Author: Ophelia Benson

The Guardian gives us an extract from Dawkins’s new book, in which he talks about things I’ve been pondering myself for the past couple of days, I suppose prompted by that long discussion on ‘Explain’.

All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man…Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory: “Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’”…Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship”.

Since that generally is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’ – or maybe some of them mean something more ‘sophisticated’ but don’t say so in order not to affront or alarm the faithful – which comes to the same thing. Or some of them go back and forth between the two. Or some perhaps don’t know what the hell they mean, but the word is out there, after all, and people seem to understand something by it, so why not go on using it, however vaguely…

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion.

And/or by failure to distinguish what can be called Biblical or personal or cozy or lovable God from sophisticated abstract distant first-cause God.

[Interjection. Oh look – how funny. There’s Julian. I wasn’t expecting to see him here. But there he is – ‘But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism’ and then he quotes a bit. Heh – small world. (Wish he’d quote a bit of Why Truth Matters instead. Or in addition. Perhaps he did. Why Truth Matters quoted him.)]

Carl Sagan put it well: “… if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”…I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

That’s just it, it seems to me. The interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible and of clerics and of the newspapers and radio and discourse is a kind of person – a person with a lot of labels stuck on such as omnipotent and omniscient, but still a kind of person, who does person-like things, who loves us and pities us and helps and protects us, so that it makes sense to love it and worship it. The other god, the one that created the whole of the universe – can’t possibly be like that. No matter how many labels you stick on it, it still just can’t be like that. It can’t be both transcendent and immanent, it can’t be both outside the universe and our loving parent. It’s an either-or thing, not a both-and thing. It’s a fork. You can call it Benson’s fork if you want to; I don’t mind. Either God is a local human-like god that humans can sensibly love and pray to (in which case one wonders where exactly it is) or it’s something so far away and so strange that as far as we’re concerned it might as well not exist at all. But it’s a cheat to pretend it can be both.

Why did no one (until G Tingey in comments today) tell me Richard Dawkins has set up a foundation and a website? It’s apparently (judging by the dates on some of the postings) been there since May. This is September. I’m out of touch.

So it republishes this Johann Hari piece about the real reasons to feel disapprobation for the pontiff. Here’s an item that stirred a certain amount of distaste in me.

For over a decade now, he has been one of the primary defenders of priests who go to the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world and tell them condoms are the cause of AIDS. In the past year, I have sat in two Catholic churches thousands of miles apart and listened while a Catholic priest told illiterate people with no alternative sources of information that condoms come pre-infected with AIDS and are the reason people die of it. In Bukavu, a crater-city in Congo, and in the slums ringing Caracas, Venezuela, people believed it. They told me they “would not go to Heaven” if they used condoms, and that condoms contain tiny invisible holes through which the virus passes – the advice their priest had doled out.

I knew about the last part, but I didn’t know priests were telling people that condoms come pre-infected and are themselves the reason people die of Aids. I knew priests were telling people condoms were ineffective as well as sinful; I didn’t know they were telling people they were actually the source of infection. I knew they were wicked, I didn’t know they were as wicked as that.

So…there’s one example of a harm that is prompted exclusively by a religious idea. What possible secular reason can there be to object to condoms on principle? And if there were one, what possible secular reason could be strong enough to outweigh the reasons to try to avoid getting and transmitting Aids. One reason preaching against condom-use is so disgusting is that people can be entirely virtuous and faithful and still get Aids from a partner who isn’t, so the Vatican’s policy kills faithful wives along with unfaithful husbands, and then it kills the children of the unfaithful husbands. It takes a real perversion of moral insight to do that, and to go on doing it despite being told that it’s what you’re doing. That’s the kind of thing that makes ‘aggressive’ atheists like me (and like Dawkins, and Hari) angry. There’s enough unavoidable illness and misery in the world; it annoys us that the Vatican goes to so much trouble to create extra, for the sake of – opposing birth control. The game seems not quite worth the candle, frankly.

But there is a deeper philosophical repugnance to Ratzinger lying beneath these individual decisions. His recent lecture was devoted to the premise that the free pursuit of reason will lead all people to a rational belief in the Christian God described in the Bible.

So it’s just a coincidence that most Christians have Christian parents and that most non-Christians have non-Christian parents? Accidents of birth, geography, social surroundings, context, upbringing, education, tradition have nothing to do with it? Interesting. Credulity-straining, but interesting.

Andrew Brown doesn’t admire Dawkins’s new book, despite agreeing on the basics.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Despite all the trillions of words in theological journals, ‘who designed the designer?’ is still a question without an answer. But Brown says Dawkins should get to grips with ‘the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.’

Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it’s nothing to do with their atheism.

That does sound too simple (but I haven’t read the book, so don’t know if it’s a fair account of what Dawkins says – and people aren’t always fair to him). But a slightly different answer might be that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes that they wouldn’t otherwise commit, and that is why the fact that they are religious opinions is shocking. If religious opinions generate murders and wars that would not otherwise occur, then religious opinions are a source of bad things, and that’s bad (whether or not it’s shocking, which is a little beside the point). It may well be that a lot of those crimes would occur anyway, that if there were no religion, some other pretext would be found; it may well be that what is basic is rivalry and anger and hatred and heterophobia, and religion is often just the top-dressing. But it may not; or it may sometimes and not others. For one thing, religion can transform and translate an otherwise obviously contemptible motivation into a glorious and pious one, and thus free people to act on it when they otherwise wouldn’t. I can’t kill those people just because I hate them, or just because I want their land, but if they’re heretics or infidels or followers of the anti-Christ, then I’m doing a good and brave thing. Atheism doesn’t exactly work that way – but it may work other ways, so I think Brown is right to say (paraphrasing) that it’s too simple to say religious believers kill people and atheists don’t. But I don’t think it’s too simple to say that religious enthusiasm or a pious sense of duty can motivate crimes that would otherwise go unmotivated.