ere is an unvarnished truth with which the committed atheist Richard Dawkins needs to come to grip: If you do not want to believe in God, then there is probably nothing that anyone can say or do that would make you believe.  Likewise, if you want to believe in God, then there is probably nothing anyone can say or do that would make you disbelieve.  Truth be told, nobody believes or disbelieves in God simply because of some string of sentences or series of acts.  To be sure, people change sides all the time.  But the explanation for this is not that, alas, they stumbled upon this or that argument or series of facts. 

As I shall try to show, the belief in God is very much akin to the belief that our parents loved us or our commitment to friendship or romantic love.  And that, alas, tells us something important about our humanity.

Richard Dawkins is a committed atheist, and a very talented evolutionary scientist, author of the influential book The Selfish Gene. 

In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Dawkins examines and finds entirely unacceptable a multitude of considerations that purport to show or provide reasons to believe that God exists.  But is that why he does not believe in God?  Was it the epiphany of seeing that Thomas Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God flounder that turned Dawkins into an atheist?  I don’t think so. 

Or, was there a string of empirical truths that did it for Dawkins?  For instance, was it his commitment to the truth of evolutionary theory?  I doubt it.  Why?  Because there is no string of empirical truths about the world that yield the conclusion that God does not exist.  Empirical truths can yield all sorts of interesting conclusions about emperically verifiable things.  If you know, for instance, that Jane is at this very moment in Brazil, then you also know that this very same Jane cannot be in Spain two minutes later.  We do not at this point in time have the means to traverse thousands of miles in a mere 2 minutes. 

But there is no set of empirical facts that will yield in a like manner the conclusion that God does not exist.  True, many religious folks seem to think that there is some incompatibility between the truth of evolution and the existence of God.  The incompatibility, rather, is in the truth of evolution and certain actions attributed to God.  If the claim is that God brought the human race into existence by combining water, sand, and leaves from a tree: well that action attributed to God is clearly incompatible with evolution’s claim that the human race evolved from apes. 

However, the belief that the human race evolved from apes which, in turn, evolved from creatures in the sea (or whatever) hardly requires me, on the pain of otherwise being irrational, to assert that God does not exist.

The underlying premise of Dawkins’ argument is that human beings should be guided by the facts and none other than the facts.  I myself wonder whether, from an evolutionary perspective, this is how human beings are actually constituted. 

Consider the following very simple conviction that many a person has: My parents love me.  Now, what facts actually establish this?  It is true, of course, that in the typical case a person can say that her parents did this and that and the other for her.  A person will invariably point to many sacrifices that were made by her parents on her behalf.  But how is all of this supposed to establish the conclusion that she was loved by her parents, especially since the very same action can flow from entirely different and incompatible motives?  Was it a photo opportunity, given my bid for president, or my affection for you as my friend that motivated me to jump into the pool and save your life?  

Now, imagine two families, one rich and one poor.  John is a child of the poor family and Jane is a child of the rich family.  As it turns out John and Jane are playmates.  Now, Jane gets all the toys and amenities and privileges that a child could want; whereas John does not.  Jane, then, can point to one thing and then another as evidence, supposedly, that her parents love her.  But now I ask you: Is John at a disadvantage when it comes to thinking that his parents love him?  After all, he can surely see that his parents are not giving him all the things that Jane’s parents are giving her.  His parents may tell him that they are poor.  But what exactly does that utterance do for a child?  Surely it is not the case that John has doubts as to whether his parents loved him and the utterance “We are a poor family” wipes away the doubts. 

My general point here is that the belief that one was loved by one’s parents is not so much tied this fact and then that one.  Rather, this belief is simply tied to the phenomenology of the experience with one’s parents, which is about a host of quite ineffable things from a touch to a look.  The fact that parental love can be secured in this way makes it possible for children to feel loved by their parents across an exceedingly wide-variety of differences.  In particular, rich children are not at an advantage when it comes to having the conviction that they are loved by their parents. 

By the way, a similar line of reasoning applies to friendship or romantic love.  There is no one thing that establishes that people have romantic love for one another?  Not even sex.  

In an odd way, then the real problem with Dawkins book, The God Delusion, is that he does not see the forest for the trees; and this is quite striking given that he is an evolutionary theorist. 

In The God Delusion, Dawkins is committed to the tedious exercise of exposing one fallacy after another on the part of those who believe in God or who ague for God’s existence.  Or, Dawkins draws attention to one morally unacceptable piece of behavior after another that has been committed in the name of God.  For example, he tells us about the abominable behavior of the religious pro-life folks who kill doctors who perform abortions because these religious folks regard the fetus as a person.  See the section in The God Delusion entitled “Faith and the Sanctity of Life” (pp. 291-298).  I have discussed some of his other claims in a previous blog-entry.

What does Dawkins imagine?  Does he think that a theist who completes The God Delusion will go: “What on earth am I doing believing in God?  This is utterly silly of me.”  Does he expect the reader to conclude that all religious people are morally bad or more so than all non-religious people? 

No honest and reasonably informed person could possibly think either that all religious people are morally bad or that all non-religious people are morally good.  Certainly, this much is clear.  There is no way for Richard Dawkins to establish the truth of the counterfactual that if there had been no religion in the world, then the world would be a better place. 

I claimed that Richard Dawkins does not see the forest for the trees.  What did I mean by that?  The question that he might ask is this: Is there is something about human nature that makes it the case that belief in God remains such a rich feature of the human tapestry?

To see my point, consider the case of romantic love.  People continue to believe in and to be moved by the idea of romantic love although if one just looked at the facts alone, one might deem the pursuit of romantic love rationally indefensible.  Look at all the betrayal, deceit, and pained caused by the pursuit of romantic love gone awry.  True, there are some marvelous successes.  Just so, there are lots and lots and lots of horrendous failures.  So it is notwithstanding the fact that case after case of romantic love often starts with the greatest of hopes. 

What distinguishes human beings from mere animals is that we are and can be animated by the transcendent.  Whether it be parental love or romantic love or love between friends, the truth of the matter is that love is necessarily a transcendent good.  Facts are relevant, but are rarely decisive—in just the way that (as Kurt Baier observed) candlelight is relevant to having a romantic atmosphere but not decisive with regard to whether the atmosphere is romantic or not.  Out of love, we make sacrifices and take risks that we would in the typical instance never ever make for another and for which there can be no rationally compelling argument to make on behalf of another. 

At yet a more rarified level, religion speaks to the impulse that I have just described in the preceding paragraph.  Can this impulse be put to evil use?  Absolutely.  But this merely tells us what we already know, namely that anything can be abused—even the transcendent traits of love and loyalty can be abused in the most horrific ways. 

Accordingly, living well consists not in destroying any trait that can be abused, but so successfully harnessing the trait in question for that which is good that the trait’s abuse is kept to a minimum if not eliminated entirely.  Whether it is religion or love, this is the challenge that we human beings have and no mere animal has.  This challenge is the mark of our humanity.

What Richard Dawkins has unwittingly shown in his book The God Delusion is not that belief in God, as such, is the problem, but rather that the fear of having that belief is. 

here is an assumption among some opponents of religion, one of them being Richard Dawkins, that the following contrary to the fact statement (a counterfactual as such a statement is called in philosophy) is true: Had there been no religion, then there would not be so very much of the hostility that we find in the world today; hence, the world would be much better off.  Dawkins writes:

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion.  Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant haired televangelists fleecing guillible people of their money (‘God wants you to give til it hurts’.  Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues; no beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female for the crime of showing an inch of it. 

The God Delusion (pp. 1-2)

The inference that we are supposed to draw, of course, is that had there not been religion, then the bad things mentioned in the above quotation would not have occurred; hence, the world would have been better off without religion.  I shall demonstrate the inadequacy of this line of reasoning.  There are in fact two problems with it.  I shall begin with the more obvious one.  The second problem, as we shall see, pertains to the value of self-sacrifice that has been majestically husbanded by religion and which bears upon, of all things, academic institutions.

Now, what is certainly true is that

(A) If there had been no religion, then there would not have been any crimes or atrocities committed against human beings in the name of religion. 

But claim (A) is logically different from and does not entail claim

(B) If there had been no religion, then there would not have been any crimes or atrocities committed against human beings. 

And surely it is claim (B) and not claim (A) that is supposed to be established by the long passage from Dawkins’ book quoted above.  For things are radically uninteresting if, instead of (B), all that Dawkins meant for his readers to infer from that passage is:

(C) If there had been no religion, there would of course still be crimes and atrocities committed against human beings.  It is just that these would not be committed in the name of religion.

After all, a crime or an atrocity is no less painful merely because it was committed for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion.  And there seems to be no shortage of crimes and atrocities committed by individuals whose motivations are entirely shorn of religious convictions. 

Some counterfactual are more rightly seen as more plausibly true than others.  Here is a plausibly true counterfactual: (i) If I had been born 6 days later, it is rather unlikely that my life would be any different from what it is now. 

As things stands, this counterfactual seems true enough; for it seems next to impossible to point to anything relevant during the intervening 6 days that would count for a substantial difference.  All sorts of things could have happened, but they did not.  If, for example, during the intervening 6 days both my parents had died or had been exposed to some radiation that rendered me blind in the womb, it is rather likely that things would surely have been very different.  But none of that happened.

Now, contrast (i) with: (ii) If I had been born blind owing to an infection acquired in the womb during the 7th month, it is unlikely that my life would be any different from what it is now.  Needless to say, this counterfactual is so far removed from the reality that it is not all clear how we should evaluate it, although we are quite clear about what it means to be born blind.  Obviously, there are ways in which my life would be fundamentally different.  But do would we know that my life as a blind person would have been less fortunate than my present life?  Absolutely not.  My life could actually turn out to have been more fortunate. 

Consider Ray Charles.  When compared to any number of individuals with sight, Ray Charles seems to have had quite a fortunate life—so much so that our knowledge that he was blind does not call to mind the typical concerns or pity that we have when we think of a blind person. 

With the second counterfactual regarding my having been born blind, only one fact about my initial entry into the world has changed.  I have the exact same genetic make-up, social background, and so on.  Yet, it is next to impossible to extrapolate from that single change what my life would have been like. 

Turning to Dawkins’ counterfactual about the world had there been no religion: What is incontrovertibly true is that the world be quite different.  But just how it would be different is anything but obvious.  It is logically possible that the difference would be for the better.  But it is also logically possible that the difference would be for the worse.  The example of my being born blind makes it clear just how difficult is to extrapolate from a single change. 

Accordingly, it is sheer intellectual dishonesty to aver that there would be less evil in the world, when all that we can possibly know for sure is that in a world without religion there would be no evil committed in the name of religion.  This truth does not even entail that there would be less evil, but only the truism that the evil committed would not be committed in the name of religion. 

Certainly, Richard Dawkins is not under the delusion that it is only in the name of religion that evil is committed.

No one can deny the bad done in the name of religion.  Still, an honest and forthright discussion of a world without religion requires that we look not only at the bad occasioned by religion, but the good occasioned by religion, if indeed there be any. 

It is easy enough to come up with a list of good things done in the name of religion.  However, I want merely to draw attention to a single idea that surely has its ontogenesis in religion, namely that of self-sacrifice on behalf of others.  If there is any one single good idea with untold marvelous implications that religion has husbanded, it is the idea of self-sacrifice.  It is not clear that any other institution could husband this idea as effectively as religion has done.  So if we take away religion, then our present conception of the idea of self-sacrifice that we valorize and that religion sanctifies would also have to go. 

Now, the value of self-sacrifice has been one of the cornerstones in the development of Western civilization; and part of the proof of that turns out to be academic institutions themselves.  The idea of providing people with the proper training has deep religious roots.  Many distinguished institutions, including Harvard University and Yale University and the University of Notre Dame, to say nothing of many of Oxford’s colleges (Corpus Christi College; All Souls College), owe their beginnings to the religious ideal of self-sacrifice. 

Most major academic institutions have long since departed from their religious moorings.  But we can ask: Would these institutions have come about in the absence of religion?  Respectively, Henry Dunster and Charles Chauncy were the first two presidents of Harvard University; and both were members of the clergy.  Here is what we find about Dunster on Harvard’s website:

Dunster established education strongly allied with the Christian missionary goals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Students were required to read scripture and prayers twice a day at the College Hall.  Weekly recitations were encouraged.  Moreover, a code of conduct or "Rules and Precepts" was established for every student to observe.  These rules instructed students that the foundation of all sound knowledge and learning was in knowing and studying the words of God and Jesus Christ.

As this single example makes abundantly clear: Dawkins’ counterfactual world without religion would require some serious changes in the history of the world even with respect to things that we highly praise and value. 

Mr. Dawkins is very, very good.  But in his world without religion he does not get to throw out the bad things done in the name of religion and keep the good things occasioned by religion all the while pretending that the good things have a source entirely independent of religion. 

It is stupefying that a man of Richard Dawkins intellectual caliber and breadth of knowledge cannot seem to remember any of the positive contributions of religion—including those of which he is a beneficiary, if only indirectly, namely educational institutions. 

I, like Dawkins, am horrified by many aspects of religion.  Yet, if I have seen nothing in society that has come even close to anchoring a sense of self-sacrifice like religion has.  No criticism of religion has a chance of being a just and sound criticism if that criticism is committed to ignoring the gifts of religion. 

For all I know, it may be possible to show that, even when one takes into account all the good that has been done in the name of religion, the good done by religion is still substantially outweighed by the bad done by religion.  But Dawkins has not even come close to presenting that argument.  Worse, he is too committed to the truth of his conclusion even to see the need to do so.  In his athiesm, then, he is behaving rather like the religious zealots that he detests. 

Painfully, this is the right characterization of someone who claims that the very nature of religious upbringing is such that it is worse than being a victim of child sexual abuse.  If I should ever have to choose between (a) believing that being a victim of child sexual is, as Dawkins claims, worse than religious upbringing and (b) believing that God spoke to Moses through a burning bush, I would take the burning bush story any day.  For surely this much is obvious: The very nature of child sexual abuse makes it a horror for any child to experience; whereas the burning bush story can easily be played out in a number of majestic and inspriring ways. 

Dawkins is asking us to replace thesis (b) with thesis (a).  You tell me: How wonderful would that world be? 

f you had told me that between child sexual abuse, on the one hand, and religious upbringing, on the other, a person of Richard Dawkins’ intellectual stature would declare religious upbringing on a par with child sexual abuse if not the worse of the two, I would have deemed your remark utterly implausible.  Guess what, I would have been wrong.  In his book, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) Dawkins makes just this claim in the sections entitled “Physical and Mental Abuse” and “In Defense of Children”.  This goes to show that no one is immune to being ideologically driven.  There is much in the book that is wonderful and even courageous.  I hope to address some of these ideas on another occasion.

Now, since Mr. Dawkins admits to having been a victim of child abuse (p. 316, para. 1), he clearly can speak about the matter first-hand.  I assume, as Dawkins maintains and illustrates with an example, that there are children who are not psychologically devastated and damaged by a single instance of sexual fondling from an adult.  On page 317, Dawkins tells us of a woman raised Catholic who had been fondled by a priest when she was 7 years old, but who was more distraught over the fact that her playmate, who had tragically died, would be going to hell because she was a Protestant. 

Dawkins remarks, as represented in the preceding paragraph, tell us what we already know, namely that it is always possible for something to have a most unexpected negative impact upon us when we had every reason to expect that it would not; or for something not to have a significant negative impact upon us when we had every good reason to expect that it would. 

We do not expect most people to say that the occasional sexual fondling in youth by this or that adult had next to no impact upon them.  If it were even remotely plausible to have that expectation, sexual abuse could not be the profound harm that we take it to be. 

Richard Dawkins writes:

I am persuaded that the phrase “child abuse” is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven moral sins in an eternal hell (p. 318)

I am perfectly prepared to concede that the story of burning in hell forever is extremely difficult to fathom.  Moreover, I am perfectly prepared to concede that there is a way of indoctrinating a child with that story that is utterly damaging to that child.  For instance, constantly telling a child that she or he is going to hell for not doing the right thing would be unconscionable.,

But most people I know have managed to shake off the story of hell taught to them during their upbringing with little or no difficulty.  By contrast, I know several folks who were the victim of sexual abuse during their childhood; and not a single one of them has been able simply to shake off that damage.  Indeed, I know of one male student (call him Opidopo) whose attitude towards females was severely damaged by a junior high school experience.  The student believed that he did not resist the teacher’s overtures as forcefully as he should have. 

The Opidopo devastation is far more typical of the pain that sexual abuse occasions.  This should come as no surprise.  For sexual abuse is an egregious violation of trust at a most basic level on the part of those whom we deem most trustworthy: parents, uncles, members of the clergy, and so on.  And when there are repeated instances of such abuse, there is the further issue of being powerless to do anything about it. 

Now, I have already acknowledged that the hell story has struck me as difficult to fathom.  But this much is clear: Merely teaching one’s child that story would not constitute a violation of that child’s trust in one; nor, again, would it constitute putting that child in a powerless situation and then harming it.  In a word, teaching one’s child that story does not in any way amount to a form exploitation of the child. 

I understand that for Mr. Richard Dawkins, the very idea of God is just so much nonsense.  But it is utterly irresponsible of him to suggest that religious indoctrination as such parallels child sexual abuse.  This is to use his prestige as an erudite scholar of evolutionary theory in a most malicious and deplorable manner. 

No one denies that religious practices can be abusive; and we do not need the story of the Inca girl who, 500 years ago, was made a human sacrifice (p.327) in order to see this.  Indeed, it is rather disingenuous of him to invoke that story when the point that he wants to make presumably is that religion as it is practiced today is akin to, if not worse than, child sexual abuse.  As a first approximation: death by religious sacrifice at a young age does appear to be considerably worse than being sexually fondled at a young age by an adult. 

Even if there were nothing at all good about religion as it is generally practiced today it would still be quite some distance from child sexual abuse. 

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.  Sometimes greatness gets in the way of appreciating how those who are less fortunate live.  Whether he likes it or not, religion has across the globe been a source of inspiration and hope for the weary—and not just an occasion to think of ill of the Other.  Perhaps from the lofty heights of Oxford University and international fame, there is no shortage of hope and inspiration. 

But for those without that social standing, it has often been the inspiration and hope afforded by religion that have made the difference between giving up in despair and finding a reason to go to work the next day or to come home to the family.  Religion has made it possible for people to feel engulfed by a sense of majesty whilst living in an utterly shattered reality. 

There is no denying the horrific wrongs done in the name of religion.  But the problem, I suggest, is not so much religion but arrogance.  And arrogance on the part of non-religious in the academy has been a most destructive force to the ideal of open-mindedness.  Nothing has turned inquiring nubile minds into “bigots” like the condemnation of arrogant non-religious professors who truck no disagreement, all the while claiming to be the very embodiment of open-mindedness.   Is Mr. Dawkins a case in point?

Well, there is the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.  Both organizations owe their existence to the Christian spirit of helping others.  There are the people of Le Chambon who stood up to the might of Hitler’s army and saved the lives of thousands of Jews.  But they were Christians who no doubt believed in, and taught their children about, hell.  There is Raoul Wallenberg who risked his Christian life in order to save Jews.  Then there is that nun.  She went by the name Mother Theresa, I believe.  Perhaps these sorts of facts are only for intellectual peons. 

Obviously, I am mocking Dawkins.  But for good reason.  He is a brilliant scientist from whom I have learnt much; and his words have considerable weight.  In the absence of an extraordinarily rich and complex argument: It is misleading and incendiary and downright irresponsible for him, of all people, to put religious upbringing on the same plane as child sexual abuse.  If nothing else, he has dramatically trivialized the horror of child sexual abuse.  As I have already noted: In terms of violating trust and abusing the powerless, and even leaving aside the examples of altruism spawned by religion, there is no comparison whatsoever between religious upbringing and child sexual abuse. 

Mr. Richard Dawkins is way too intelligent not to know that instinctively, especially since (as he has told us) he has been through that abominable experience of having been sexually abused.  And when a man of his intellectual caliber and personal experience says something so egregiously wrong, there are really only two explanations.  One is that his intellect has begun to fail him, after all.  The other is that he has an ideological bone to pick.  In Dawkins’ case, it ain’t the first.  So we know it is the second one.  Call it the Dawkins Delusion ! ! !