"An Athiest Tells It Like It Is "

READING

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has written several books on science and religion, appeared on TV in documentaries and interviews, and has made an impact on public thought far beyond his role as a professor at Oxford University, England. His latest book, "The God Delusion," has earned him the reputation as the "world's most prominent atheist." With an encyclopedic grasp not only of his own field of biology, but of philosophy and the history of religion, Dawkins "makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly." (From the cover jacket.) He writes,

"There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? . . . .

"The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed . . . .

"How lucky we are to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. For those of us lucky enough to be here, [picture] the relative brevity of life by imagining a laser-thin spotlight creeping along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in the darkness of the dead past, or the darkness of the unknown future. We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place? As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something. Emily Dickinson said,

/That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet./"

SERMON

Every now and then, someone comes along and looks at an old question in a different way, and arrives at a totally new perspective, with fresh possibility and hope for the future. It is the kind of evolutionary progress we associate with scientific exploration and discovery. Knowledge comes from asking questions, from challenging the limits of understanding, and paying attention to our doubts.

Yet religion has been largely off limits to this type of inquiry. People have been trained not to question belief. They make the oddly dissonant assumption that it is possible to gain one kind of knowledge through science and to profess another kind through faith. They accept the popular notion that faith addresses the mysteries that science has not explained. Why are we here and what are we meant to do with our lives? What happens to us after we die? Where can we turn when we suffer and anguish? How can we live without a benevolent and life-affirming presence that comforts us when we are conflicted and alone? This is the territory that religion has carved out and made exclusive through the mystery of belief, beyond the reach of science or reason.

Richard Dawkins is prepared to talk us out of all of it. Daring to challenge the reality of belief and the value of religious faith, he raises the possibility of life without either. His book "The God Delusion" covers all this territory and beyond. It is first of all an inquiry into belief in God, with Dawkins challenging every believer from Thomas Aquinas to Tony Blair. For Dawkins it is child's play to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of religious belief, although that might not convince a person of faith. But Dawkins goes so far as to argue that it is faith itself - the acceptance of unproven ideas as if they were true - that is the deeper problem. His argument is compelling and has something to say even to religious liberals like us, who don't need to be talked into or out of much.

Our tradition has claimed for two hundred years that we should apply reason to our understanding of religion. We welcome scientific knowledge and nurture the love of learning. Equally important values for us are respect for the individual and tolerance of different points of view. Foundational to democratic community and inclusive in spirit, our values have taught us to reserve judgment about personal faith.

Our commitment to tolerance and pluralism is a virtue. It preserves diversity among ourselves and encourages us to learn about others. But it also leaves us with ambiguity about what it is we do believe. Most of us live fairly comfortably with this lack of definition, perhaps because we sense what might happen if we were to try and nail it down. We would have to admit that we had a faith without belief, and that isn't much of a faith at all. Are we ready for that? What would we have instead?

Richard Dawkins claims that life without faith might just be sweeter. "We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight" of life, he says. Life without faith places its trust in the knowledge gained from science, not scripture. What we do not yet know - and might call a mystery - is really just unexplored territory. It is what has invited every open and inquisitive mind into the world of science, the discovery of knowledge, tested and proven to be true.

What if there are no mysteries, only that which we have not yet learned?

This is the simple yet original question Dawkins asks us to consider. Its implications are liberating and hopeful. Life might be less fraught with conflict and danger.

I don't need to convince you that religion has fueled far too many violent clashes in our time and in any time. But Dawkins will convince you that it is not just the fanaticism of a few zealots who have spoiled everything. It is the unassailability of religious faith.

Religious faith, with its faux knowledge and opaqueness, leaves people unable to make compromises and all too often, sets them against each other. Human heartbreaks small and large have come from this rigidity. Families fall apart, ancient tribes carry ancient grudges, planes fly into buildings. Everyone involved in religion, including Unitarian Universalists, has to take responsibility for these consequences. They are a tragic case of misplaced authority, which deserves to be challenged and exposed for what it is.

Dawkins tells a chilling but familiar story about a British school, a "city academy" that teaches biblical creationism and is funded by the government. The Headmaster of the school offers a scenario that is intended to show the "school's open-mindedness."[1] "The best example I can give of what it is like here," Headmaster McQuoid says, "is a sixth-form philosophy lecture I was giving. Shaquille was sitting there and he says, 'The Koran is correct and true.' And Clare, over here, says, 'No, the Bible is true.' So we talked about the similarities between what they say and the places where they disagree. And we agreed that they could not both be true. And eventually I said, 'Sorry Shaquille, you are wrong, it is the Bible that is true.' And he said, 'Sorry Mr McQuoid, you are wrong, it is the Koran.' And they went on to lunch and carried on discussing it there. That's what we want," Headmaster McQuoid went on. "We want children to know why it is they believe what they believe and to defend it."

I've been to interfaith meetings like this. They reassure us that people can differ with each other and maintain civility - even stay to have lunch together. But that may be the only good that comes of it.

Here is what Richard Dawkins has to say about the school scenario: "What a charming picture! Shaquille and Clare went to lunch together, vigorously arguing their cases and defending their incompatible beliefs. But is it really so charming? Isn't it actually rather a deplorable picture that Mr McQuoid has painted? Upon what, after all, did Shaquille and Clare base their argument? What cogent evidence was each one able to bring to bear, in their vigorous and constructive debate? Clare and Shaquille simply asserted that her or his holy book was superior, and that was that. That is apparently all they said, and that, indeed is all you can say when you have been taught that truth comes from scripture rather than from evidence. Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds."[2]

Belief is not the same as truth. But generations of religious people have taught impressionable minds that this is so. Clare and Shaquille may never face each other from opposite sides of a holy war, but it is that sense of certainty and rightness that drives people to such wars, whoever they are. Religious belief is where they ground their certainty and rightness. Belief they have been taught not to question.

And so have we. Perhaps this is most disturbing conclusion I have drawn from reading Richard Dawkins. The non-judgmental live-and-let-live attitude we cultivate among ourselves as Unitarian Universalists and as participants in the wider interfaith community gives me an uneasy feeling now. Are we being less than true to ourselves by refraining from making the same judgments about religion as Richard Dawkins has made?

I think of all the interfaith gatherings in which I have taken part. There always comes a point at which someone likes to say that as different as we may be, we all share a common belief: a belief in God, or simply a faith grounded in belief. Do I belong there if I reject the validity of religious belief? Perhaps not. What then?

Richard Dawkins uses one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's wonderful one-liners as a chapter heading in his book. "The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson left ministry behind when he felt he could no longer observe the religious rituals that were a commonplace in his time. He had to resign from his church, a Unitarian church, in order to be true to himself. Yet he had a profound effect on the Unitarian tradition, which he never completely left, but rather brought along with him, until it was transformed almost in his image.

The time may have come for us to take an evolutionary step forward. What we leave behind are ideas, perhaps even beliefs, that no longer fit. But what we gain is life, illumined by the realization of just how lucky we are to have it at all. A life "so sweet," as Emily Dickinson said, that we are able to live every minute of it with fullness and joy, which will never harm anyone ever.

[1] Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), p. 336.

[2] Ibid., p. 337.

[3] Ibid., p. 29.