Gunning for God (12 page)

Christian conviction cannot be produced by heredity, ceremony, or force. Indeed, Jesus Christ reserved some of his severest denunciations for religious people who caused offence to children. We all need to heed the warning that our teaching does not become indoctrination — whether it is religious or atheist, since the very same thing can be said about atheist teaching; although this side of it tends to be conspicuous by its absence in the canons of New Atheism’s writings.

Now I am aware that others were not as fortunate as I was. I have seen firsthand the results of people who have been force-fed with religion and who were never allowed to have their own opinions. Not surprisingly, many abandoned religion at the first opportunity. For instance, in the German Democratic Republic force-fed atheism was the norm. Would the New Atheists call that mental child abuse? Or we might think of the Cultural Revolution in China, when parents could not tell their children about their faith, lest the children betray them to the authorities. Where does that fit in to New Atheist thinking? I would certainly like to imagine a world without that, and am delighted that at least part of the world has got rid of it.

I would plead with the New Atheists to be responsible in their use of terms — for terms can themselves be abused, with frightful consequences. Child abuse is an exceedingly serious offence that society justifiably abhors. It is surely not hard to see that applying such a term incautiously could be a step on a very dangerous and sinister road: a road that could lead eventually to the removal of some children from their parents because of alleged “religious abuse”. If this is thought to be alarmist, let us listen to Dawkins again: “It’s probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” he told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents — and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.” That sounds ominously familiar. And what about indoctrination with atheism: is that the alternative? Should we “look very carefully at the rights of parents” to do this? Dawkins may need to re-read his own extra commandments in connection with children.
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HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE ANY GOOD?

Concentration on the deeds of those people who disobey Christ leads the New Atheists to compound their error, by failing to take account of the great good that has been done throughout the centuries by those who genuinely follow him. For instance, the New Atheists say little or nothing about the immense positive contribution that Christianity has made to Western civilization.

Terry Eagleton trenchantly sums up this blinkered attitude to history:

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that, in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a
priori
improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag.
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Eagleton is by no means alone in his assessment. The leading German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who calls himself a “methodological atheist”, warns against an “unfair exclusion of religion from the public space in order not to cut secular society off from important resources for creating meaning”.
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He goes on to reference the biblical doctrine that all human beings are created in the image of God: “This
createdness
of the image expresses an intuition that can, in our context, say something to those who are religiously unmusical.” Unlike the New Atheists, Habermas is in no doubt about the unique contribution of this biblical worldview to the basic prerequisites for civilized human flourishing:

Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.
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That “everything else” thus includes much of the New Atheism which, in its detachment from truth, really is no more than “postmodern chatter”. The irony is that Christianity originally gave the world its universities that educated the New Atheists. It was Christianity that provided the hospitals and hospices that care for them, and that undergirds the freedoms and human rights which allow them to disseminate their ideas. There are large tracts of the world where they might just be reluctant to give their lectures; and it would not be Christianity that would stop them.

David Aikman points out that Sam Harris also shares this incapacity to see the contribution of Christianity, even in his own country:

Sam Harris ignores altogether the fact that America’s Founders, although sometimes openly sceptical of Christian orthodoxy, saw political liberty itself as indissolubly linked to the virtues deemed to be rooted in Christian ethics. As Thomas Jefferson, who said that he could not find in orthodox Christianity “one redeeming feature”, put it himself: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Perhaps the Founders, who had studied the constitutions of dozens of previously attempted republics, knew a truth about theism when they saw it.
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Avoiding any serious attempt to come to grips with history in his quest to show that religion does no good, Dawkins endeavours to bring science to his aid by enlisting the results of the so-called “Great Prayer Experiment”. Many believers would share his scepticism (that is, about the experiment; not necessarily about the deductions Dawkins makes from it). They are not surprised that the living God, revealed to us in the Bible, is not likely to be amenable to our testing him by praying for some people and not for others, and trying to measure the difference. The God who is the Creator of heaven and earth (and not some figment of the imagination) is interested in genuine prayer; and it is hard to see that prayer produced for such an experiment could be genuine.

In fact, Dawkins’ feeble attempt to bring science to bear on this issue leaves much to be desired, even in the eyes of his fellow atheists. Biologist David Sloan Wilson is forthright in his assessment:

When Dawkins’
The God Delusion
was published I naturally assumed that he was basing his critique of religion on the scientific study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. I regret to report otherwise. He has not done any original work on the subject and he has not fairly represented the work of his colleagues. Hence this critique of
The God Delusion
and the larger issues at stake.
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If atheists (or anyone else) wish to enlist science for their cause, it would surely be wise for them to find out what research has been done in this area. For someone who claims to put great store by scientific evidence, Dawkins displays culpable ignorance of the considerable body of research that has shown the positive contribution of Christianity to well being. For instance, contradicting Dawkins’ contention that religion causes more stress through guilt than it relieves, Sloan Wilson cites the results of recent research carried out by himself and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

These studies were performed on such a massive scale and with so much background information that we can compare the psychological experience of religious believers vs. nonbelievers on a moment-by-moment basis. We can even compare members of conservative vs. liberal protestant denominations when they are alone vs. in the company of other people. On average, religious believers are more pro-social than non-believers; feel better about themselves; use their time more constructively; and engage in long-term planning rather than gratifying their impulsive desires. On a moment-by-moment basis, they report being more happy, active, sociable, involved and excited. Some of these differences remain even when religious and non-religious believers are matched for their degree of prosociality.
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In this regard Daniel Batson of the University of Kansas makes a useful distinction between “intrinsic” religiosity — belief in God and motivation to attend church as an end in itself — and “extrinsic” religiosity, where religion and churchgoing are seen more as social activities that are often engaged in for personal gain. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Batson found a correlation between the former group and compassion or reduced prejudice; whereas the latter group tended to be less helpful to others and show increased prejudice.
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Wilson deduces that “Dawkins’ armchair speculation about the guilt-inducing effects of religion doesn’t even get him to first base”, and later adds:

I agree with Dawkins that religions are fair game for criticism in a pluralistic society and that the stigma associated with atheism needs to be removed. The problem with Dawkins’ analysis, however, is that if he doesn’t get the facts about religion right, his diagnosis of the problems and proffered solutions won’t be right either. If the bump on the shark’s nose is an organ, you won’t get very far by thinking of it as a wart. That is why Dawkins’ diatribe against religion, however well-intentioned, is so deeply misinformed… At the moment, he is just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion.

Nicholas Beale and John Polkinghorne point out that, ironically, Dawkins cannot even claim that evolution is on his side here:

The claim that religious belief is harmful from an evolutionary point of view is simply false. Whether or not the tenets of (say) Christianity are true, there is overwhelming evidence that Christians have, on average, more children than atheists (surviving fertile grandchildren is really the acid test, but I don’t know of any data on this). They also live longer, are healthier, and so on. The fact that there are individual counter-examples to this is beside the point: evolution works on populations and not on individuals. Such practical effects of practicing the Christian faith are at best only weak evidence for the truth of Christianity. But it is dishonest for evolutionary biologists to say “Christian belief is harmful” unless they make it crystal clear that what they mean is: Christian belief is beneficial from an evolutionary point of view, but I consider it harmful for other reasons.
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But that kind of clarity tends to be avoided. New Atheism needs a dense intellectual fog in order to survive — but then it is not notably short of prolific fog-generators.

You may be tired of my saying it, but it seems to me that repetition is needed in order to “heighten the consciousness” of the public to the signal fact that the New Atheists, who are loudest in their claims to be governed by the scientific approach, have evidently failed to engage with the real science that has been done on the topic of the benefits conferred by Christianity. Before Richard Dawkins wrote a book claiming that God is a delusion it would surely have been wise for him, since he is not a psychiatrist himself, to have consulted psychiatrists’ views on the subject. I am not a psychiatrist either, so I did consult the relevant expert evidence. The result does not favour Dawkins’ viewpoint at all.

Perhaps the most important work that has appeared recently on the whole question of the benefits or otherwise of religious belief in general, and of Christianity in particular, is the book
Is Faith Delusional?
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by Professor Andrew Sims, former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Sims has done his research over many years and does not confine himself, like Dawkins, to commenting on one (flawed) experiment. His studied conclusion backs up the results of Wilson mentioned above. It is the following:

The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally. If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land.

I might add that it would have been trumpeted most loudly by the New Atheists.

Sims cites as evidence the
American Journal of Public Health
’s major meta-analysis of epidemiological studies on the psychological effects of religious belief:

In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug use and abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction… We concluded that for the vast majority of people the apparent benefits of devout religious belief and practice probably outweigh the risks.
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