In his best-selling book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins is more cautious than the fool in tonight’s psalm. He stops short of categorical assertion, but one of his chapters carries the title: Why there almost certainly is no God. It’s pretty clear that he thinks any case for the existence of God is so remote as to be tantamount to delusion, if not something worse. I would not venture to call Dawkins a fool in any ordinary sense of the word. The case which he makes against religious belief merits respectful attention, and there are aspects of his critique that the Church needs to take to heart, but I want to explain tonight why I remain unmoved by the main thrust of his argument.
The heart of his case – as he states himself – is intellectual (Dawkins, pp 187-9). We look at the universe, see evidence of what appears to be intelligent design, and are consequently tempted to believe that there must be an intelligent designer out there. How else could the wildly improbable set of circumstances have arisen that allowed life to develop as it has? Against this he contends first that there are enough planets in the universe – a billion billion would be a conservative estimate – for the admittedly infinitesimal chance of life to develop on at least one of them, even if we don’t yet know exactly how this happened; and second, once life had begun, Darwinian theories of natural selection are sufficient over millions of years to explain the evolution of primitive life forms into the highly complex diversity that we observe all about us. In short, creation can be explained without God. Moreover, if you were to posit the existence of God, to twiddle the dials so to speak in order to produce by design rather than by chance the improbable combination of factors leading to the establishment of life, you would face the even greater difficulty of explaining where such a highly complex God came from – who made God?
I would hope that most of us are not much troubled by this analysis. To my mind at least, the chemistry of creation and the biology of evolution are as awesomely wonderful as the ancient myths of creation that we find in the book of Genesis. But whereas science may be able to explain how life has developed on earth, the Bible is more interested in Why than How, not ‘how did man get here?’ but rather ‘what is the purpose of life, why are we here?’ On this basis, scientific and Biblical discussions of the origins of life are not really in conflict with one another at all. There is more to trouble us, I think, in the second half of Dawkins’ book, where he challenges the view that religious belief, mainly but not exclusively Christianity, is beneficial or at least harmless. He argues among other things that morality does not depend on religion, and that faith is not only hostile to the search for truth, but a dangerous incubator of malevolent fanaticism, and an abuse of the trust of children. In the course of this argument he advances a non-religious basis for morality, pouring scorn on the violent, angry, vengeful god of the Old Testament. He admires the moral teachings of Jesus, but he is deeply critical of what he describes as the sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement, regarding Jesus’ self-sacrifice as barking mad as well as viciously unpleasant (Dawkins, p 287).
As it happens, our Old Testament reading is quite a good example of the sort of divine posturing that Dawkins uses to rubbish the morality of the god we encounter in the pages of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Here we have God pronouncing a curse against his people, vowing to bring disaster upon them, refusing to listen to them when they cry out to him, and ordering Jeremiah not to plead their cause. And what are his grounds for such angry behaviour? Essentially, he is jealous. He has loved them, but they have gone off with someone else, so he is furious and will wipe them out. What a nasty, bitter old man. How like the vindictive, bloodthirsty, uncompromising god of the book of Judges, whom Dawkins particularly delights to excoriate as a moral role model. Whatever happened to mercy and loving-kindness?
But read on a little into the next chapter. There we find Jeremiah somewhat diffidently asking God to explain why it is the wicked who still flourish in the land whilst he is like a hunted animal, exhausted, rejected and in danger of his life. And as this particular debate draws to a close, we find promises that God will after all have compassion on his people, and ‘bring them again to their heritage and to their land, every one of them’ (Jer. 12.15). The book of Jeremiah is an anguished attempt to understand why God’s beloved and chosen people had been driven out of the land which God had promised and given to them. The easy answers, based on sin and judgment, fail to satisfy, but as the prophet digs ever deeper into his own misfortunes and those of his people, he struggles towards a new understanding of what it might mean to keep a law which is written not on tablets of stone but deep in our hearts (eg Jer. 31.31-34).
What is going on here? Like so much of the Bible, the book of Jeremiah is not meant to be read as a straightforward piece of prose. It is more like a cacophony of discordant voices, or a complex piece of modern music struggling to find some harmonic resolution. The text itself will have been edited and re-edited many times, as successive writers sought to understand and interpret its message for their own times. Which is not to say that we cannot know what the Bible means, only that we have to apply to it the same standards of patient and thoughtful exegesis that we would apply to any other document of similar origins and antiquity. But that is not the end of our task. Having done that, we still need to explore what these ancient texts may be telling us about the nature of god in the light of the fuller revelation which we have in the person of Jesus Christ, and our contemporary understanding of the truth about god, which changes as the Holy Spirit leads us into more of the truth.
Our New Testament reading began with seven verses about why we should be good citizens, keeping the law and paying our taxes. Fortunate as we are in this country to live under reasonably good rulers, we can follow Paul’s advice in this matter with a good conscience. But we also need to bear in mind that these same verses have been used to justify the divine right of kings, and also the Church’s submission to evil regimes. We can explore those issues another time – the point for now is that even the New Testament has to be read as a whole and in its historical context (in this case a mostly just pax romana); it is rarely safe to rely on texts cited in isolation.
But our reading went on to present an insight into the nature of the relationship between love and the law of God, which has had profound consequences for the development of a distinctively Christian morality, one with the confidence to rely on the positive imperatives dictated by love – for God and for our neighbour – rather than on the negative prohibitions which characterise seven of the ten commandments, and much of the ethics and morality built on those foundations. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans 13.10). Even Dawkins would go along with that – indeed his own set of alternative commandments adopts a not dissimilar stance (Dawkins, 298-300).
Of course there are other aspects of the Dawkins commandments which raise a flag for his distinct and avowedly atheistic point of view. In particular he insists on testing and questioning everything, forming independent opinions on the basis of reason and experience – don’t let anybody else tell you what to think – and respecting the right of others to disagree. And these positions lead him to reject out of hand all attempts to indoctrinate others, particularly children.
I endorse his defence of all scientific enquiry and the pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead us. And I agree that children should be taught to think for themselves. But that should not prevent us from introducing our children to God, God in three persons – a loving parent, a trustworthy companion who knows what life on earth is all about, and a spirit who is able to inspire us to seek after all that is both good and true.
There is an intellectual dimension to our faith. In the Anglican tradition we are taught to respect Reason, Scripture and Tradition, and we are continually exploring what that means for our understanding of the nature of God, as well as his will for us and for our society. But alongside the intellectual dimension – and of far greater importance – there is a personal relationship of trust and love which each of us has to enter into. We cannot know what we are missing if we decline to enter into that relationship, and those of us who have done so could not imagine refusing to point our children and grandchildren in the same direction. However sharp your intellect, you cannot test a relationship in debate.
The fool hath said in his heart: there is no god. Dawkins is no fool, but perhaps the saddest delusion of all is to insist that there is no God, or even to assert that probably there is no god, if this leads you to refuse any possibility of entering into that relationship of trust and love which sustains so many of us Christian believers, and gives us the assurance that the God who loves us is not a delusion.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2007)