called second-world-war “cargo cults” of the Pacific Islands, in which American GI’s bringing trinkets in the holds of their marvelous flying machines were worshiped as gods and redeemers by the Melanesian natives. Through no small hermeneutic effort, the reader may eventually divine that the unifying features of these religions is their founders’ monstrous avarice, which they satisfied by resort to the gross fraudulence of their claims to supernatural revelations or powers. To slightly alter the favourite predicatorial text of Chaucer’s Pardoner, Radix religionis est cupiditas. The Pardoner, by the way, reminds us that faithful Christians were aware of the clerical temptation to venality and mischief, and publicly denounced them, six hundred years before Hitchens exposed this open secret. Being rather more realistic than Hitchens, medieval Christians recognized that avarice and dishonesty are the universal condition of fallen man, and by no means limited to the religious. If they excoriated ecclesiastical corruption more ruthlessly than any other kind, it was because they demanded a higher standard of probity from priests and monks than the generality of mankind. It was the high-minded religious ideal of virtue, that is, that made religious vice scandalous.

But besides its incoherence, Hitchens’ chapter is a crashing disappointment, even by the meager scholarly standards to which readers would have become inured by this point in his narrative. While his title promises a universal theory of the origins of religion, it delivers yet another smirk at relatively recent cultic ephemera. If Hitchens affects to account for the origins of the ancient mystery religions of the Great Mother, Isis and Osiris, Orpheus, Demeter and Persephone, Dionysus, Hercules, Mithras, or Christ, on the grounds that, like Marjoe Gortner or Joseph Smith, they all secretly forged their own “revelations” and peddled them using slick theatrical effects, one should like to see his evidence. Hitchens provides none. Instead, he merely invites us to indict all religions by analogy to the most larcenous, primitive, and short-lived examples he can find. Should you wish to see dishonesty and legerdemain in action, look no further than the cynically staged arguments of writers who, by rhetorical sleight of hand, show gullible readers the compliant facts, while keeping the inconvenient ones up their sleeves.

Curiously, a common theme of both books is the aforementioned “cargo cults”, a relative neologism in the jargon of anthropology and the history of religion, whose prominence in our authors’ discussions of cultic origins suggests that they borrowed the term and thesis from one of the earlier anti-theistic manuals on which they so heavily depend (but which they rarely cite, not wishing to admit the gross unoriginality of their polemics). Or perhaps the appeal of the cargo cult theory is its sci-fi topicality, inasmuch as such astrophysical mystics as Carl Sagan have fixed in the popular imagination the vision of “billions and billions” of potentially habitable galaxies, which seems to have given new life to the early twentieth century fantasy that the gods we worship are extra-terrestrials who visited the earth during the infancy of our species. Dawkins devotes a significant part of his chapter “The Roots of Religion” to recounting how the flying machines and magical boxes that glowed with light and emitted strange noises, along with the uniforms and marching rituals of the white-skinned aliens who brought them, so impressed the natives of the Pacific Islands that they worshiped them as gods. For Dawkins, the speed with which these cults spread and their extraordinary geographical range confirm A.C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Dawkins concludes that “the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed”. But he does not tell us with what superior technological marvels Jesus mesmerized and purchased the reverence of his disciples–indeed, if Jesus really had possessed anything like the modern radio or airplane, perhaps he really was a God–nor from what advanced civilization he interloped into Palestine. Like Hitchens, Dawkins provides not a shred of evidence to support his risible hypothesis; rather, he asks his readers to accept it holus-bolus on, well, faith.

Since for Dawkins evolution is all the law and the prophets, his own contribution to the study of cultic origins is his theory of religion as a product of (you guessed it) natural selection. In dragging evolution into everything, Dawkins reminds one of the comically persona-ridden physician Euryximachus, an interlocutor in Plato’s Symposium, who when asked to discourse on the theme of love, defined it as “the health of the body”.

The problem for Dawkins-the-Darwinian, however, is explaining how a behavioral trait that is so “time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking…anti-factual, [and] counter-productive” as the worship of God could have become so universally naturalized within the human species that “no known culture lacks some version” of it. Shouldn’t religion have long ago been “selected out”? Indeed, as the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin insists, “That is the one point which I think all evolutionists agree upon, that it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in its own environment.” The human organism is ubiquitously religious, and by his own logic, the evolutionist ought to conclude that, along with other universally human modes of adaption (e.g., reasoning, planning, tool-making, negotiating, co-operating), religion is a positive and essential contributor to man’s biological survival and thrift.

But then, predisposed as he is to the proposition that religion is pernicious, Dawkins is forced to introduce a bit of “dialectical prestidigitation” (to recall his mockery of the ontological argument) that would have made Anselm proud. Religion, he says, is an unfortunate “by-product” of a more generally successful evolutionary strategy: viz., the prudent imperative for a child to obey his parents. “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival.” But the by-product of it is gullibility, and the inability to distinguish between worldly wisdom and nonsense. “The child cannot know that ‘Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but ‘You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail’ is at best a waste of time and goats.” As virus-like “memes”, religious doctrines thus infect the gullible brains of children and metastasize throughout the gene-pool, or rather “meme-pool”. Like genes, memes are selfish and reproduce only for the benefit of themselves, rather than their individual hosts or collective species. Each religion is a complex of such self-replicating “memes” or cultural complexes. “Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one”, Dawkins speculates.

But once again, he offers no empirical evidence to support such fascinating speculations. Nor does it really matter. The theory may be plausible enough that childish credulity and obedience (in themselves, making excellent Darwinian sense) have led to the propagation from generation to generation of religious nonsense, but it tells us nothing about religious origins. Why did parents and tribal elders conceive these fantasies about God and the soul in the first place? It will not do to say that they accepted them credulously from their own parents when they were children; for this is merely to kick the causal can down the road–and Dawkins has only contempt for that sort of intellectual sloppiness when it is exhibited by Creationists. (The triumphantly unanswerable question, “Who designed the Designer”, is one of Dawkins’ rhetorical tics.) So, what Darwinian Imperative first planted the God hypothesis in the brains of parents and tribal elders, in every part of the inhabited globe, during the nascency of humankind? And why was that particular species of nonsense, more than any other, so universally “selected” and propagated?

According to the very criteria to which he regularly appeals, Dawkins’ theory is preposterous. Both he and Hitchens are fond of invoking the principle of Occam’s razor to refute the assumption of the existence of God. According to Occam, the simplest explanation is always the truest, and thus for modern science, the God hypothesis, being wholly superfluous to the explanation of the existence and evolution of the cosmos, is false. (Not surprisingly, Occam is the one Christian theologian whom both Dawkins and Hitchens admire.) Well, isn’t it “simpler” for a Darwinian to infer that the universality and perdurance of religion means that it has been “selected” because it is a successful human adaptation? Remember Lowentin’s point that “it is impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in its own environment”. For humans, that environment has ubiquitously and perennially included religion. Dawkins’ Byzantine speculations about religion as a “misfiring” of an otherwise sound evolutionary mechanism rather needlessly complicates things.

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.