[Peguy]

Secure in their philosophical obtuseness, they confidently preach that morals are independent of religious faith. Of the three, Harris is the most philosophically explicit. He argues that ethics without God is possible because we can apply the scientific method to the investigation of the conditions of human happiness. This ignores the basic observation that ethics is not an empirical discipline like physics or chemistry, partly because of the disparity between “is” and “ought,” and partly because ethics relies on concepts such as “happiness,” “obligation,” and “humanity” that cannot be defined by laboratory experiments. Furthermore, on the issue of ethics without God, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens misrepresent theologians’ traditional positions. Most classical theologians (at least Christian ones) argued that natural law and right reason support the basic moral principles that undergird society. The problem is that most people are not philosophers, and in practice we need the assistance of revelation and religious experience to make ethics a living reality. Ironically, our atheist authors make some shady ethical judgments of their own. Dawkins supports both abortion and euthanasia, and Harris makes extremely specious arguments for the use of torture (which is a strange position, since elsewhere in his book he inveighs against the Inquisition and witch trials).

The strange confidence of Hitchens,’ Dawkins’ and Harris’ assumption that atheism has no destabilizing social consequences is closely related to a popular fallacy which they all repeat and elaborate. The most common contemporary argument against religion is the charge of bloodiness. The Inquisition, witch trials, the Crusades, religious wars and conflicts from Northern Ireland to Lebanon and Sri Lanka, suicide bombings and jihad—again and again, some people have killed or tortured other people in the name of God and faith. For many of our contemporaries, this is a decisive argument against religion. Does not religious belief create divisions between people that result in persecutions and war? Hitchens and Harris both make this argument the centerpiece of their books. Hitchens draws upon his wide-ranging experience as a globe-trotting journalist to flesh out this argument with memorable stories and anecdotes. Harris uses both contemporary Islamist violence and on the history of the Inquisition and witch trials to make the generalization that religious faith as such has a murderous streak. Dawkins spends somewhat less time on the history of religious violence, but dwells on abortion clinic violence and religious opposition to stem cell research, homosexual rights and euthanasia, all of which he assumes the reader agrees are self-evidently good. Despite their variations, they all agree that the history of religion shows that it is an unmitigated evil.

This “religion is evil” argument suffers from a triple weakness. First, it ignores the fact that the twentieth century is one long proof that collective homicide can occur quite independently of religion. The militantly atheist regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha and other Communist tyrants far surpassed, in both absolute and per capita terms, the worst excesses of Christian or Muslim theocrats and inquisitors. Hitchens argues that Communists had a form of religious faith, but he misses the point that a godless cosmology provides no proof against fanaticism. Second, the “religion is evil” argument assumes that whenever religious differences are invoked, they are the primary causes of ethnic conflict. In fact, civil wars in the twentieth century show that ethnic differences are often primary, with religion serving as a strictly secondary factor. For example, the perennial Israeli-Palestinian-Arab crisis began as a largely secular conflict. The state of Israel was settled by secular Zionists, who were much more inspired by nineteenth century romantic nationalism than the Torah. And up until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Arab opposition to Israel was led by pan-Arabist nationalists, such as Nasser, the Baathist Parties, and the PLO. In Northern Ireland, the modern IRA is a semi-Marxist secular army, and Protestant and Catholic differences are often cultural rather than religious. In northern Iraq, Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomans have all historically been at each other’s throats despite their common allegiance to Sunni Islam. The murderous war in Sri Lanka—which saw the first extensive use of suicide bombing—is driven far more by ethnic than religious differences. The Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda share the same religion—as do the combatants on both sides in Darfur, Sudan. The third and most serious problem with the “religion is evil” argument, however, is the way it selectively picks events from religious history. It seizes upon every awful thing done in the name of God, while ignoring all the others. In the Middle Ages and early modernity, Christians did persecute heretics, kill witches and wage religious wars. Christians also built schools and hospitals, established systems of poverty relief, and re-established the rule of law after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Almost every achievement in the areas of art, music, literature, philosophy, science, law and even engineering (think of the Gothic cathedrals) was associated with faith in the Bible, Trinity and Incarnation. Similar points can be made about other traditional religious civilizations, whether Muslim, Hindu or pagan Greek. Hitchens’ mantra that “religion poisons everything” is a selective misreading of the historical record. Since in pre-modern societies everything was done in the name of religion, one could more easily say, “religion creates everything.” Singling out the evil from the good in the history of religion creates a gross caricature. It is actually astonishing how the authors fail to see this fallacy. Both Hitchens and Dawkins cite the Taliban’s destruction of the monumental Bamyan Buddha sculpture as an example, not of the barbarism of Islamic fundamentalism, but of the savagery of religion in general. And yet, the very object of the Taliban’s iconoclastic wrath was itself the product of religion. Why do they blame religion for vandalism but not credit it for the beauty that was vandalized?

Dawkins and Harris couple this blindness to the general structure of religious history with a sometimes sloppy disregard for details. Although Harris is a doctoral student, his chapter on the Inquisition and witch trials relies on secondary sources that are seriously out of date (in one instance, by over fifty years). He neglects the most basic current works on these topics that would be de rigeur for a freshman history paper. As a result, he exaggerates the tortures of the Spanish Inquistion (which would have been fearful enough had he stuck to the facts), and relates an anecdote that has no basis in fact which detracts from the reputation of a Jesuit opponent of witch trails (I happen to be writing a book on the Jesuit in question, so I have reason to know). On a more fundamental level, Harris’s neglect of the current literature on witch trials leads him to make a fundamental category error. He regards witch trials as an example of the evil of religious faith, when in fact they arose out of bad science. Demonology was a developed part of medieval and early modern natural philosophy, and the witch hunters thought they had empirical grounds for believing in witches, such as the testimony of pagan authors and the evidence of contemporary confessions.

But whereas Harris actually took the labor of reading some books, Dawkins apparently palmed off much of his research onto a lazy graduate assistant. This is not an exaggeration, but a plausible explanation for why an eminent scientist could give such a butchered account of St Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God. St Thomas’ famous five proofs, found in his Summa Theologica, are a staple of philosophical discussions about the existence of God, and I was actually looking forward to Dawkins’ critique. It had been some time since I studied these proofs, and I always had a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction with them. I was hoping that a lucid critique would shed some light on this important part of our Western heritage. Alas, Dawkins not only failed to engage St. Thomas at a philosophical level; he even failed at summarizing or paraphrasing him correctly. There are legitimate problems with St. Thomas proofs (mainly, that they are so tied to certain questionable principles of Aristotelian physics), but Dawkins fails to give them.

Dawkins’ sloppy reading of St Thomas Aquinas is a sample of his more general refusal to understand theologians. He makes it clear in The God Delusion that he has no respect for theology as an intellectual discipline. As a consequence, although he turns to elementary secondary sources (such as The Catholic Encyclyopedia) and a few primary sources, he can only give cartoonish renderings of theology. In my opinion, this is a far worse error than atheism. God is invisible, so disbelief has some justification. But the works of human beings are visible and tangible, and to deny the creativity and intelligence that has gone into centuries of theological argumentation is an insult to humanity. For example, St Anselm’s famous a priori ontological argument for the existence of God (i.e., that the very notion of God implies His existence) may not be sound, but it is a subtle piece of reasoning that has occupied the minds of geniuses such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Bertrand Russell. As such, it is a testimony to the sheer power of human thought. Dawkins paraphrases it as a piece of schoolyard sophistry, a play on words that would be patently unconvincing in the twelfth century. At a deeper level, Dawkins fails to understand what theologians mean when they say God is “simple,” or how cosmological arguments for the existence of God operate. Dawkins denies the distinctions among science, philosophy and theology, and thinks that the existence of God is a hypothesis that can scientifically be shown to be probably false. The heart of Dawkin’s rejection of theism is his assertion that positing the existence of God implies an infinite regress. For Dawkins, if God started the universe, then something must have started God; if God intelligently designed the universe, then something must have intelligently designed God. He even calls God “the ultimate Boeing 747,” i.e., if a Boeing 747 must have been designed because it is so complex, the same must be true of God. Dawkins fails to get the basic theological point that the unity of God precludes any such infinite regress. If God exists, He is a purely spiritual principle beyond time and space, having no parts, interior divisions, or imperfections. Theologians do not assert that the mere existence of things implies God’s existence. Rather, certain qualities of physical things, such as motion, contingency, and composition of spatial-temporal parts implies the existence of a First Mover and Supreme Architect. Since God by definition does not have motion, contingency or composition of parts, God has no creator or designer. This is an elementary point that a scholar as smart as Dawkins could have gotten, if he had bothered to respect theologians’ humanity and actually read their works, rather than lazily allowing his eyes to glance over their printed words.

In contrast, Sam Harris does not address arguments for and against God’s existence (which is a pity, since he does ably philosophize about epistemology in The End of Faith). He seems to assume that the reader already accepts the thesis that faith in the Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic God is as mythical as belief in Zeus or the Easter Bunny. The chief target of his criticism is faith itself. For him, it is the way religious people believe, not what they believe, that is the greatest evil. Harris defines faith as holding something to be absolutely true in the absence of proof or evidence. The Kierkegaardian leap of faith is, for him, a leap into the dark that disconnects the mind from external reality. In an interesting move, Harris does not deny the validity of spiritual experiences, or the possible existence of a spiritual realm. Like many who claim to be “spiritual, not religious,” Harris endorses spiritual experience, but rejects giving spirituality a dogmatic shape through supernatural revelation. Revelation, concretely expressed in holy texts such as the Bible or the Qur’an, is a double evil: it demands absolute convictions divorced from evidence, and it binds people to outdated and barbaric beliefs and practices. For Harris, only the fundamentalist is a true believer. Harris calls the religious liberal “a failed fundamentalist,” because he believes in the sacredness of a text while selectively ignoring or rejecting whatever does not fit with modern civility. For Harris, faith, religion, revelation, fundamentalism and irrationality are all synonymous.

In his critique of faith and revelation, Harris does make some telling points. If faith is understood as a blind stubbornness to a conviction, it is the kind of evil that he describes (which Bin Laden and Bush illustrate). And its ill effects are compounded when it is combined with what he and others call “fundamentalism,” i.e., the kind of rigid adherence to a text that we see among the Taliban, less sophisticated evangelicals, and others. Still, Harris has no understanding of traditional religion or mainstream theological thought (including mainstream conservative religious thought), so his whole book attacks a polemical straw man. The vast majority of theologians and religious thinkers, especially in the premodern era, do not define faith as belief in the absence of any kind of evidence. Faith does transcend human reason, but it is not arbitrary, because it proceeds from rational signs and indications that point to the plausibility of faith. In the older kind of apologetic, one could prove the existence of God and His goodness, and establish that it would be fitting or reasonable for Him to reveal certain truths to us. Many contemporary theologians have less confidence in our ability to prove the existence of God in the manner of geometry. Nevertheless, they argue that the existence of a personal God fits the needs of the human heart. Human life becomes meaningful and rational once we posit the existence of a loving God, so it is not an arbitrary leap to believe in Him. Likewise, Harris’ assumption that all religious believers are either fundamentalists or radical liberals is a grossly false dichotomy. Orthodox religious thinkers such as John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis or Hans Urs von Balthasar accept the whole of the Bible as a divine revelation, including all of the bloody parts of the Old Testament, but they do not advocate stoning adulterers or smiting Amalekites. The mainstream of orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim offers rules of interpretation that allow the believer to apply a religious text in a humane manner. In mainstream Christianity, for example, a distinction is made between the provisions of Mosaic law, which were binding only on ancient Israel, and the more general and flexible dictates of natural law, which is expressed in the Ten Commandments. For its part, rabbinical Judaism has an interpretative tradition over 2000 years old that also humanizes Mosaic Law. For example, whereas biblical law prescribes that a father can whip his children for certain offenses, rabbinical jurisprudence specifies that the lash be no thicker than a shoe lace. A similar tradition also exists to some extent in Islam. The philosopher Averroes served for years as a sharia judge, and he always managed to avoid chopping off someone’s hand or head. In short, Harris completely ignores how traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam are able to combine faith and scriptural revelation with reason and compassion.

In the end, my final experience of our recent atheist bestsellers is a profound feeling of disappointment. An educated believer has nothing to fear from atheism, but he does have a beef with atheism that is poorly thought out. Anti-religious thought is valuable for theology as a kind of photographic negative of faith. It depicts the same scene, but with an inversion of light and darkness. Instead of being the ultimate principle of existence, God is a nothing—but then, negative theology is able to say that God is “no thing.” Atheism’s inversion of theology, through its bracing criticism, brings to light problems that lay hidden so long as we doze away in what Kant called “dogmatic slumber.” The emotions of the more sensitive atheists, such as Nietzsche, Mencken and Foucault, also reveal the significance of the presence of God by making us alert to the consequnces of his absence. But what value is an atheist book when the author knows neither the ideas nor the experiences of religious faith? Such an author ends up not attacking religion at all, and the believer is left with nothing to learn. Atheism after 9-11 begins with political concerns (terrorism, “culture wars,”) but it should move on to examine what thinkers such as Aquinas, Newman, Soloviev, Buber and Plantinga actually wrote. Perhaps some brilliant seminarian, after having immersed himself deeply into theology and religious history, will lose his faith and write a brilliant atheist book that has a bite. Until then, we will have to content ourselves with books by the older, more reflective infidels.


Erasmus Root is a pseudonym living in California.