Books
No doubt
by David Larsen
Richard Dawkins is as fanatical as his religious enemies.
Introspection and self-doubt need better press. Consider George W Bush, with his blithe confidence that he can make the world a better place. The most dangerous capacity humans possess is the power to convince ourselves we’re in the right.
Most of what most people have believed throughout most of human history has been wrong. A great deal of what most people believe now is wrong. These are not difficult statements to swallow. But get your mind around this: some of your own beliefs are wrong. Bound to be. Which ones? Pick three things it would kill you to be mistaken about, and imagine for a moment that you’re flat-out wrong on all of them. What’s best for your children. The morality of the hardest choice you ever made. Whether God exists.
Someone out there disagrees with you on all these things. It might be me. Suppose it is. Suppose I’m right. What should I do about it?
Richard Dawkins doesn’t need to think twice to answer that question. It isn’t clear that he needs to think once. In a world befouled by religious fanaticism, he has a profound truth to lay before us: all religions are wrong. There is no God, there is no afterlife and beliefs to the contrary are simply pernicious. Therefore, he announces evenly, “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.”
“Attacking” is the right word. In stark contrast to his sworn enemies, the Intelligent Design theorists who attempt to smuggle fundamentalist religion into secular education systems by dressing it up in the language of science, he makes no attempt to sugar the pill. This is not a “discussion”. It’s not a “consideration”. It isn’t an “attempt to engage”. It’s an attack.
Dawkins has been fighting this fight for a long time, and he knows the frequently asked questions. He devotes many chapters to such objections as “Why do you care so much?” and “Even if you’re right, doesn’t religion do more good than bad?” The questions are herrings so red as to be crimson. A book like this stands or falls on its central project. If you can establish that religious belief – all religious belief – is demonstrably false, then your job is simply to do so, after which you can walk off quietly while the force of your reasoning changes the world. It’s Galileo who wins, not the Inquisition. On the other hand, if you can’t make your case, invoking priests who molest children or the evils of the burqa won’t disguise the fact that you’re just another zealot trying to retail your personal certainties to the planet at large.
So the two chapters that matter are “Arguments for God’s existence” and “Why there almost certainly is no God”. Of the many pro-God arguments, the one that won’t go away is the oldest: where did everything come from ultimately, if not from God? Dawkins gives the standard answers: maybe reality doesn’t come from anywhere, and well, where did God come from?
Dress it up how you may, this exchange is the alpha and the omega of knowledge on this topic: beyond it, the only options are religious faith, anti-religious faith and agnostic silence. Dawkins argues that anyone who takes the religious option doesn’t understand the implications of modern science. We can explain the universe and everything in it, ourselves included, without reference to God. God is therefore the solution to a problem we don’t have. So why believe?
But in posing that question, Dawkins has not disproved God’s existence. He’s merely shown that God is logically optional. Given that “faith” implies that we don’t know for sure, the possible non-existence of God should hardly come as a shock. And yet Dawkins considers the matter closed. Religion is dead. If only the blasted thing would stop moving.
I asked what I should do in a situation where you and I disagree about something of fundamental importance and I know that I’m in the right. It was a trick question, or a fool’s question. On the thorniest issues of value – the hardest questions of parenting, or morality, or religion – we never know who’s in the right. We just find it tempting to think we do. A fanatic is someone who gives in to that temptation so thoroughly that he loses the power to doubt himself. On the narrow issue of God’s existence, I believe that Dawkins is right. Still, he’s a fanatic. Atheists everywhere should wince every time he opens his mouth.
THE GOD DELUSION, by Richard Dawkins (Bantam, $40)
THE GOD DELUSION, by Richard Dawkins (Bantam, $40)
