The Evangelical Atheists

It may be worth noting right at the start that the name I suggested for this little talk was “The Evangelical Atheists.” [Someone]changed the title in your Newsletter to “The Cost of Tolerance.” He thought the latter title was more likely to draw an audience than the former. All in all, I think it is probably a better title, but Dawkins and Harris and Dennett would probably be offended by the change of title. They are not ashamed of their stance; they do, indeed, want to proselytize; they think it is important, even crucial, that supernaturalism be abandoned, and that so-called religious ethics be replaced by a genuine ethic. Along with Christopher Hitchens, they believe that organized religion is one of the gravest dangers facing the world today, and that liberals and moderates in their insistence on tolerance for all faiths are actually playing into the hands of religious fundamentalists all over the world. Their claim is that the cost of tolerance is high indeed, so high that we can no longer afford it.

I want to talk about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and his later book, Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens’ god is Not Great:How Religion Spoils Everything. What I am hoping is that my little overview will get you to read just the first chapters of each of these books. If you do that, I think you will quickly see that the derogatory press they have gotten is not deserved; I think you will find that you want to read beyond the first chapters of all or most of them, and that you will realize the dangers they warn us of are real. Perhaps we need to re-examine our religious pluralism and the belief that somehow all faiths can somehow be reconciled.

It was actually a comment made by someone in this congregation when I was here last year that instigated my examination of these atheistic thinkers. I had quoted with approval the opening lines of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metahphysics, “Why is there anything at all, why not far more nothing?” This, he insists, is a mystery, but not one that is to be solved, but rather simply to be lived. He hastens to add that Christians flee the mystery; they think they have answered the question, but it is not answerable. It is more like a Zen koan, something we are to ponder; we are faced with the mystery of existence, and the task is to remain in the mystery, open to the mystery, not to flee into some tidy and safe explanation. In that address last year, I also mentioned my admiration for Richard Dawkins’ early work, The Selfish Gene, and the person from this congregation claimed (both during the service and in a conversation with me afterwards) that Dawkins, like Christianity and other world religions, thinks modern science has solved the mystery. I did not remember Dawkins in that way, and hence began my perusal of the new atheists. While I came to understand this person’s objection better as I read Dawkins, and I, too, detected a kind of arrogance in Dawkins and Dennett that I do not like, I think that they are not guilty of supposing the mystery has been answered. It seems to me that both Dawkins and Dennett think that the more we come to know about the universe, the more wonderful and awe-inspiring it seems.

Dawkins, in particular, insists that he is not attacking what he calls Einsteinian religion, but only supernaturalism and supernatural gods. Indeed, he names his first chapter “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”, and begins it with this quote from Einstein: “I don’t try too imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.” Hitchens in his first chapter remarks, “We [atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe…” and he continues, “If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or ‘end of days’ story….. Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your maker, which turns out not to be a ‘who,’ but a process of mutation with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish. This is more than enough mystery and marvel for any mammal to be getting along with: the most educated person in the world now has to admit…..that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

Yes, it is true that all of these thinkers believe that the supernaturalist ‘explanations’ of the universe are silly and simplistic and unreasonable, and they think that scientific hypotheses about cosmology and biology are much, much better, much closer to the truth. And yes, they think that we would be foolish not to accept the hypothesis that animals and plants on the earth have evolved over immense periods of time, but they do not think that science has all the answers or that the fundamental mysteries have been solved. Indeed, they are quite willing to talk about spirituality and spiritual values, but they think that spirituality need not be (and should not be) confused with religion, and especially not with supernatural beings or events. Again quoting Einstein with admiration, Dawkins includes in his first chapter this remark of Einstein: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Dawkins insists that many scientists who seem to be religious, who accentuate the complexity of the universe, turn out not to be religious when you study what they say more carefully. {Incidentally, I have found this to be true as well. A good example of this is Paul Davies’ book, God and the New Physics, which has nothing at all do with god or gods.} At any rate, it is supernaturalism in all its forms that Dawkins decries, not the sort of humility in the face of complexity that one finds in Einstein, or, I think, in many of you. If that is the only sense in which you are religious, he has no quarrel with you. He does, however, think it a mistake for Einstein or anyone else to name this complexity, this mystery, god—both because it is misleading, and because it plays into the hands of supernaturalists. I think he is right about this. I recall after I first began to read extensively in biology and astronomy, I still called myself a theist, and when pressed would say that god was a whirling ball of energy. I understand my attempt to express my fascination with the incredible work being done in astronomy, the larger and larger universe it was disclosing to me, but I think my friends who urged me to stop ‘lying’ to people, misleading them by calling myself a theist, were right in their admonition. God-talk has a long history and the word ‘god’ a meaning that I cannot simply discard, stipulating in its place some meaning more respectable and more in line with scientific discovery. It is not simply misleading to play so fast and loose with the language, it is more dangerous than that. It constitutes a form of collusion.

So, among other things, what these evangelical atheists are claiming is that the scientific story about the universe is much better, more full of wonder, more complex and breathtaking than any of the rather simple and silly creation myths of the great religions, and that it is not simply a denial of common sense, but something far more dangerous (even sinister) to give any sort of allegiance to such stories. Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way,’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardy tapped by the conventional faiths.”

Dawkins concludes his remarks on Sagan: “All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration… As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.”

Hitchens is, if anything, even more adamant in insisting that the scientific story about the universe is more awe-inspiring and more worthy of respect than any simplistic religious myth, and that our awe in the face of existence ought to increase with our understanding of science rather than decrease. He takes issue with Dawkins and Dennett for allowing themselves to be identified with the ‘brights,’ a group of atheistic, anti-supernaturalists who, Hitchens thinks, give anti-religionists a bad name (due to its arrogance, and the implication that religious people are dim). But his attack is less about religion’s insult to science than on the moral consequences of what he calls the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Indeed, in all of the books I will talk about today, while they may begin with a rejection of supernaturalism on scientific grounds, it is the moral consequences of religious belief that they are most frightened of and most eager to combat. {Impressive to me that scientists are talking about morality—something that for many years seemed, if not taboo, at least very much out of style.}

So, while these atheists are concerned with leading us away from religious myth and towards a more mature, more complex, more in line with reason explanation typified by modern science, and while they do think science has been given short shrift, usually by people who understand almost nothing of its story, their biggest concern is with the immorality perpetuated by religion, while these same religions claim to be the very seat of morality. I think it is this attack on religious immorality in their books that has really set people on edge, partly because the world we live in is so dangerous, so hate-filled, and often enough we want to avert our faces from what is happening in the larger world. At any rate, we do not want to stoke the fires of hatred. Thus, that these thinkers seem to be advocating intolerance is shocking, when we know that tolerance is such an important virtue, such an essential component of any decent ethic. However, these men, Hitchens and Harris in particular, force us to look hard at what is happening and of how, if we really pay attention to religious texts, really attempt to understand what it would mean to take them literally, live by them literally, we would see that murder and mayhem are the natural consequences of the Abrahamic religions, rather than the product of a few mistaken fanatics who are acting against the scriptures. Although I will not do it here, all of these atheists, especially Hitchens, provide quote after quote of the price of apostasy. A careful reading of the scriptures makes it clear that religious moderates, along with those who call themselves agnostics or atheists, are all in the same boat when it comes to their eternal fate, and the duty of the fundamentalists is to root them out and kill them. You folks, many of whom may be casualties of some fundamentalist religion or another, come together in fellowship attempting to preserve from religion what seems good to you while avoiding the intolerance and brutality of fundamentalism. But seen from inside religious fundamentalism, you are dangerous, perhaps even more dangerous than the apostate, and what you see as enlightenment, they will see as poison. Thus, your tolerance will have a price.

Let me quote a few more passages from these books, mostly to give you some feeling for their moral objections to religion as well as to suggest where they think we should go from here.

Hitchens: “There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that is ultimately grounded in wish-thinking.” And he continues, “We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better towards each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” And he concludes, “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted… As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.” {I have admit that Hitchens is adamant to the point of being brutal in his assessment of religion. Still, if you read him, I think you will see why.}

If Hawkins and Dennett are aiming primarily at supernaturalist religions and religious fundamentalists, Sam Harris is critical of a far wider group. Beginning with quotes from Deuteronomy in the Old Testament and passages from the Koran on just how those from other religions (and those who believe in other gods) are to treated, i.e., exterminated, he begins to explain how and why he thinks religious moderates are aiding and abetting what they see as simply extremists.
“Our situation is this: most of the people in the world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions—according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: ‘respect’ for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

And he continues, “Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner or our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated…. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs---antithetical to our survival.”

I must confess, perhaps because of my political leanings, to be one of those who thinks that it must be economics that is behind horrible and desperate terrorist acts. Hitchens and Harrris point out how many terrorists are neither poor nor uneducated. Both have obviously read the sacred scriptures of the main religions, carefully and many times. When they make claims about what those scriptures say about dealing with infidels, they back up their claims immediately with lengthy and very explicit quotes. Indeed, they urge all of us to really read the scriptures of religions other than our own, both to see how their claims to absolute truth are as adamant as ours, and to see that their ‘arguments’ are every bit as bad (though no worse) than those of our favorite religion. Thus, for both of these men, to be a moderate Mormon, Catholic, Jew is simply to support Mormonism, Catholicism, Judaism. As I used to say to my students, especially those at the House of Studies (a Catholic lay organization that prepares young men who are considering the priesthood), if you wear the collar, no matter how often you insist that you don’t believe that only Catholics are saved, that abortion is always and everywhere wrong, that women are best seen as the handmaidens of men, the collar announces quite a different set of beliefs, and it speaks louder than the individual voice. And while claiming to be a theist does not mean necessarily that you think infidels will go to hell or that only belief in your god can save you, the scriptures will say otherwise, and even your tepid allegiance to the name, Mormon, Christian, Muslim makes you complicit in the acts done in the name of religious faith.

What I see as the unifier of these quite different thinkers (besides their championing of science over superstition, rational discourse over revelation) is their insistence that morality is separate from religion, and, indeed, that religious models of morality are dangerous and false. The moderates who have stayed within their religions have not become more moderate because of the religion and its sacred texts, but for moral reasons not in the religion but (in important ways) opposed to it. As one of my teachers used to insist (though he was, himself, a Mormon), religious beliefs must be tried in the crucible of morality, not the other way around. Genuine morality will require one to rethink and to reject much of the so-called moral teachings of their religion. In Harris’ words, “Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors. If we would speak of the baseness of our natures, our willingness to live, kill, and die on account of propositions for which we have no evidence should be among the first topics of discussion.” It is moral enlightenment and social progress that has reformed religion and religious practices where and when they have been reformed, not the other way around. So, why stay within the fold, why try to reform from within, when the core cause of the immoral practices is the religion itself and its claim to be the one and only Truth?

Dennett, the philosopher, quotes with approval the anonymous but provocative statement: “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” But the questioning must start, faith claims must be scrutinized; religious beliefs are not merely personal; they have dire moral and political consequences. Thus, they must, like all of our beliefs, be scrutinized—put to the test of reason and evidence. I admire the philosophical writings of Augustine and Aquinas, but they concluded (as Harris points out) that heretics should be tortured or killed outright. “Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.” It was not lack of knowledge of scripture that led these great men to advocate such atrocities, but instead their intimate knowledge of and adherence to these texts. As Harris concludes, “Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.”

Let me close by mentioning one bright note in all of this. Fifty years ago, many (even most) philosophers and scientists would not even talk about morality, and certainly did not think that either science or deep thought had much to tell us about morality. Instead, many of them considered moral utterances to be simply emotive, non-cognitive, simply expressions of taste. Whether overtly or not, these positivists provided arguments for the ethical relativists, for the view that nothing is really right or wrong and that all moral judgments are simply statements of cultural preference. Slavery, infanticide, clitoridectomy, none of these practices is really wrong, but simply approved of by one culture and time and place, and disapproved by another. I find none of that offhand relativism in any of these writers. Clearly when women and children are violated, raped, murdered, mutilated, these acts are wrong. While Harris and Dawkins may believe that morality has not yet been scrutinized scientifically, and the origins of morality not fully explained, they think it is both obvious and true that torture and rape and murder are wrong, and that the origins of morality, itself, both can and need to be studied and understood. They dare to use moral criticism of belief systems, even to criticize science for its failure to take moral concerns as real and as theirs. I was not offended by any of these books. I was shocked and horrified at what they reported and documented, afraid for our future from the implications of what they had to say. But it is not these writers who are the enemy. They are voices of reason and of morality, and at the very least we should give them a serious read.

In his preface, Dawkins insists: “You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages.” And, indeed, he thinks we all ought to strive for just such a stance. He is quite content to be a proselyte, and a proselytizer.