Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks takes Richard Dawkins to task in The Times
Richard Dawkins is one of the great atheists of our time, and his latest book, The God Delusion, is his angriest. Imagine, he says, a world with no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian Partition, no Bosnian massacres, no religious persecution of the Jews, no Northern Ireland troubles, and so on. No religion, therefore no evil in the name of God.
This is good, honest, challenging atheism. I only wish I had as much faith as the learned professor. It would be nice to believe that if you cured people of believing in God, you would thereby have cured them of hate, violence, anger, injustice, cruelty and the urge to control, exploit, dominate and oppress.
Nothing in history suggests such a thing. On the contrary, if people do not commit evil in the name of God they have never been short of other reasons to do so: race, the war of classes, the political system, the march of progress, the Darwinian struggle to survive.
In the perennial battle between our lowest and highest instincts, which is the human condition whether we are atheist or believer, people usually robe their most brutal acts in the mantle of high ideals. In this respect the history of religion, like the history of substitutes for religion, is all too human.
There is, though, another thought-experiment worth performing. Imagine a world with no Book of Psalms, no Isaiah, no Ten Commandments, none of Michelangelo’s religious art or Bach’s devotional music, no Dante, no Milton, no medieval cathedrals, no prayer. Imagine one with no narrative like the Exodus to give hope to the oppressed and enslaved. And that really is the point.
It took an even greater atheist, Nietzsche, to see the truth with fearless clarity. He called Judaism and Christianity “the slave revolt in moralsâ€. It was, he believed, the ethic of the underdog, the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. It generated an entirely new set of virtues: “Pity, the kind and helping hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, friendliness.â€
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Kim 10.27.06 at 5:14 pm
Sacks must be having us on when he says that Dawkins is “one of the great atheists of our time.” To call Dawkins’ atheism theologically superficial would be an accolade. Unlike “great” atheists like Nietzsche (Sacks is right there), Marx and Freud, Dawkins is bad-tempered rather than prophetic and theologically pig-ignorant.
Do folk know Merold Westphal’s Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (1998)? I would highly recommend it for believer and non-believer alike. Westphal makes a useful, indeed crucial distinction between “skepticism” and “suspicion”. Skepticism issues in the “evidential” atheism of the likes of David Hume, A. J. Ayer - and Dawkins. It is “suspicion”, however, that informs the ideological critiques of three master atheists mentioned above.
Westphal writes: “Skepticism is directed toward the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is directed toward the evasiveness of consciousness. Skepticism seeks to overcome the opacity of facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons. Skepticism addresses itself directly to the propositions believed and asks whether there is sufficient evidence to make belief rational. Suspicion addresses itself to the persons who believe and only indirectly to the propositions believed. It seeks to discredit the believing soul by asking what motives lead people to belief and what functions their beliefs play, looking precisely for those motives and functions that love darkness rather than light and therefore hide themselves.” In other words, evidential atheists “challenge the soundness of the arguments for the existence of God” - which is like shooting fish in a barrel, a
Kim 10.27.06 at 5:28 pm
OOPS - HIT THE WRONG KEY! As I was saying before being so rudely self-interrupted:
. . . which is like shooting fish in a barrel, as it regards faith - as no sane believer regards faith - as “blind trust in the absence of evidence” (Dawkins’ own words). The masters of suspicion, however, (Westphal again) “show how theistic belief functions both to mask and fulfill forms of self-interest that cannot be acknowledged.” That is why their witness, albeit in spite of themselves, is prophetic: it smashes idols clothed in the sanctity of belief, uncovering it as “bad” faith. Thus they do the church a favour. But Dawkins - he doesn’t know an idol from his arse, and goes around smashing things indiscriminately like a bull in a China shop.
John 10.27.06 at 6:17 pm
While Judaism and Christianity (and perhaps Islam, I do not know) are words of power to the enslaved, we need to remember that slavery is not merely an economic condition.
Nietzsche’s ideal of the self-made and self-creating man has become the spiritual center of contemporary life. If we do not all achieve the status of superman, it is because we have not had enough therapy or we have not worked hard enough.
We are all slaves and all oppressed. Some of our chains are just not as easy to see.
Chris E 10.27.06 at 6:21 pm
I have no problem with people believing in God, but I do wish that places they became more tolerant of other religions. What I would really love to see are new all-embracing building celebrating spirituailty as a whole rather than a specific God or set of doctrines - perhaps with metaphysical philosphers instead of vicars offering guidance to visitors. I think we all question the meaning of life and existence and should such places as these starti sprouting across the country am sure of their popularity.
What first put me off the idea of Christianity was its notion of Heaven. Most Christians i know believe (or hope) that when they die they will meet all the loved ones in their lives that they lost - akind of happy ever after version of life on earth. Even if this were true, given that all our thoughts are shaped in entirety by the physical make up of both our senses and the world around us, our very thoughts and perceptions would be so far removed from what they are now that I think we would have trouble in identifying them as ourselves at all.
As for Dawkins, I can see where he is coming from (though I do find him a little too intolerant of other people’s belief systems. I really do hope that I am wrong and that Christians are right - there really is nothing more that I would like than for all my family and friends to meet up again and exist together in bliss. I really do. I am actually quite jealous of Christians and other religious people and feel many people are desperate for the comfort a belief in spirituality brings.
DH 10.27.06 at 9:28 pm
Chris, I guess for me what seperates Christianity from all the other religions (I personally feel Christianity isn’t a religion but arelationship with Christ) is that Christianity is the only one that has a living God that isn’t dead. Buddah, Mohammad, all the gods of Hare Chrishna or Hindu, etc. all are dead gods. None of them are living. Jesus He physically rose again, the grave is empty and He is currently sitting at the right hand of the Father with His Spirit available, and Grace thereafter, to all who will Believe in Him by Faith. I am glad you hope Christians are right, I really do. In all honesty, At the same time, what makes you think Christians are wrong?
Chris E 10.27.06 at 10:27 pm
That’s a difficult one. I don’t know they are wrong. I don’t know enough about the deeper issues really. I can only comment on what people I have had personal contact with believe in as Christians and their belief in our human spirit continuing after death in a form which is substantially familiar in thought and being to the one that exists on earth. This, I believe, is impossible as i am a firm believer that what we see and experience on earth is a direct result of our senses and not really what is really going on - this includes our ideas such as our belief in Gods etc. We are trapped in our understanding by our physical being. While we may continue to exist outside it, the experience would be so disamilar to what we take as our identities in a physical world that they would not even recognise themselves. I think that if there is a spiritual world, that we are so far removed from it by the trappings of our physical being that it would be impossible to know what is really going on. If I were forced to state any kind of spiritual bias, I suppose the philosophy of Taoism (not the religion) or perhaps even animalism would be closer to my stab at the dark as to what is going on in the spiritual realm. But I believe that that is what all philophies and religions are - just stabs in the dark (not that dark even has a real meaning except in the physical realm of our minds.