François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), known by his
pen-name, Voltaire, is reported to have said, “I don’t believe in God, but I
hope my valet does so he won’t steal my spoons.” For many atheists, holding to
religious tenets, at least for other people, is practical because it keeps them
from stealing their stuff.
In the spirit of Voltaire, Atheist Richard
Dawkins tweeted: “Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively
benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme:
‘Always keep a-hold of nurse, For fear of finding something worse.’” What’s the
“something worse”? Islam.
This isn’t the first time Dawkins considered
Christianity to be preferable than Islam.
Two years earlier “Dawkins begrudgingly
admitted that Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant
forms of religion that threaten the world.” Here’s what he said:
There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. . . I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse. (H/T: Breitbart)
What else “might be”? If Dawkins knew of
something else that “might be” or in fact is, I’m sure he would have mentioned
it. Why didn’t he say atheism is that bulwark? He couldn’t because of a
statement like this:
In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
Stuff just happens, and there is no ultimate
judge as to whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. Maybe the DNA in certain
people has changed and is giving us what we describe as radical Islam. It’s
merely “genetic replication.” There’s no morality attached to it since DNA
neither knows nor cares. Presently we are dancing to the inextricable advances
of DNA. This is the world that New Atheists like Dawkins has created.
In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral
Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre, expresses the real-life consequences of
a DNA-only world. “The underlying structure of [Friedrich Nietzsche’s] argument
is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my
morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such
fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. I myself must now bring into existence ‘new tables of what is good.’”1
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) made a similar
statement in his book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942):
We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to Earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the grandson
of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) and brother of Julian, justified a type
of moral anarchy based on the premise that if the world did not have meaning
then there was nothing that could judge the thoughts and actions of the human
animal.
The following is from his book Ends and
Means (1937):
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning – the Christian meaning, they insisted – of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.
How does a worldview without meaning fight a
worldview that is all about meaning even if that meaning is ruthless? And given
the operating assumptions of atheism, how does an atheist formally judge
another worldview?
How did Stephen Hawking’s view of the cosmos
compete and push back against Islam or any other destructive worldview, and how
would an atheist ultimately know if a worldview is destructive and should be
opposed given the following?
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.2
First, how does he know this, and second, if
what he says is true, then how does it compete with a worldview that is filled
with divine purpose even if that purpose is perverted? Again, how would an
atheist know what’s fundamentally perverted if he does not have a fixed moral
standard to evaluate it?
In the
2009 film Collision, the late Christopher Hitchens describes a
conversation he had with Dawkins:
“I said if I . . . could convince everyone to be non-believers, then I have really done brilliantly, and there is only one left, one more, and then it would be done and there would be no more religion in the world and no more deism and theism, I wouldn’t do it.“And Dawkins said, what do you mean you wouldn’t do it? And I said I don’t quite know why I wouldn’t do it. And it is not just because there would be nothing left to argue over and no one left to argue with, it is not just that, well, it would be then, somehow if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn’t and the incredulity with which he looked stays with me still, I’ve got to say.”
It seems
that Dawkins might have caught up with Hitchens’ point. Consistent atheism does
not have an answer to the problem of evil because it can’t define it, measure
it, weigh it, or see it with the microscope or the telescope because it resides
as one of the communicable attributes of God.
1. Alasdair MacIntyre,
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, [1981] 2013), 132.(↩)
2. From an interview with
Ken Campbell on the 1995 show Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken and
quoted in part in Laurence Foss, The End of Modern Medicine: Biomedical
Science Under a Microscope (Albany, NY: State University Press, 2002),
197.(↩)
