Why Richard Is Wrong
For Sunday January 30, 2005
Fourth Sunday After Epiphany
Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year A)
Micah 6:1–8
Psalm 15
1 Corinthians 1:18–31
Matthew 5:1–12
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Richard Dawkins. Photo by Lalla Ward |
The staggering numbers and the poignant images of hundreds of beach front funeral pyres from the tsunami disaster keep pouring in. More than 225,000 people from 50 countries died in the dozen nations devastated by the wall of water. In the lesson from Paul's epistle for this week we read, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18).
The tsunami has provoked many religious questions for many people. Editorials in the New York Times and shows like NPR's Talk of the Nation and Larry King Live have bandied about a cluster of questions. Why would God allow such a tragedy? Was it some sort of divine punishment? The answer to the first question is, "we don't know." The answer to the second question is "no" (see John 9:1–3). But the tsunami provokes an even more fundamental question: is it irrational to believe there is a God who is all-powerful and all-loving?
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) thinks so. For Dawkins, a Zoologist and Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and an outspoken atheist, religious faith is a dangerous superstition or even mental illness that drives people to folly.1 He describes faith as "the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence".2 At the turn of the new year, in responding to an article about the tsunami in the British Guardian, and subsequent letters to the editor, Dawkins derided religious faith as absurd belief "in a non-existent illusion." He urged readers to "get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering".3
Scientists deserve our admiration, respect, gratitude, and careful attention for a number of reasons. As some of our best and brightest minds, they are opinion makers and culture shapers. We ought to listen to people who have devoted their professional lives to considering fundamental issues of being human. The scientific work they have done in their narrow specialties is a gift to humanity. We acknowledge that some Christians (certainly not all) have invited justifiable scientific ridicule for defending the dubious. Science has also been a force for tremendous good in our world, curing humanity of horrific diseases and horrible superstitions. So, I for one am thankful for the scientist Dawkins.
But I take exception to Dawkins the philosopher. Whatever mantel of prestige Dawkins might deserve for his scientific work (and some believe that his "fame" owes more to his popular writings than to his scientific contributions) should not pass over to his religious and philosophical pronouncements. That's like asking an accomplished electrician for advice about plumbing. Here are ten reasons why I believe Richard is wrong about God and the tsunami disaster.
1. In addition to being a great writer, Dawkins is so quotable, so entertaining, so controversial and colorful because he is a fundamentalist zealot, albeit of the atheist variety. This makes for great press and wonderful book sales, but it is hardly a compliment when it comes to the matter of careful comment about complex matters like religious faith. All the modesty, nuance, controls, and qualifications that characterize careful scientific work vanish when Dawkins dons his philosopher's hat. I have to believe that many of his scientific colleagues cringe at his bombastic and pompous pronouncements, however entertaining. Admittedly, this is an issue of style, but at some point style and substance merge. In engineering lingo, there is a problem with Dawkins's signal to noise ratio. In cards we would say that he has overplayed his hand.
2. Dawkins seems to defend "scientism," the belief that science is the only or best source of reliable knowledge about what is worth knowing. In his book River Out of Eden, for example, he writes that "all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle." But as my friend and neuroscientist from Stanford, Bill Newsome, has observed, many, maybe even most, of life's most important questions cannot be answered by the scientific method: What is love? Should I get married? Is it sensible to bear children? How should we assess scientific explanation? We rightly do not expect science to answer these or many other important questions.
3. Closely related to this, many have observed that you cannot move "from is to ought." Einstein, for example, insisted upon this point. That is, science tells us what is, but it cannot tell us what ought to be. It can build a bomb, but not advise us when and whether to drop it. It can describe the acoustics of a Mozart symphony, but not explain why that symphony moves us to tears.
4. Science limits itself to empirical evidence, which makes much of it so compelling, but empirical evidence yields only limited information. Further, even such an ostensibly objective act as "empirical observation" is both theory laden and "tainted" by the subjective knower. In addition, like all disciplines, science operates with its own unprovable assumptions (eg, that the world is rational). In this sense Dawkins, and all scientists, are people of faith. When recently asked, "what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Dawkins responded, "I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe."4 As an article of faith, fair enough. As a "proof" demanded by science, no.
5. Dawkins the grandstander gets more than his fair share of the press, and this should not obscure the untold and often unknown story that there are many scientists, prestigious and obscure, who are people of deep religious faith. My favorite science-faith writer is John Polkinghorne—a particle physicist, former president of Queens' College, Cambridge, and ordained Anglican priest. Others come to mind, like Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard, or Ian Hutchinson, a plasma physicist who heads MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. I have already mentioned Bill Newsome at Stanford. Scientific "authority," whatever its cache, cuts both ways. As a university pastor for almost nine years at Stanford, it was my pleasure and privilege to meet hundreds of Christian professors, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, from every academic discipline. It does not disturb or surprise me to encounter a Richard Dawkins every once in a long while.
6. Beyond the narrow confines of the scientific community, Dawkins the atheist and people like him form a tiny minority. As the Harvard Islamicist Wilfred Cantwell Smith has observed, the overwhelming majority of intelligent peoples of all times, places, and cultures have been religious: "To be secularist in the negative sense is to be oddly parochial in both space and time, and to opt for what may be a dying culture".5 Granted, truth is not a matter of democratic vote, but this historical fact begs for an explanation beyond Dawkins's sarcastic derision of religion.
7. What about the every day voices of ordinary people as they interpret their own experiences? I am willing to bet Dawkins that the average Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or Christian most devastated by the tsunami has not jettisoned her faith. Most people, however tragic their experiences, maintain their religious faith, they want to continue to live, and they believe that, however painful, it is better to have lived than never to have lived at all. This empirical reality also demands an explanation other than insisting that people of faith are badly befuddled idiots.
8. Is the Dawkins world view more intellectually compelling or humanly satisfying? After all, the "tsunami problem" of religious faith does not disappear just because you excoriate Christian belief; the problem remains for other faiths or atheists like Dawkins to explain and incorporate into their own world view. He admits that we should not privilege the human species above any other life form or believe that it deserves any special moral consideration.6 Many people believe that it is a short step indeed from such an atheist world view, in which physical matter is all that exists, to a depressingly nihilistic world view. We do know that the greatest crimes against humanity, Soviet and Chinese communism, killed over 100 million people in the name of atheism (with the help of scientific technologies), and that in Dawkins's world view you might consider those deaths unfortunate, despicable, socially counter productive, or whatever, but you cannot call them Wrong with a capital W.
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Tsunami victims. Photo by foxnews.com. |
9. The Christian world view does not turn a blind eye to suffering or candy coat it with pious cliches. Rather, our faith encourages a large measure of protest, doubt, and questioning, not to mention concrete deeds of love to address the human condition (most of which are never reported on the nightly news). The book of Job is perhaps the best example; likewise the Psalms. One irritating habit of Dawkins's is to present the weakest and most tendentious examples of Christian faith, and then proceed to destroy them (the straw man argument). Another is to insinuate that he is among the first or brightest thinkers ever to consider the place of the problem of evil in the life of faith. Christians do not embrace the irrational or claim ignorance as an ally. We do not understand faith as blind obedience or "believing what you know ain't true." Christians, in fact, find a place for something like the tsunami, believing as we do that "the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" (Romans 8:22).
10. Most important of all, Christians believe that God in Christ has done something about human suffering, that He has entered our suffering and in some mysterious way taken it into Himself to transform it to our good: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and grace to help us in our time of need" (Hebrews 4:15–16).
That, ultimately, is a choice of faith. I cannot prove it, even though it is a choice grounded in the empirical realities of science, human history, reason, and Scripture. Which is another way of saying that the tsunami is not our only data point. I might be wrong, but I am hardly tempted to forfeit my faith due to the provocative bluster of a prominent intellectual, no matter how admirable his scientific accomplishments.
[1] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 330).
[2] www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/quotes.shtml
#books.
[3] The Guardian, December 30, 2004 and January 1, 2005.
[4] www.edge.org/q2005/q05_6.html#dawkins.
[5]Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards A World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), pp. 3, 52–53, 57–58, 189.
[6] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 10.
