1: Where Dawkins Went Wrong

If you enjoy this essay, please consider purchasing a copy of Where Dawkins Went Wrong and Other Theological Blockbusters from this address - a collection of  some of the best and most-linked-to essays from this blog and its predecessor. It contains my five part assault critique of 'The God Delusion', along with essays on gay bishops, the 'gospel' of Judas, the 'legend' of the three wise men.





Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I was sent a copy of Richard Dawkins amusing book, The God Delusion, by an anonymous donor (Steve Watson), so I feel I should at least try to review it.

This isn't easy. I got as far as page 36 before chucking it across the room in disgust. I was in the Boston Tea Party on Park Street. I warned the other customers to get out of my line of fire first.

It was a trivial thing. Dawkins was talking about Polytheism–the belief that there is more than one god. He admits that he won't have much to say about it.

Most of my readers will have been reared in one or another of the three 'great' monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism)...

What?

I mean, seriously, what?

Where did that remark come from?

Mormonism, as anyone can easily find out, is one of a number of Christian sects which came into being in the USA in the nineteenth century. It differs from mainstream Christianity on certain technical points which Dawkins would at least pretend not to understand. So why write 'four if you count Mormonism'? Why not 'five if you count Mormonism and Christian Science'. Or 'ten if you include Mormonism, Christian Science, Christedelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Reformed Judaism, Shi'ite Islam, Strict Baptists, Celtic Orthodox, Unitarians and Quakers?' Does Dawkins think that the Mormons' adoptionist Christology is so far removed from the mainstream as to constitute a separate faith (while the Jehovah's Witnesses arianism is not?) Or is he playing a numbers game–saying that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints is so numerous as to count as a religion in its own right, distinct from 'Christianity'. (But then, why not 'Four if you include Catholicism'?)

We never find out. Like Melchizidec. it comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere. It popped into Dawkins head and he wrote it down. It makes me doubt whether our author is fully in command of his brief.

Four if you include Mormons. Honestly, you might just as well say 'Britain consists of three countries: England, Scotland and Wales–or four if you include Tooting Bec.'

A trivial point, as I say. But once I had retrieved the book–the people on the next table were quite polite, considering–I found that nearly all the non-scientific sections were driven by the same kind of non-sequitur.

Look at the bit called 'Religious Education as a Part of Literary Culture.' Dawkins concedes that we should teach children about the Bible because of its literary importance. (As we'll see, he's deeply conflicted about the whole concept of religious art.) He demonstrates the importance of the Bible by listing 200 well-known phrases that originate in the Authorized Version. He adds:

Doubtless the equivalent is true of French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and other great European literatures. And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage. Finally, to round off the list, you can't appreciate Wagner (whose music, as has been wittily said, is better than it sounds) without knowing your way around the Norse Gods. Let me not labour the point...'

Again, what? Where does the Wagner remark come from?

The analogy doesn't stand up for one minute. The problem with being ignorant of the Bible is that it is assumed in our culture: it leaps out at you without warning in places where you aren't expecting it. In Shakespeare's Othello Iago says 'My lord, you know I love you'. If you know John's gospel this remark strikes you as ironic, even blasphemous: if you don't, it doesn't. The Ring doesn't assume the Prose Edda in any remotely comparable way. You might as well say 'You can't appreciate Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat without knowing your way around Genesis.'

What really interests me is the parenthesis. Where has the little snipe at Wagner's music come from? It isn't relevant and anyway, if you can google for a list of 200 Bible quotes you can google and find out that the remark wasn't made by 'someone witty' but by Mark Twain. But Dawkins can never resist the irrelevant sneer, the put-down, the look-how-clever-we-are remark. He puts in a completely irrelevant reference to post-structuralism purely so he can write it off as 'haute francophonyism'. Ho-ho. The Bible has made him think of the Koran; which has made him think of the Gita, which has reminded that in his chapter on Polytheism he compared the Hindu Gods with the Norse Gods, which has made him think of Wagner, which has called to mind the Mark Twain quote and he has bunged it all down. He's not even pretending to present a sequential train of thought.

Or look at Chapter III, 'The Argument From Scripture'. People have certainly tried to use the Bible to try and prove the existence of God; so of course Dawkins should try to demonstrate why he thinks those kinds of proofs don't work. Instead, he quotes the bloody trilemma from C.S Lewis and Josh McDowell (1). He rejects this argument, not—astonishingly–because it is logically invalid, but because he thinks that Jesus never actually claimed to be the Son of God. This triggers a two-page digression about inconsistencies in Matthew and Luke's accounts of the Nativity story (and also in the the vital matter of Jesus' genealogy) which suddenly veers off at 90 degrees to talk about the formation of the canon, climaxing with this jaw-droppingly childish remark:

The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, our of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Phillip, Bathelomew and Mary Magdelen.

Think before you write, Professor Dawkins; think before you write. If the choice had been arbitrary then is it at all likely that all the Pauline,Trinitarian works would have been included in the canon and all the Gnostic and Ebionite works left out? Are you seriously saying that any council or church or community ever believed that late works like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas had equal status with Matthew or John? Are you aware that not one of the six works you cite is a Gospel in the sense of being a narrative account of the life, death, supposed resurrection and teaching of Jesus? (The 'gospel' of 'Mary', for example, is a brief dialogue in which 'Mary' reveals that 'Jesus' gave her secret gnostic teachings.) That word, 'arbitrary': I do not think it means what you think it means.

The reference to the Thomas 'gospel' triggers off a rather breathless footnote in which Dawkins tells us that A.N Wilson thinks that the Aramaic word naggar may not actually mean 'carpenter' but 'wise man' and by the way when the Bible says 'a virgin shall conceive ' the word virgin might really mean 'young woman' and did you know that when the Koran refers to '72 virgins' it might really mean '72 raisins' so aren't Christians silly?

(Not that it makes any difference, but the 'gospel' of 'Thomas' is a piece of pious fan-fiction imagining the childhood of Jesus. It says specifically 'Now Joseph was a builder and wrought ploughs and yokes for oxen.' How can you possibly say that Thomas had just as much right to have been one of the four Gospels as Matthew or Luke and at the same time say that we only think of Joseph as a carpenter because of a mistranslation?)

Dawkins goes on to explain how the four Gospels came to be written:

Much of what the four canonical gospels share is derived from a common source, either Mark's gospel or a lost work of which Mark is the earliest extant descendent.

I think you'd probably have to look quite hard to find a commentator who believes that John had a Marcan source. (I also like the idea that Mark may be derived from Mark, but that's probably just a proof reading error.) If you are going to make the whole difficult and controversial question about the origins of the Gospels–all those Qs and Jesus Traditions and Proto-Marks–part of your argument, I think you should probably spend more than 27 words on it.

Pausing briefly to wonder if Jesus even existed and deciding he probably did, Dawkins offers this school-boyish conclusion:

The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the Gospels is that the Gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.

The only difference?

1: Dan Brown's book is a thriller intended to entertain people. The Gospels are religious texts intended to win converts or to edify and instruct people who had already been converted.

2: The Gospellers were writing about events which they thought had happened, say, 50 years in the past. They were presumably working from earlier documents and those earlier documents may have had even earlier oral sources. Dan Brown is weaving a fictional work around 2,000 year old texts which carry a huge weight of commentary and cultural baggage.

3: The evangelists are telling a story; or perhaps commenting on and interpreting a story by re-telling it. Dan Brown is creating a meta-fiction about the origins of those ancient stories.

Aren't these differences?

And that's 'the argument from Scripture' dealt with: few random and not very well informed comments on why Dawkins can't be doing with the New Testament. We've heard very little about where the Lewis / McDowell argument breaks down and nothing at all about any of the other ways in which some Christians claim that the Bible proves that there is a God.

This you call 'argument'?

It is very, very hard to know where to begin in reviewing or responding to the book. It doesn't contain anything which I can recognise as a point of view or train of thought: it just fires off a random series of nasty remarks about Christianity and anything else which happens to come into the authors line of fire. I felt that I had spent the afternoon sipping latte in the company of one of those terribly sophisticated sixth-formers who is planning to leave home while he still knows everything. 'Then there's Wagner, but chaps like us know he's awful; and of course, there's modern French philosophy, but chaps like us know that's rubbish; then there's Descartes, but chaps like us are much too clever to read him.' Or perhaps, with a very, very clever but mildly autistic child, who spouts out an endless stream of non-linear free association. 'There's a big red truck. We had baked beans for tea. That makes me think of Hindus. Catholics are silly, aren't they? That makes me think of Vikings. We don't like Wagner, do we? Or Muslims. Or Jews. Or Post-Structuralists.'

However:

Note

(1) The Trilemma: 'Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. If Jesus was not the Son of God, then either he was lying, or else he was insane. Everything we know about Jesus makes it impossible to think that he was either mad or a liar; therefore, he must have been telling the truth.'

Fight! Fight! Fight!

"Dawkins seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms."

" For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is."

Next Issue: More Theology

If you enjoy this essay, please consider purchasing a copy of Where Dawkins Went Wrong and Other Theological Blockbusters from this address - a collection of  some of the best and most-linked-to essays from this blog and its predecessor. It contains my five part assault critique of 'The God Delusion', along with essays on gay bishops, the 'gospel' of Judas, the 'legend' of the three wise men.








The Guardian has taken to printing articles by the Vicar of Putney.

Don’t worry: it gets more interesting. Well, slightly more interesting.

Last month he, like every other pundit in the country, wrote a piece about the tsunami disaster. It turns out that a lot of people have spotted that this was a very terrible event, and concluded that therefore God doesn’t exist.

So far as I can tell, it is only the people who already thought that God doesn’t exist who reached this conclusion. If some journalist had managed to track down a Bishop who was also a Christian, and who had looked at the big wave and said “Well, what do you know? Materialism was right all along!” that would have been interesting. It would also have been interesting if you could have found a Dawkinsite who had looked at all the people being compassionate and said “Good God! Human life does have some purpose after all.” But no-one has managed to produce a single such person on either side. Just a lot of morgue-chasing essays by people saying “Hey! You see this big earthquake thing in all the papers. Well, guess what. It proves that I was right all along.” Major international event confirms people's philosophical prejudices, shock.

It is always thus. If a child is murdered, or a terrorist bomb goes off, or an old lady of sixty six has a baby, it is always excuse for people to say “I told you so.” Never for them to say “Gosh. I shall have to revise my whole theory of crime and punishment, or medical ethics”

(Come to think of it, there were a few pundits who said “We support the war on Iraq because of the Weapons of Mass Destruction” who subsequently said “Since there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, we were wrong to support the war. Sorry.” I wonder if any of the pacifist types would have changed their mind and said “mea culpa” if the bombs had been found?)

The Rev Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney and professor of something or other, approached the tsunami, reasonably enough, as an instance of the general question of divine goodnesses and human suffering. He starts with a painful story about the first time he, as a young clergyman, had to conduct the funeral of a baby and how this almost made him lose his vocation. However, even in the face of this awful event, he somehow carried on believing in God. The article then jump cuts to the “endless under-graduate tutorials” he has attended on the “so-called problem of evil.”

He says

“The essays that are the hardest to stomach are those that seek some clever logical trick to get God off the hook, as if the cries of human suffering could be treated like a fascinating philosophical Rubics cube....Of course, none of them work, and one has to question the moral health of those whose only concern in the face of great tragedy is to buy God some dubious alibi”.

He waffles for a bit longer, and then asks us to think about the infant Christ.

“What is terrifying about the Christmas story is that it offers us nothing but the protection of a vulnerable baby, of a God so pathetic that we need to protect Him. The idea of a omnipotent God who can calm the sea and defeat out enemies turns out to be a part of the great fantasy of power that has corrupted the Christian imagination for centuries. Instead, Christians are called to recognize that the essence of the divine being is not power but compassion and love...”

There is quite a lot that can be said about this drivel.

First, Fraser has decided that he is free to be as selective as he wishes about which Biblical stories and Christian doctrines he will believe in. He approves of “the Christmas story”, which is told in different forms, by St Matthew and St Luke; but disapproves of the story about Christ calming the seas, which is told (in very similar forms) by Matthew, Mark and Luke. The four Gospels are full of stories in which Jesus is a figure of power (“what manner of man is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”) If, when Matthew and Luke report stories of Jesus working miracles, they had been "seduced by a fantasy of power" which is not merely irrelevant to Christianity, but actually antithetical to it, why trust them when they talk about the Bethlehem baby? Why trust anything they say about Jesus? Why read the New Testement at all?

(On Christmas Eve, Fraser got very angry, albeit about seventeen hundred years too late, about the emperor Constantine because the Creed of Nicea mentions that Jesus was born of a Virgin, and that he Died, but misses out everything that happens in between. The in-between bit is, apparently, the important bit, because the true message of Christianity is that the adult Jesus preached that we should all be pacifists. Or something. But now he wants us to concentrate on the baby-in-a-manger bit, and ignore all the adult-jesus-does-miracles stuff. )

Second, it is very hard to find anything in his religion which is recognisable as “Christiantiy”. He tells us that Christains “cannot go on speaking about prayer as if it were an alternative way of getting things done” (even though Jesus is reported as having told his disciples that they would get anything they prayed for.). He rejects the idea of devils as risible (even though the gospels report Jesus as functioning as, among other things, an exorcist). And as noted, he rejects the idea of Jesus as a miracle-worker.

One slightly wonders what they do in churches in Putney. If you can't use passages from the Bible which refer to miracles, Satan, or an omnipotent God, and if you don't believe in prayer, then what do you find to do for an hour and a half on Sunday morning?

(Question: Why is the idea of devils so often assumed to be medieval or supersititous, when the idea of God is treated with at least a modicum of respect? Is there anything inherently less sensible about believing in bad supernatural beings than believing in good ones?)

I am reminded of a lecture given by Don Cupitt while I was at York University. A guy I knew from the anarchist club stuck up his hand and said “I agree with nearly everything you are saying, but I don’t understand why you put it in terms of this reactionary Christian bullshit.” I’ve always thought he had a very good point. Fraser gives very cogent reasons for rejecting the religion which has always been referred to as Christianity; having done so, I can’t see why he wants to carry on referring to himself as a Christian.

Third, his doctrine of the incarnation is distinctly wobbly. He says that God “is” a pathetic baby, and that the divine essence “is” compassion and love. I actually don’t know what “is” means, here. Christians say that the God who made the universe was in some way was transformed into a baby. (Subject to a thousand years of hair splitting about what you mean by “God”, “baby” and “transformed”, obviously.) They see this as a paradox. (“Our god contracted to a span/incomprehensibly made man”...another hymn they presumably can’t sing in Putney.) Fraser appears to be saying that “helplessness” and “babyness” is in some way what God has always been like. Those silly, silly Jews made another mistake which the Christian story corrects.

He has a nice line in sending barbed nasties at people he doesn’t quite agree with. “Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe/of holynesse, to semen hooly and trewe” as the fellow said. It isn’t sufficient for Fraser to say that the standard theological answers to the problem of evil are inadequate. The people who put them forward have to be bad people. (“and one has to question the moral health of those whose only concern...”) Is it really likely that those who he has heard propose solutions to the problem of evil are doing so because they have no other concerns? Isn’t it more likely that they are undergraduates attempting to answer a question that has been set them? And are they really trying to “find God an alibi” or “let him off the hook”? Isn’t it more likely that they are asking whether it is intellectually or morally possible to believe that there is any such being as God in the first place? Fraser doesn’t seem to mind us asking these question: but if you try to answer them, you aren’t merely foolish -- you are morally sick.

I also like the bit about the “ ‘so-called’ problem of evil”. Reminds me of Dorothy L Sayers reference to a war-time leading article which referred to Hitler and his dupes as “these so-called Germans.”

Fraser appears to be saying that knowing the answer to the Problem of Evil would be of no help in councelling a bereaved mother. He’s probably right. He concludes that it is silly, or futile, or pointless or actually bad to ask the question, which seems to me to be a non sequitur. The “problem of evil” is a logical problem. So it is not very surprising that people try to come up with logical answers to it. And it is not very surprising that answering a logical problem doesn’t help you solve a pastoral one.

The"problem" of evil itself is actually very simple. It’s a bit like the old business proverb: “You can have it cheap. You can have it quick. You can have it good. Pick any two.”

Similarly, you are welcome to pick any 4 statments off the following list:

1: God exists
2 God is good
3: God knows everything.
4: God can do anything.
5: Bad things happen.

But you can’t logically believe in all 5.

If God doesn’t exist, then there is no problem. Bad things happen: they just do. (It’s probably even a fallacy to call them bad. One baby dying, or a lot of people dying in a natural disaster, is not “bad” in any cosmological sense. We just happen not to like it very much. It would be better to just say “stuff happens” and leave it at that.) But if you were prepared to say “God doesn’t exist”, then you wouldn’t be a vicar, even a Church of England vicar. If you want God to carry on existing, you have to chose one of the remaining four lines to delete.

So: cross out line 2, and there is no problem. God exists, and knows about all the bad things which are happening, and could stop them if he wanted to, only he doesn’t want to, because he isn’t good, not in the sense that we usually mean. Maybe we are so Totally Depraved that we couldn’t possibly know the difference between Goodness and Badness, and all our arguments are therefore invalidated. Maybe God is like Galactus or the Force, totally above “good” and “evil”. Maybe the God who is running this universe is actually a Baddy. There have been wacky forms of Christianity which say that an evil demiurge created the universe against God’s will; or that for the time being, God has delegated the running of this world to Satan.

Not happy with an evil or amoral God? Then cross out line 3. The reason that so many bad things happen in the world is because God doesn't know about them. Either he created the universe and then left it running like a clockwork thing, with a view to coming back and checking up on it in a few billion years, or else he just happens to be looking the other way at the moment. Maybe it's our job to draw his attention to the problems down here, and the reason bad things happen is that we aren't all praying hard enough. This was the line taken by the Diests and some Country and Western singers.

You’d rather God was omniscient? All right then, dispense with line 5, and say that in actual fact, bad things don’t happen in the world, so there is nothing surprising about the fact that God doesn’t stop them. If you go down this path, you’ve got lots and lots of options. You can either say that, in actual fact, things like earthquakes and AIDS don’t happen at all: that they only figments of our imagination. Or you can say that they certainly happen, but they aren’t actually bad. Maybe they are a divine punishment, and therefore a good thing. Or maybe they are less bad than the alternatives, because we live in the best of all possible worlds. Maybe living in a place where bad things happen is a necessary part of the process whereby we grow into sons of god. Or maybe dying isn’t actually an evil, because you go to heaven (or hell, if you deserve it, which is still good in the long run). Maybe dying in a disaster is actually an advantage, because it concentrates your mind wonderfully so you have got more chance of making a good end, getting saved, and going to heaven.

Does this sound callous to you? Then reject point 4. Bad things are bad, and God knows they are bad, and God wants to help...but he can’t. Because he isn’t omnipotent. This one is harder work, but you could say that God is one of two or more forces in the universe, and right now, the Devil has the upper hand. Or you could say that it just so happens that God is powerful enough to bring the universe into being, but not powerful enough to control everything in it on a day to day basis. Or that God’s omnipotence doesn’t stretch to doing things which are literally impossible (like making four sided triangles, or two hills without a valley between them) and “a world in which nothing bad ever happens” is one of those literally impossible things. Or that when he created the universe he said “I am going to waive my omnipotence: there will be lots of things in this creation that I can’t influence.” ("Human free will" is often invoked in this context, although I have never been quite sure how it helps.) Or maybe, in some complicated way, God just happens not to be omnipotent. Maybe he is more like a vulnerable baby in a manger. Maybe the essence of the divine is not power but love. Maybe...

You will, of course, have spotted, that this is precisely the line taken by the Vicar of Putney. Granted, he wraps it up in a lot of thought-for-the-day-Latin which, frankly, has no meaning that I can discern. (“Far from being a reason for people to to take their leave of God, many find that the language of God is the only language sufficient to express their pain and grief” ... what?), but what he actually does is deny, at length and repeatedly, God’s omnipotence. Which is, as long as we are talking about the problem of pain, is perfectly good answer. His theory of a God who never answers prayers or does miracles or so so far as I can tell, does anything at all just as much a logical solution to the logical problem of pain as any other. “How can an omnipotent God let bad things happen.” “Because he is not omnipotent.” (And, I suspect, just as un-helpful in an actual pastoral situation. "Why did God let my baby die?" "Because he's a helpless baby in a manger and can't do anything about it.")

It seems that Giles Fraser is just as much of a moral sicko as the rest of us.