Richard Dawkins, espousing atheism-as-progress, has been joined by other prominent voices. They include three best-selling writers: the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens, and the anti-Christian lightning rod, former student of Buddhism, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The books they write are deliberate provocations, but I am puzzled by how shallow their arguments against God actually are. They gleefully distort spirituality and have no qualms about using unfair tactics. Hitchens, for example, throws out spiritual testimony before it even has its say.
Any decent intellectual argument has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know. You start off by saying, “Well, that’s wrong to begin with. Now can we get on with it?” So theism is gone in the first round. It’s off the island. It’s out of the show.
Personally, I can’t imagine a better formula for intellectual dishonesty. The spokesmen for militant atheism don’t confront their own tunnel vision; they revel in it instead. All ideologues do. This leads them into making blind misstatements. Here’s a sampling taken from taped talks:
Harris: “Every religious person feels the same criticism of other people’s faiths that we do as atheists. They reject the pseudo-miracles … they see the confidence tricks in other people’s faith.”
Hitchens: Religious people “like the idea that [God] can’t be demonstrated, because then there would be nothing to be faithful about. If everyone had seen the Resurrection and we all knew we’d been saved by it, then we would be living in an unalterable system of belief—it would have to be policed.”
Harris again: “If the Bible is not a magic book, Christianity evaporates. If the Koran is not a magic book, Islam evaporates. If you look at these books, is there … a single sentence that could not have been uttered by a person for whom a wheelbarrow would have been emergent technology?”
Raw prejudice is spewed out all over the place, yet in a skeptical age, militant atheism has gotten a good deal of intellectual respect. Dennett, who argues that we are all “zombies” mechanically following the dictates of our brains, is widely praised for debunking such worn-out notions as the soul and the personal self. Hitchens’s provocative book, god is not Great (lowercasing God is his choice, in the title and throughout the text), was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2011, during his last dying days, as he succumbed to cancer of the esophagus—the sad outcome of being a lifelong heavy drinker and smoker—Hitchens wrote an open letter to an annual atheist convention in America.
His message was poignant in its defiance of any death-bed conversion. Here are a few excerpts.
I have found, as the enemy [death] becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow … than it did before.
I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion.
It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstition.
The key terms that Hitchens uses in his letter to condemn an old, discredited worldview are familiar in the rhetoric of militant atheism: “superstition,” “false consolation,” “mind-forged manacles of servility,” “stultifying pseudo-science,” and the “blandishments” of organized religion. Against these inimical forces he amasses the impulse for good that is on his side: decency, skepticism, “our innate solidarity,” courage, “sincere resistance to insidious nonsense,” and so on.
Rhetoric is just rhetoric, and few take seriously that atheists are models of decency and morality while all believers are servile and superstitious. Human nature is not so neatly parceled out. At the emotional level I am most disturbed by bullying behavior that seeks to crush the early shoots of personal spirituality. In my experience, people who have left the reassurance of traditional faiths usually feel insecure. Their spiritual yearning is vague and unformed. They aren’t armed against the arguments of militant atheists. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett are professional writers and thinkers; they have mastered the art of persuasion. They are unashamed to marshal dishonest arguments just for the sake of winning, or out of disdain for their opponents. In a flash, Dawkins and his cohorts lump anyone who utters the word “God” in with the crudest religious fundamentalism. There are many shades of atheism also. It’s worth repeating that 2008 Pew survey I began with, which found that 21 percent of American who describe themselves as atheists believe in God or a universal spirit. The same poll found that 12 percent of atheists believe in heaven, and 10 percent pray at least once a week.
What about the claim that we would all enjoy life more if we dropped the preposterous notion that God exists? The Irish-American writer T. C. Boyle gave the lie to this in a doleful remark made in an interview with the New York Times. The topic of death came up—Boyle’s novels feature death prominently—and his telling response goes to the heart of what disillusionment actually feels like.
In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, of course, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
For many, this kind of disillusionment feels very real, but no one would call it a happy state of mind. Leave out the tainted word God with all its bad connotations. Substitute a synonym for what seekers want, such as inner peace, spiritual fulfillment, the soul, higher consciousness, the transcendent. Wiping them off the face of the earth isn’t the key to a happier existence. It’s more like a preview of hell on earth. The happiness that is supposed to follow when you give up on your spiritual aspirations is hollow.
None of this is hard to see. But it is hard to counter, because militant atheism makes the right diagnosis while offering the wrong medicine. The right medicine is spiritual renewal. We are essentially spiritual beings. Our place in creation isn’t defined by being intelligent—although we are proud of that—but by aspiring to reach higher. Militant atheism would crush this precious trait. It would exchange the tragedy of a failed God for the tragedy of having no soul. Science and the data it collects contain no wonder, awe, or mystery. The joy of existence has no reality except inside us—we add the wonder, and we can take it away.
Christopher Hitchens died of cancer ten days before Christmas 2011. He was sixty-two. The kind of existential courage he showed, in the “long argument I am currently having with the specter of death,” is honorable and touching. It is equally honorable to be a spiritual seeker, and ironically, there’s a convergence here. Spirituality is existential, too. It asks who we are, why we are here, and what the highest values are by which a person should live.
The atheist’s mistake is to hog the moral limelight, declaring that only nonbelievers own the truth. The truth is a process of discovery, and someone who scorns the process needs to wake up before claiming that anyone else is fast asleep. When they talk to pollsters, people almost unanimously express a belief in God. But the seed of unbelief hasn’t been plucked out. To begin the process of rebooting God, each of us needs to hold up a mirror to our own unbelief. That may seem like a frightening or disheartening prospect. It isn’t. When you remove the illusions that you trust in, what remains is the truth, and the ultimate truth is God.