Talk given by the Rector on 20 May 2007In
his first letter, the apostle Peter urges us, 'Always be prepared to
give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope
that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear
conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good
behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander' (1 Peter 3:15-16).
'Always
be prepared to give an answer' is the bit we're going to concentrate on
this evening. But before we do, it's worth reflecting on how easy it is
to win the battle but lose the war when it comes to defending the
Christian Faith against the different attacks it comes under. Argument
is a good thing to engage in, but...
Listen to how theology teacher Graham Tomlin describes a not uncommon situation:
'Some
time ago I got into a theological discussion with one of my students.
He came to find me after something I'd said in a lecture and basically
wanted to pick a fight with me. He planted himself in my room and was
clearly not willing to leave until he had argued me into submission and
I had admitted that I was wrong. With the coolness of hindsight, I can
now see that his point of view had some merit. However, the more he
argued, the less I wanted to give in. It became a battle of wills. The
more he pressed me, the more aggressive he became, the less I wanted to
back down. It wasn't exactly mature or wise of me to react that way but
I couldn't help it. We've all been in discussions like that, when the
truth or falsehood of an argument becomes irrelevant in a sheer battle
of cerebral skill where victory goes, not to the one who has the truth,
but to the one who can play the game best and outwit his opponent with
deft intellectual footwork. If we're honest, Christian apologetics has
often been conducted in this way. The purpose appears to be to argue
unbelievers into submission by showing them the falsehood of their
position and forcing them to back down. The result is that often the
battle is won and the war lost. The loser simply comes back more
determined than ever to bolster an opinion with stronger arguments in
future.'
Which is why Peter says, not just 'Always be prepared
to give an answer', but also 'do this with gentleness and respect'. It
isn't always easy - which is probably why he felt the need to say it!
But it is important.
OK, with that health warning in mind, let's
press on. Back in February, you may remember that we had a brief look
at the history of the relationship between science and religion. We saw
that what started out as a partnership between friends came under
increasing strain through what happened to people like Galileo and
Charles Darwin. The best way approach the differences between science
and religion is to take them not as 'either-or' but as 'both-and'. But
the well-publicised history of the conflicts that there have been
between the two makes it difficult for our culture to take this on
board.
This evening we're going to have another look at the
subject. We're going to focus on the views of someone who is
particularly prominent at the moment. Richard Dawkins is an ethologist
and evolutionary biologist who is Professor of the Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford University. That would probably have been that
except for the fact that he also has considerable talent as a popular
science writer. As a result, he is one of the best-known and most
authoritative scientists in the public arena today.
Dawkins
describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing", but says
that he began to have doubts about the existence of God when he was
about nine years old. He later went back to the Christian Faith because
he was persuaded by the argument from design. But at the age of
sixteen, when he came to understood evolution better, his religious
position changed again. He felt that evolution could account for the
complexity and intricacy of life on our planet and that a designer was
simply not necessary. He went on to study zoology at university, spent
a couple of years as an assistant professor of zoology in California
and then came back to Oxford where he rose through the academic ranks
and is now a distinguished professor.
In his writing about
science, Dawkins is best known for popularising the gene-centered view
of evolution – a view first set out in his book 'The Selfish Gene'
(published in 1976). He advocates the idea that the gene is the
principal unit of selection in evolution. But please don't worry if
that doesn't make any sense - it's on the edge of what we're thinking
about this evening, which is more to do with what he has to say about
religion, most recently in his book 'The God Delusion', published in
hardback last year and due to be published in paperback tomorrow.
You
may remember from last time that we looked at a debate about the
evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin that took place between the
then Bishop of Oxford and Thomas Huxley - which led to Huxley being
known as 'Darwin's Bulldog'. Well, Dawkins too has a nickname - he's
known as 'Darwin's Rottweiler'!
What has Richard Dawkins got against God and how might we answer him?
In
preparing for this evening, I've been greatly helped by the writings of
this man. Alister McGrath, who is now Professor of Historical Theology
at Oxford University, has engaged in debate with Richard Dawkins, both
personally and in print - most recently in his book 'The Dawkins
Delusion?'
Let's look at what Dawkins thinks under three headings.
1. NO ROOM FOR GOD
First,
Dawkins thinks that a properly scientific way of looking at the world
leaves no room for God. What we have discovered through science, he
says, especially as a result of Darwin's theory of evolution, leaves no
room for God and makes him unnecessary. Either that or it has
alternative explanations for the way things are that make belief in God
simply impossible.
Those who believe that God was involved in
the creation of the world often argue that living things are too well
designed to have come into existence by chance. Take the intricate
structure of the human eye, for example. How can something so
wonderfully designed have come about all by itself? Surely there must
have been a designer at work? Dawkins writes about this in two books:
'The Blind Watchmaker' and 'Climbing Mount Improbable'. He follows and
develops Darwin in arguing that, given enough time, complex things can
evolve from simple beginnings without any need to bring in a divine
creator. He invites us to imagine a metaphorical "Mount Improbable".
Seen from one angle, its "towering, vertical cliffs" seem impossible to
climb. Yet seen from another angle, the mountain turns out to have
"gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the
distant uplands."
If Dawkins is right, it follows that there is
no need to believe in God - science is able to offer an explanation of
the world that doesn't involve him. But actually, Dawkins goes much
further and claims that there is a definite need not to believe in God.
This is where there is a problem. Leaving aside the question of whether
or not he is right about intelligent design, the fact is that science
is simply unable to come up with a decisive answer to the question of
whether or not God exists.
This is far from being a new idea.
The limitations of the scientific method when it comes to answering
questions about God were very well understood around the time of Darwin
himself. 'Darwin's Bulldog', T. H. Huxley, wrote this in 1880:
"Some
twenty years ago, or thereabouts, I invented the word "Agnostic" to
denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly
ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians
and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with utmost
confidence." He goes on to say this: "Agnosticism is of the essence of
science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall
not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds
for professing to know or believe... Consequently Agnosticism puts
aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the
greater part of anti-theology."
More recently, let's hear from
Sir Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960. In a
book called 'The Limits of Science' he wrote about how science, despite
being "the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged
upon", has limits. It's ideally placed to show that the chemical
formula for water is H2O or that DNA has a double helix. But when it
comes to issues like 'What is life all about?', these are "questions
that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science
would empower it to answer".
This is why, whether Richard
Dawkins likes it or not, scientists hold such a wide variety of
religious beliefs. The scientist who believes in God is neither a
better nor a worse scientist because he does so. Scientists are
intellectually and morally free either to believe in God or not to
believe in God.
In other words, Dawkins goes too far. It's one
thing to say that the way the world is can be explained without
invoking the direct and miraculous hand of God. But it's quite another
to say that the fact that we can come up with such explanations proves
that God doesn't exist at all.
2. THE MEANING OF FAITH
Secondly,
Dawkins has a rather strange view of what faith is all about. For him,
faith "means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth
of evidence," which is totally inconsistent with the scientific method.
He sees faith as "a kind of mental illness," or as one of "the world’s
great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate".
Which it would be - if the definition of faith that Dawkins
offers has any credibility! But, of course, it hasn't. Faith isn't
about going against evidence or setting it aside as inconvenient. As
one Christian writer puts it, faith "commences with the conviction of
the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of
the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the
consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence
are expressed in conduct".
Dawkins argues that faith in God is
like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. According to him,
when you grow up, you grow out of it. But this is clearly absurd. There
is no evidence that people seriously regard God, Santa Clause and the
Tooth Fairy as being in the same category. Quite the reverse. The fact
is that quite a large number of people who give up believing in God as
children come back to him in later life. But no-one starts believing
again in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy when they've grown up!
3. RELIGION AND EVIL
Thirdly,
Dawkins sees religion is a virus which infects otherwise healthy and
sane minds and prevents them from functioning as they should. He sees
faith in God is an irrational infection that messes up our minds and
our lives and is responsible for an enormous amount of evil in our
world. There's no evidence that such a 'virus' actually exists. But
Dawkins is desperate to try and explain why it is that the confident
predictions made by atheists a generation ago that religion would soon
die out are so manifestly untrue.
It's true, of course, that
some religious people do some very evil things. But the fact that some
religion is bad doesn't demonstrate that all religion is tarred with
the same brush. And anyway, how many people with antireligious views
also do some very evil things? What about all the people in the
twentieth century killed under communist regimes in the name of
atheism?
As Alister McGrath comments, "One of the greatest
ironies of the twentieth century is that many of the most deplorable
acts of murder, intolerance and repression of the twentieth century
were carried out by those who thought that religion was murderous,
intolerant and repressive – and thus sought to remove it from the face
of the planet as a humanitarian act". The truth is that both religion
and anti-religion are capable of inspiring great acts of goodness on
the part of some, and acts of violence on the part of others.
Back
in 1965, an American theologian called Harvey Cox published a book
called 'The Secular City'. Its basic message was that traditional ways
of presenting Christianity were on the way out. The church must adapt
to the fact that God was dead and secularism was here to stay. The
book’s basic ideas are now regarded as hopelessly out of date - even by
their author! Writing thirty years later in a book called 'Fire from
Heaven', Harvey Cox argues that it is no longer secularism that holds
the future for Christianity, but Pentecostalism, described as 'a
spiritual hurricane that has already touched half a billion people, and
an alternative vision of the human future whose impact may only be at
its earliest stages today'.
In the end, we must not allow
ourselves to be bamboozled by the likes of Richard Dawkins. He is not
someone to be worried by. There are answers to what he is saying. As it
happens, some of the fiercest attacks on his book 'The God Delusion'
are coming from other atheists, rather than religious believers.
Michael Ruse, who describes himself as a 'hardline Darwinian'
philosopher, confessed that The God Delusion made him 'embarrassed to
be an atheist'. As Alister McGrath puts it, "'The God Delusion' might
turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism
is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer."
We
end where we began. 'Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone
who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this
with gentleness and respect...' May God help us, in the conversations
we have with those who do not yet believe, to argue both skilfully and
graciously as we help people overcome barriers to faith. Amen.
© 2007 David Stone |