Some weeks ago we received an e-mail from an acquaintance in New Jersey asking us to join with others in objecting to the new dollar coins, which feature images of our early Presidents, because, as it said, the phrase “In God We Trust” is gone. It asked that we refuse to accept the coins from our banks and merchants. I responded with a few choice words about why one should want religious beliefs stamped on money. It was just the right message to get me in the mood for this sermon.
When I was a child I attended a Protestant Sunday School, a neighborhood church where my parents tried to attend at least once a year. Until I was 11 or 12 years old this was a pleasant experience. I remember some of the songs we sang in my earliest years, songs such as “Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam.” And I remember that we bowed our heads to thank God for the graham crackers and juice which we consumed. I was not a child agnostic, nor very curious. I never asked about this god who, though invisible, was every-where. I was not a child skeptic.
How my own understanding of traditional religious questions changed in the years ahead is beyond the reach of this sermon. I do remember with fondness those early years in that church room, a room with a picture of a bearded and robed Jesus surrounded by children of many races. I remember the story of Moses in the bullrushes and the coat of many colors. I was never taught about how Abraham was on the verge of killing his son, Isaac, until a voice from God told him not to. I never was told about the horrors of the Hebrew Bible, or told why God would want to kill his own son, Jesus. The cruelty of those passages never made it into my friendly Sunday School. God was a mysterious being, to be sure, but not a malevolent one. Here is how Richard Dawkins in his book, THE GOD DELUSION, describes the deity of the Hebrew Bible:
The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak, a vindictive bloodthirsty, genocidal, filicidil, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
The publishers of the book thought so much of that quote that they used it in an advertisement for the book in the New York Times.. And a week before Christmas last year they ran an ad that read: “This Christmas Imagine ...No Religion, ...No Crusades, ...No Inquisition, ...No Pogroms, ...No 9/11, ...No Suicide Bombings. This Holiday Give THE GOD DELUSION.”
This is to say that neither the author nor publisher was trying to hide the real theme of the book from potential readers. Dawkins is not just a non-believer in the existence of God; he firmly believes that belief in God, as he sees such belief in the religions of the world, can be dangerous to the health of the earth and its people.
Richard Dawkins is a Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and the author of several earlier books, among them THE SELFISH GENE and a collection of essays and talks, A DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN, a title taken from a letter written by Charles Darwin. In another book, THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, Dawkins argues that the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without intelligent design. In using that title, Dawkins is recalling the famous analogy of the 18th century English theologian, William Paley. Paley, in arguing for the existence of God, imagines finding a watch on the path and wrote, “the watch must have had a maker.”
And, of course, he was right. And so, he went on, the works of nature must have had a creator as well. It surely seemed obvious at the time, but his time was well before Darwin and the evidences of evolution. It was Darwin who destroyed Paley and the argument for intelligent design. Natural selection, writes Dawkins, following Darwin, is automatic, unconscious. It has no vision, no foresight, no mind, no purpose. It is truly blind.
When the argument from design was overthrown, the last of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, as set forth by Thomas Aquinas, are all dissolved. All but the argument from design, says Dawkins, were vacuous anyway, and one hears no one arguing these days that, say, the argument of the unmoved mover makes any sense. It goes like this: Nothing moves without something that moves it. This leads back, ultimately, to the unmoved mover, who is God. But who moved God, you ask. That’s the point, God just is; nothing is required to move God. Dawkins doesn’t dwell on such petty arguments; he realizes that questions about the origin of origins are doomed to be permanently beyond our reach. Perhaps science can never answer such questions, but “that does not imply that religion can.”
The religious world that Dawkins sees and fears and distrusts and dislikes is precisely that world that knows all the answers, that has “holy books” to back it up, and interpreters of those books who can smooth over the inconsistencies. The religious world he perceives imagines that God is a servant to our needs, and he even writes, at
one point “there are motorists who believe God saved them a parking place.”
The joke I received via e-mail didn’t quite say that. Paddy was desperately looking for a parking place as he was late for an important meeting. He was so desperate that he began to pray: “God, if you find me a parking place I promise to attend church every week and to cut back on my drinking.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a parking place appeared, and Paddy said, “Oh God, don’t bother, I found one myself.” Dawkins, in his recent writing, is a highly critical observer of the religious world, and of the more popular, if not logical, belief that if the world exists God must have had a hand in it. In a sense, Dawkins tells us nothing else in his book. His arguments against the existence of God are the same arguments that have long been used, except that he maintains that our knowledge of evolution has made the existence of a creator God even more doubtful. He writes that Darwin has made it possible to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
But if there is nothing particularly new here, there is a kind of fervent eloquence that for those of us who share his understanding of the questions is most appealing. He argues at one point in the book that agnosticism is a coward’s way out, and refers to the “poverty of agnosticism.” As one who has taken agnosticism to aptly describe my own view, I was a bit troubled, feeling that he was being overly harsh on those of us who were drawn intellectually to a position that stated that we could not fully know if God existed or not. But he is a convincing antagonist.
Dawkins is not the only religious doubter writing books these days. There is Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, declaring a year ago at a forum in California that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief. Anything that we scientists can do,” he said, “to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
There is Sam Harris, whose book THE END OF FAITH was a best-seller a year ago. There is Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, whose recent book, BREAKING THE SPELL-RELIGION AS NATURAL PHENOMENON, argues that we need to break the spell that creates an invisible moat around religion, one with a sign that says: “Science, stay away. Don’t try to Study religion.” He writes that it is necessary that we study religion because:
“Just about every major problem we have interacts with religion: the environment, injustice, discrimination, terrible economic imbalances and potential genocide. In our own country, the religious attitudes of people are clearly interfering with the political discussion. So if we fail to understand why religions have the effects they do on people, we will screw up our efforts to solve these problems.”
And then there is Christopher Hitchens whose book GOD IS NOT GREAT made it to the best seller lists for many weeks this past summer. Hitchens is an angry atheist, and when I reviewed it in the book page of Lincoln’s Sunday paper in late August, I suggested that it would offend some people; yet, I wrote, “Given the numbers of maudlin religious tracts abounding in our world, and given the obvious evils that religious belief often creates (as in Iraq), this book has a place.”
Religion, Hitchens says, cannot get along without “great fraud and minor fraud.” The Old Testament God, he writes, is “an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god.” And, of course, he is correct. The Book of Mormon, he writes, “is a piece of vulgar fabrication.” And Islam? “As far as I am aware,” he write, “there is not a country in the world where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran.”
A year ago Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg and a host of other, including theistic Christians and Jews, gathered at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California for a conference entitled, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion and Survival.” There were disagreements among the participants, of course, but there seemed to be agreement that the scientists of the world should be “less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief.”
At the end of the conference, Weinberg tried to soften the anti-religious mood and described religion fondly as “a crazy old aunt, She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once. When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
To which Richard Dawkins replied: “I won’t miss her at all. Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.” (NYTimes, 11/21/06)
Atheism has never had a good press in this country. In his book Dawkins writes, “The status of atheism in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago.” And he has a Gallup Poll to prove it. Asked in 1999 if they would vote for a well-qualified person for high office who was a woman, 95% said they would. A Roman Catholic, 94%, a Jew, 92%, a Black, 92%, Mormon, 79%, homosexual, 79%, or Atheist, 49%.
In some countries, including our own, to call someone an atheist is about as harsh a condemnation as one can imagine. To be sure, in some countries to be an atheist is to risk one’s life. But here one is safer; but disbelief in God does frighten some believers, who imagine that those who are atheists or even agnostics cannot really be good citizens.
But even true believers in the Christian God would have to admit that we are all atheists of a sort. Who can believe in Allah and Yahweh, in Kali and Krishna, in all the gods and goddesses and godlets who have been born and die in the long centuries of human existence? And for the atheist this panoply of gods, this reign of deities, is argument enough why belief in God or the gods is illogical, even a bit silly.
It is easy to be critical of our outspoken atheists these days – some are angry, some think all religion is delusional. Critics can say, and there is truth in this, that our current band of public atheists tend to forget how the idea of God provides comfort to millions. Don’t they tend to lump all religion in one great bundle and then throw it all out? Dawkins deals with this mood in a chapter near the end of his book, a chapter he entitles, “What’s Wrong With Religion; Why be So Hostile?”
And he writes:
“Colleagues who agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in puzzlement. Why be so hostile? Does it really do so much harm that we should actively oppose it? Why not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio and Leo:isn’t it all harmless nonsense?”
Well, without detailing his response, he argues that is not all “harmless nonsense.” He writes: “I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because I am hostile to their theology.”
In the next edition of his book, he can write about the case of the English woman teaching in Sudan, who was sentenced to jail for permitting her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed.
Her punishment could have been worse, but it was the response of Islamic mobs calling for her execution that would have proven Dawkins correct in his condemnation of religion.
But Dawkins, as his fellow scientists who share his views on religion – and they are most numerous – finds grandeur in the world at his feet. He finds that grandeur not in wondering how God created us, but in the wonderfully complex process of evolution that has brought us into life. He is, as he once described his fellow scientist and atheist, Carl Sagan, “an apostle of wonder.”
Last year a new book by Carl Sagan was published, a book based on a series of lectures he had given in Glasgow in 1985, and edited by his widow. Sagan died in 1996. In a blurb for the book, Dawkins said that Sagan “was more than religious, having left behind the priests and the mullahs”. He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about. They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe.
I was going to end this sermon with those lines, but then I found a page of quotations about God in my files and thought some of them express exactly what many UUs believe about God. I once gave a sermon I called “Unitarians and the Waning of God.” That accurately describes much of UU thinking and feeling these days. One of my favorite quotes comes from my colleague, Forrest Church who wrote: “Even if God does not exist, we are here by the grace of God.” What that line is saying is what John Haynes Holmes said many decades ago:
When I say “God” it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas, and the saviors of the race, and God …. has at one time or another reached my soul.
Then there is this line from Sam Keen: “The more I am struck with the poignancy and wonder of being alive, the less I want to talk about God or theology.”
I think most of us would agree with that.
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