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How do you react to
Professor Richard Dawkins' views on the pernicious nature of all religion and
of Christianity in particular? A mixture of outrage, a certain sneaking
sympathy, and a desire to hear what might be said by way of serious reply? All three responses are fair enough, I
think. In the following brief reflections, I am not going to have much to say
about what is outrageous in Dawkins. For detailed, measured and trenchant
responses, I would thoroughly recommend the books by Alistair McGrath and Keith
Ward. What I want to do here is to suggest what Christians might have to learn
from the fact that some of his criticisms do strike a sympathetic chord in many
of his readers, and even in many of his Christian readers. In so doing, I hope
to show why it is that his many valid points do not in the end succeed in
making his overall case.
Dawkins returns time
and again to the same basic points. The first is that Christians, in their
belief that the bible is an inspired book, are committed either to believing
many things which are scientifically indefensible, or to adopting various
dishonest evasive manoeuvres to try to deny that the most absurd of these
statements are in the bible at all. His second point is that Christians hold a
view of faith which places religious faith completely beyond reasonable
discussion or scientific counter-argument. In our modern world, such
unsupported prejudices deserve no credence, and can be positively damaging. Any
beliefs worthy of respect must stand up to scientific criticism. Science is the
gold standard for all truth.
I shall argue that we
Christians have ourselves unfortunately provided some grounds for each of the
two main criticisms: I shall further argue that there is no need for us to do
anything of the kind; and I shall conclude with some brief thoughts about
Dawkins' views of science.
What the Bible actually claims to be true
It seems undeniable
that most Christians, or at least those in the West, have gradually over the
centuries lost touch with the languages and cultures in which the biblical
texts, both Jewish and Christian, were written. The result is that Christian
tradition generally has tended more and more to take all narrative passages in
the biblical books as if they were descriptions of historical events, often
entirely missing the crucial theological messages which those passages
contained.
How do we typically
try to express truths? Our normal style is to try to formulate straightforward
predominantly factual statements, shorn of metaphor, lacking in poetic charm,
but making the most of clarity and precision. I say that predominantly we
express ourselves like that; but even we do other things as well. Contemporary
scientists, at least when they are working at the limits of our understanding,
themselves have to use metaphors and models - black holes, tiny strings
vibrating in ten dimensions, particles with spin and charm, selfish genes. And
more broadly, we might wish to insist that there are many truths about
ourselves and our world which cannot be properly captured other than in poetry.
Still, in our post-Enlightenment culture we do tend to focus primarily on the
straight, unvarnished, precise facts. It was not always thus, however. The
emphasis on metaphor and models played a larger role in civilisations which
were less able to conduct precise measurements, less interested, perhaps, in
purely mechanical facts. In understanding what was written in distant
civilisations we need constantly to bear in mind what were their interests, and
how their linguistic conventions worked in the expression of truth.
In some future era,
even our own culture could be open to much misunderstanding. Imagine a future
generation which no longer realised that Dad's
Army or Yes, Minister are
sitcoms, and took the first as a documentary on the Home Guard, and the second
as the video-records of meetings in the conclaves of Whitehall; or did not
realise that Animal Farm is an
allegorical novel, and read it as a description of some extraordinary episode
in evolutionary history. Such mistakes simply could not be made by our
contemporaries, because we are all well aware of the conventions and concerns
of our culture; we effortlessly pick up the relevant cues in the sitcoms, we promptly
see the point of the details in the allegorical narrative. All three make
comments on our world, comments which may or may not give a fair picture of how
things are: but they do not say what they say in straightforward factual ways.
Failure to grasp that is a fundamental misunderstanding. But mistakes of just those kinds have
frequently been made by Christians who took the opening chapters of the book of
Genesis as a factual description of the stages in which the matter in the
universe was organised into the cosmos as we know it. Later Christians were
insufficiently attuned to the concerns of the author to see that those chapters
are above all a monotheistic manifesto, a theological counterblast to those
contemporary polytheist accounts which explained the conflict of good and evil
in our world as the result of quarrels between good and bad gods. The writer of
these chapters of Genesis is making an important statement, indeed; the claim
is that there is but one God, that he made everything, and that everything he
made was good. If there is suffering and death in our world, that explanation
has to be sought elsewhere, in human failures but not in polytheism. Those,
rather than truths about astrophysics, are the truths upon which the texts are
focussed.
Similarly, the
narratives of the conception, birth and infancy of Jesus in the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke are theological prefaces to the description of Jesus'
ministry, with which all four Gospels
begin their more straightforward account of what Jesus said and did. The aim of
the infancy narratives is to give an imaginative presentation of some profound
theological truths - that Jesus is more than a prophet, that he is messiah,
sent directly from God; that his ministry is that of a second Moses; that he fulfils
the expectations of Jewish tradition despite his sufferings and his apparent
powerlessness. The Fourth Gospel in its opening chapter makes just the same
points, only this time they are couched in abstract rather than imaginative
language. In all four gospels the aim is that the reader should come to the
account of the ministry of Jesus with the theological stage well and truly set.
It is a mistake to read them as giving a chronological history of the events in
Jesus' early years, just as it is to read Animal
Farm as recounting what really happened in some part of rural Sussex or
wherever, or Yes, Minister as the
tape of actual Whitehall conversations. Yet the novel is offering insights into
the historical appeal of Marxist totalitarianism and the corruption to which it
leads, and the sitcom is laughing at the delusions which politicians actually
have about their own power. Just so, the infancy narratives are concerned with
the true significance of Jesus' life, but what they have to say does not depend
on their being a factual record of Jesus' early years; they prepare the reader
to grasp the true significance of the two or three years during which Jesus
lived, preached and died.
Dawkins, frequently
treats these and other parts of the Bible in a way in which he would never
dream of treating Dad's Army, Yes,
Minister or Animal Farm. But he
has been given considerable encouragement to do so by the way in which
Christians themselves have misread the bible and in so doing have failed to see
which are the truths which the biblical texts convey. Thus, some
Christians have responded to his
misdirected criticisms by trying to defend creationism, or the moving star of
Bethlehem, as though the bible is trying to make truth claims about cosmogony
or astronomy, rather than about monotheism and Christology. The bible, so far
as I know, says nothing which is either directly compatible or in any way
incompatible with evolution, for the simple reason that nothing the Bible
claims to be true relates to that topic at all. Space does not here permit me
to make similar points about many other biblical passages, where theological
argument is all too frequently mistaken
for scientific or historical description.
I am not in any sense,
as Dawkins often hints, advocating some kind of devious evasiveness,
'sophisticated' Christianity in some pejorative sense, any more than I am being
devious in my reading of Animal Farm.
There is plenty of evidence - as Dawkins rightly insists we look for, and
would, I hope, himself be ready to consider - to show that these ancient texts
would have been immediately understood by their authors and original audiences
in the ways I have suggested. That evidence is to be found by understanding the
cultures in which those texts arose - what they were concerned with, what they
took to be controversial and important to get right, and what literary devices
they had at their disposal to get their points across. To varying degrees, all
the Christian churches have, sadly, been nervous and slow to see the importance
and true value of such evidence, and have for too long behaved as if a simple
list of events were the most or the only important things which the biblical
books had to give us. It is to a considerable extent our own fault that
Christianity has been so misunderstood. In a strange way, many Christians and
Dawkins start from the same mistaken views about what the biblical writers
actually claim to be true. Both sides need radical re-education before any
debate between Dawkins and Christians can be at all useful to anyone interested
in the truth.
The perils of blind faith
The other constant
theme in Dawkins' criticism of religions, or at any rate of Christianity, is
what he takes to be the way in which faith is promoted as a virtue; for, he
argues, to do that is to imply that it is positively admirable to hold beliefs
for which there is no good evidence. Once again, it seems to me that in
Christian history there has been at least some basis for this criticism. This
can be seen in the ways in which Christian authorities have responded when
anything comes up which even appears to provide good grounds for questioning
what is authoritatively taught. The basis of the authority can vary
considerably: it might be what is taken to be the clear teaching of the bible;
or some position to which a Christian church has been committed for a long time
and perhaps has never questioned at all; it might be what is insisted upon by
legitimate church authority at some particular time of crisis or dispute. If
reasons for questioning such a position are advanced, they may be moral, or
philosophical, or scientific - consider disputes about contraception, or
homosexuality; or disputes about the ordination of women based upon a
philosophical doctrine of non-discrimination; or about whether it is essential
to Christianity to hold that we are all descended from just one pair of humans,
or whether it makes sense to speak of an immortal soul. One possible religious
response to any of these issues is to appeal to the status of the authority in
question - the bible, or the bishops, or the pope, or the general assembly,
claiming that such an authority cannot be vulnerable to attacks based on purely
secular considerations. The bible is divinely inspired, the Church is guided by
the Holy Spirit, what is taught is therefore to be believed without question by
the faithful.
Very few Christians,
and certainly very few Catholics, have seriously maintained that anyone has to
believe, in faith, something which is contrary to what can be rationally established.
Even the classical American Fundamentalists in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in their various ways held that science could indeed
support what they believed to be the truths taught by the bible. They thought
there was, or could be found, archaeological evidence for the age of the earth
which would match calculations made from biblical data on the ages of the
patriarchs, or would demonstrate the universality of the Flood, or the
existence of leviathans capable of giving hospitality to Jonah. Whatever one
might think about the reasonableness of such expectations, they were part of an
overall view that faith and human reason could not in the end conflict.
That overall view is
clear in theory: reason and faith cannot ultimately conflict, since truth is
one. But there are two important points which need to be made. The first is to
do with 'mysteries'. Dawkins in one place suggests that religion does not want to solve mysteries.
In one sense I think this is true. The nature of God is, I would suggest,
irreducibly mysterious beyond our comprehension. To recognise this is no more
than to acknowledge the limits of the human mind. What we can truly say about
God is limited: and even what we believe about God in the light of revelation
is limited by the fact that revelation itself is unavoidably restricted to what
we can to some extent understand. Since we cannot comprehend the nature of God,
neither can we fully comprehend what it means to say of a man that he is God.
But we can realise that to say that Jesus is both God and man is not at all the
same kind of assertion as, for instance,that a centaur is both horse and man.
In the centaur case, we are dealing with two created, and therefore limited,
kinds of thing, and we are trying to add them together as best we may. We have
all seen statues of centaurs. But the divine nature and human nature are not
two kinds of thing at all. God is transcendent; that is to say, God is not a
kind of thing, nor a member of a kind, which can in any sense be 'added' to
something else which is a member of another, human, kind. The unity of God and
man in Jesus is in the strictest sense a mystery; trying to 'solve it' by any
kind of cut and paste technique is almost certainly going to lead either to a
damaging kind of 'dumbing down', or else to a denial that Jesus is fully human,
'like us in everything apart from sin.' The Arian and the Docetist heresies are
examples of the dangers of trying to understand: the first 'dumbs down' by
denying that there is anything more to be said of the earthly Jesus of Nazareth
than can be said of any human being: the second tries to say so much more
(about what Jesus knew, or his relationship to the Father, or his inability to
sin, to take some examples) that in the end Jesus ends up simply as God appearing in some ways to be human. In
the end we have to believe, but not understand, that Jesus is fully God and
fully human; and we must explain why there are good reasons for not expecting
to be able to say more. Saying too much about mysteries is almost always ill
advised.
But Dawkins' main
complaint is that believers prefer unsolved 'mysteries' even when dealing with
perfectly ordinary this-world realities. If someone dies a mysterious death,
the true believer, he suggests, must prefer to say that God struck them down
than to try to learn more about the medical condition from which the person
died. Dawkins strongly disapproves of appealing to faith when there appear to
be perfectly good rational ways of trying to reach conclusions about something.
This seems to me to be a perfectly proper approach to take. Certainly in the
Catholic tradition, in which the importance of reason in both theology and in
ethics is emphasised, there is no disagreement in principle with what Dawkins
says on this point. But of course that does not settle everything, for two
reasons:
First, it is not always clear whether the issue is one which involves
faith or one which can and should be settled on rational grounds; the
legitimacy of the ordination of women would be one such example. The Pontifical
Biblical commission concluded that there were no strictly biblical arguments against the ordination of women; and
it is not entirely clear from the way the topic is currently discussed in
Catholic or in Anglican circles whether the main dispute is a rational one
about the status of women and the suitability of women acting in a role which
is intended to symbolise what a man, Jesus of Nazareth, once did. It has also been argued that the issue is to
be settled on strictly theological grounds.
Secondly, in ethics, the general
view that ethical requirements derive from the nature of human beings does
indeed leave room for dispute on what conclusions can be drawn from that
statement; but it does not sit at all easily with the claim that there can be
good theological reasons for going against what might be thought to be the
balance of reasonable opinion. Nor does it remotely suggest that Christians
should regard as especially important those ethical issues which are
immediately connected to sexual conduct. Dawkins all too often has a point. An
eminent Christian moral philosopher once remarked to me how distressed he was
to see how often the Christian churches produce arguments in ethics which he
would not have accepted from a second year philosophy undergraduate. Ethics is,
and should be, a complex subject, because human beings are complex creatures,
and the ways in which they are capable of interacting with one another and with
their environments are likewise complex and very varied. How any of these
considerations in the end affects human fulfilment is not always at all easy to
determine - as current discussions about the environment, or genetic
engineering, or the global economy, or developmental psychology amply
demonstrate. There is nothing in Christianity which suggests that these issues
ought to be at once simple and clear, much as we might wish that they were; and
nothing that would justify the claim to settle them by appeal to revelation
when the empirical facts would support more than one reasonable conclusion.
Science in its place
Where I think Dawkins
is at his weakest is in what I would term his 'scientism'. This is disguised by
the fact that he at every turn insists upon the importance of evidence, as
indeed he should (though it must be said that he does not in this respect
always practise what he preaches). The claim that every question about
ourselves and our world can in principle be settled by methods which can
ultimately be reduced to those of
physics is a highly disputable claim, disputable for reasons which have nothing
to do with religion. The debates in neuroscience, for instance, reveal a
near-deadlock, with some neuroscientists and some philosophers on each side,
about whether the phenomenon of consciousness, or the content of concepts and
beliefs, can be explained simply in terms of neuro-electronics; indeed there is
not even agreement on what will count as an explanation. Again, suppose the universe of space-time to
have had a beginning, it is plain enough that its appearance is not going to be
explicable simply by appeal to the laws of physics, whose truth is contingent
upon the existence of the universe which they describe. If the coming-to-be of
the universe is to be explained, then both the sense of 'explain' and the type
of explanation are not going to be scientific. Nor can God be described, as
Dawkins often does, as 'improbable'; for he intends that term to be understood
at least vaguely in the same sense in which it might appear in a scientific
argument. But he gives absolutely no account of what the basis for the
calculation of probability might be based upon in the case of God; nor indeed
whether it makes any sense at all to require that God's existence be probable
in a scientific sense. Whether there are good reasons for holding that God
exists is indeed a controversial question; but it is not, nor is it reducible
to, a scientific question. And even Dawkins, in his rather confused studies of
moral issues, while rightly insisting that there might be scientific evidence
which is relevant to those issues (for instance, the rate and causes of global
warming), has nothing coherent to say to support his extraordinary claim that
ethical argument is no more than a sub-section of scientific argument.
I cannot comment on
how good a biologist Dawkins is: but it seems to me that there are good reasons
for saying that his claim that all arguments must in the end be settled by
appeal to physical evidence is itself quite unproven - and that it does not
even remotely sound like the kind of claim that could be proved on Dawkins' own
terms.
Summing it all up
To conclude, then.
Dawkins does indeed provide a useful wake-up call to make the accepted
conclusions of most biblical scholars and most theologians much more widely known
and accepted in the Christian churches. Believers have on the whole a bad
record in the way we respond to the advancement of science and the growing
complexity of morality in our technologically and environmentally ever more
complex world. We have tended to sound, and often to be, reluctant to accept
undisputed scientific findings so that we can try to work out how they can be
integrated into our overall picture of our world as God's creation. The lessons
of Galileo, biblical criticism, evolutionary biology, contemporary physics,
psychology and medicine forever seem to catch believers unprepared, nervous,
and defensive. At his best, Dawkins calls attention to that fact. At his worst,
the exaggerations which he has to make serve only to indicate why such nervous
reluctance on the part of believers is ultimately unnecessary.
Gerry J Hughes SJ was head of the
philosophy department at Heythrop College, University of London, and is
currently tutor in philosophy at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is the author of "Aristotle
on Ethics" and "Is God to Blame?"
 Campion Hall, Oxford
Heythrop College, University of London
Is God to Blame? by Gerard J Hughes
Aristotle on Ethics by Gerard J Hughes
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