Against Atheism

Why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris Are Fundamentally Wrong

Ian S. Markham

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444358001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Athéisme

In this new book, Ian Markham analyzes the atheistic world view, opposing the arguments given by renowned authors of books on atheism, such as Richard Dawkins. Unlike other responses to the new atheism, Markham challenges these authors on their own ground by questioning their understanding of belief and of atheism itself. The result is a transforming introduction to Christianity that will appeal to anyone interested in this debate.

• A fascinating challenge to the recent spate of successful books written by high-profile atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris
• Tackles these authors on their own ground, arguing that they do not understand the nature of atheism, let alone theology and ethics
• Draws on ideas from Nietzsche, cosmology, and art to construct a powerful response that allows for a faith that is grounded, yet one that recognizes the reality of uncertainty
• Succinct, engaging, but robustly argued, this new book by a leading academic and writer contains a wealth of profound insights that show religious belief in a new light

1

Getting inside Fundamentalist Atheism

The Gentle Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris

“Fundamentalist atheism” is a term that will annoy Richard Dawkins.¹ So let me be clear: fundamentalism is not meant as a term of abuse. The authors of the booklet series called The Fundamentals, which appeared in the United States between 1910 and 1915, were sincere, intelligent, thoughtful scholars. They articulated their commitments to the inerrancy of Scripture, a substitutionary atonement, and a literal return of Jesus to Earth with precision and thoughtfulness. And in so doing, they carved out for themselves a position that was uncompromising and committed. There is no room for ambiguity or humility or even nuance in The Fundamentals. They argue for their worldview deeply confident that they are entirely right.

So the description “fundamentalist atheists” should invite a parallel because of the equally clear assertion of uncompromising truth. The commitments are different – “science is incompatible with belief in God,” “religion is deeply destructive,”² and “atheists can be moral.” But the result is the same – an unambiguous assertion of a worldview in which the authors are entirely confident that they are right.

It is no coincidence that both the Christian fundamentalists of the early twentieth century and the atheist fundamentalists of the early twenty-first century do not even try to understand their opponents. None of our atheist fundamentalists have studied theology. Herein is a crucial difference with the tradition out of which this book is written. For this author, my Christian faith requires me to work as hard as I can to understand the arguments of Christian fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists. And the tradition out of which I am writing is classical Catholicism as expressed in its Anglican form.³

This is an important point. In terms of method, classical Catholicism contrasts markedly with the approach of both versions of fundamentalism. The remarkable thirteenth-century Dominican Friar, Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), has a deeply generous methodology. Having trained as an Augustinian Platonist, he then spent much of his life exploring the world of Aristotle. He read Muslim and Jewish thinkers with care and sought to synthesize the thought of Aristotle with his Augustinian training. The very structure of his Summa Theologiae⁴ is a testimony to his generosity and care when presenting the arguments of his opponents. In this remarkable text, Aquinas always starts by presenting the strongest arguments he can find against the position that he holds. He then identifies the hinge argument for his position before going on to explain why this position is the correct one. And the position taken by him in the Summa was, for his day, controversial and pioneering. In 1270, the views of Aquinas were investigated and condemned by a papal inquiry, which was organized by the bishop of Paris.⁵

Why was Aquinas so willing to read widely and explore a tradition that wasn’t his own so carefully? The answer is that Aquinas had a primary obligation to the truth. The quest for the truth is a moral absolute. If God is, then God must be the author of all truth. Aquinas saw this clearly. No text was forbidden; no viewpoint inappropriate to explore. And one follows the truth wherever it goes.

So it is this spirit of classical Catholicism that contrasts so markedly with our Christian fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists. And it is in this spirit that this book will start with a careful, fair, and even sympathetic exploration of the arguments found in three books. The best known is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The second is by Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything;⁶ and the third is by Sam Harris, The End of Faith.⁷

These books share one thing – they are all well written. They are compelling. My goal in this chapter is to put the cases of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris as accurately as I can and in fact, in certain places, to strengthen their arguments. I will engage in this exercise because it is an act of Christian duty and fidelity to be fair to those with whom you disagree. There is a moral obligation on me to make sure that when I have conversations with others I can fairly represent the position they hold, such that if Richard Dawkins was reading this book he would say “yes, you have understood what I am trying to say.” There are seven arguments found across these three books. I shall now look at each in turn.

The Concept of God is Incoherent

Sam Harris admits that having a worldview free of all contradictions is difficult. We have so many beliefs that to examine them all is – on a practical level – hard to do. Yet, Harris writes, “given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive for coherence wherever it is in doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility.”⁸

Harris is entirely right. Imagine for a moment a person who insisted that she has a chair that isn’t a chair. Imagine further that after questioning the person, she rejects the possibility that this is a stool or an odd table that is used as a chair. Instead, she really means to affirm the two propositions “I have a chair” and “I do not have a chair” as true. What would you think? I suspect all of us would conclude that this is a nonsense use of words and impossible to accommodate in terms of lifestyle. Given chairs are intended for sitting, you cannot sit on a chair that simultaneously exists and yet doesn’t exist.

Now this is an obvious contradiction. Most contradictions are more indirect. It is contradictory, for example, to believe that “our lives are entirely determined by the stars” and at the same time to believe that “all humans are entirely free.” At first sight, the assertion about human freedom does not directly contradict the assertion about the truth of astrology. However, as one thinks further, the contradiction is exposed because if all lives are entirely determined by the stars then they cannot be entirely free.⁹

If God exists, then one must give a coherent account of what this God is like. We cannot believe in something that we cannot explain. Granted there might be plenty of mystery, but it cannot be all mystery. If it is all mystery, then we are agnostics (i.e., a person who believes that there is insufficient evidence to determine whether there is or there is not a God). We don’t know what we are talking about.

This is quite good territory for the atheist (i.e., a person who believes that God’s non-existence is highly likely). Believers are notoriously vague about precisely what they affirm. It is surprising that Dawkins only explores this problem in passing. When he defines God, he tends to think it is relatively easy. So, for example, he writes, “Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.”¹⁰ However, he does feel that when it comes to the Abrahamic God, the definition needs to be modified. And at this point, he touches on the problem of coherence:

The simple definition of the God Hypothesis with which I began has to be substantially fleshed out if it is to accommodate the Abrahamic God. He not only created the universe, he is a personal God dwelling within it, or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean), possessing the unpleasantly human qualities to which I have alluded.¹¹

Dawkins should have developed the bracket “whatever that might mean.” Christians have had enormous problems explaining the relationship of God to the universe. Take time, for example. For Aquinas, God had to be timeless – so there is no duration in the life of God. However, if God is timeless, then how can God do anything? All actions require time. You need a moment before the action, a moment during the action, and a moment after the action. If God is timeless, then God has quite literally no time in which to act. It looks incoherent. It looks like Christians are simultaneously affirming “a perfect changeless God” and at the same time “a God who acts and therefore changes.” How can we affirm both of these assertions simultaneously?

One major question for believers is this: what exactly do we mean by God? Are we claiming that God is some sort of energy that is present in the universe? Are we claiming that God is something separate from the universe and if so what? Does God have space or live in time or not? If persons of faith cannot explain what they are affirming to exist, then atheism has won. If I invent a word, say “bloop,” and cannot then explain what it means, then others are entitled to ignore me. We need an account of God; and often persons of faith are not very good at giving an account of God.

Of the three, it is Sam Harris who makes this a central issue. Harris makes much of the problem of evil: why does God allow so much evil if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving? This is a classic coherency problem in the philosophy of religion. If God is all powerful, then he must be able to eradicate all evil; if God is all loving, then God must wish to abolish evil; but evil exists, therefore God cannot be both all powerful and all loving. It looks like theism is self-contradictory given the reality of evil in the world. Harris says quite explicitly that in his view this is a decisive reason for unbelief. There is no acceptable way for Christians to evade the problem of evil. It is such a fundamental issue. Harris writes:

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.¹²

As theists, we should be willing to concede that (a) we need to provide an adequate account of God, and (b) the problem of evil is a major problem for belief. There is one last point that our trinity of atheists stress. They have a problem with the theological discourse in general. Christians have a technical vocabulary. For Dawkins, theological language about the Trinity is unintelligible. Having quoted St. Gregory the Miracle Worker’s views on the Trinity, he observes: “Whatever miracles may have earned St. Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity.”¹³ Again Christians are often not helpful at this point. There are so many Christians who seem to take a perverse pride in not understanding the point of the Trinity. Once again Dawkins is on strong ground at this point.

Faith and the Lack of Reasons

What is the basis of belief in God? This is the second area of attack for our trio of atheists. Sam Harris starts his book by contrasting “reason” with “faith.” Harris explains that “religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern – specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death.”¹⁴ It is true that the word “faith” is often used in this way. The moment in a conversation with a Christian, when the problem of evil arises, is often concluded by the Christian invoking two words, “mystery” and “faith.” It often appears that we don’t have reasons for what we believe is true.

Richard Dawkins is right to complain about those who insist that belief in God is justified by the fact that God’s existence cannot be disproved. Dawkins quotes with approval, Bertrand Russell’s parable of the teapot.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.¹⁵

This is a fair point. It is clearly insufficient for the theist to ground belief on the inability of the atheist to provide a proof for the non-existence of God. Or, as Dawkins puts it: “That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable.”¹⁶

Given this, the question then becomes: are there any good arguments for the existence of God? Richard Dawkins identifies eight arguments that have been offered for the existence of God and concludes that none of them are persuasive. To anticipate later chapters in this book, this is an area where I will want to challenge Dawkins. However, for now, let us concede there is no argument that will persuade every right-thinking person. And, although perhaps he is a little too cavalier in his treatment of the traditional proofs, Dawkins is in good company with his conviction that these arguments are not decisive. For example, John Hick, a Christian philosopher of religion, finishes his survey of the arguments for faith and writes, “From this discussion, it is evident that the writer’s own conclusion concerning the theistic proofs is negative. None of the ...