Open Season on Dawkins is in full swing, and Friday’s Catholic Herald takes a potshot at the quarry in a piece by Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, “The tragedy at the heart of New Atheism.”
On to the tragedy in a second, but Fr. Lucie-Smith’s piece doesn’t begin well:
I remember sitting up and taking notice of something Richard Dawkins once said, which was to this effect: “When aliens arrive here, the first thing they will ask is: ‘Have they discovered the theory of evolution yet?’”
The only problem with this quotation is that I can find no reference to Professor Dawkins actually saying it, or the occasion and context of him saying it. He may not have said it at all. If anyone can give me a reference (the link above, which is hardly satisfactory, is all I can find) then I would be grateful. It would be interesting to unpack the meaning of the words.
For crying out loud, anybody who has read Dawkins is familiar with this quote, which comes from the first chapter of The Selfish Gene. It took me all of two seconds to find the source with Google:
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?
Nice sentences, eh? Maybe they don’t teach Googling in Priest School. Anyway, the “tragedy” of New Atheism seems to be the despair and nihilism that comes with realizing that there is no god. As the good Father writes:
Here is a saying that I find particularly problematic: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” [JAC: That quote comes from Dawkins’s River out of Eden.]
First of all, notice the use of the words “precisely” and “observe”. It is surely impossible to observe the universe in its entirety. We observe parts, though we may intuit wholes. But these observations are not going to be precise – not if they are observations of “the universe”. So the use of the words “observe” and “precisely” here strikes me as giving the statement a scientific veracity that it cannot possibly claim, for this statement seems neither falsifiable or verifiable.
What the statement seems to be conveying, rather than a scientific observable truth, is an existential statement of belief about the nature of the universe. While Christians believe that at the heart of the universe there is Love, Professor Dawkins makes an opposing and opposite statement. But if the first statement is unscientific, so surely is the second one as well.
No, Dawkins’s statement is an inference from evidence, an inference that the character of the universe is precisely the opposite of that we’d expect under the notion of a loving and powerful god. Here is some of that evidence:
- Innocent people suffer for no apparent reason: children get cancer, thousands are killed by natural disasters. The problem of evil remains unsolved under the conception of the kind of god I mentioned above. The solution is either that there is a god, and it’s capricious, apathetic or malevolent (and no Christian believes that), or that a god doesn’t exist.
- The second alternative—no god—is more parsimonious in view of the complete lack of evidence for a deity.
- There could have been evidence for such a deity: miracles, regrowth of amputated limbs, and the efficacy of intercessory prayer. But there is no such evidence.
- Every bit of observational evidence previously adduced by religion for a God: creationism, the existence of morality, the motions of the planets, has given way to science. Science has never given way to religion. Thus there’s every expectation that the Last Redoubt of Natural Theology, the “fine-tuning of the universe” and the existence of physical laws, will also be explained by science. It’s more than just an unsubstantiated assumption, then, that the universe doesn’t care for us: it’s a judgment based on evidence.
Fr. Lucie-Smith apparently doesn’t grasp the evidential basis for rejecting god, for he sees atheism and religious belief as simply both manifestations of “feelings”:
What this might all boil down to are opposing interpretations of experience. Some may feel that they are being protected by a benign Divine Providence and that even when they suffer this suffering can be turned somehow to good. Others may feel that life teaches them that there is no purpose to anything, only blind, pitiless indifference.
How anyone can look at the world and think that a benign and providential God is protecting humans is beyond me. The parsimonious interpretation is “indifference”, i.e., no god.
And then the Big Canard: atheism is equivalent to nihilism:
It seems to me that if Professor Dawkins believes in pitiless indifference as the presiding spirit of the universe, then he is clearly in the camp of an earlier professor, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is a serious matter, because the Nietzschean vision is one that not only contradicts the idea of Divine Providence, but it also makes science of any sort nonsensical, in that it seems to deny intrinsic meaning to physical phenomena, attributing meaning only to human will. In other words, a Nietzschean would say that any theory of meaning is in the head of the person who holds it, not in the phenomena themselves. . .
Is this what Professor Dawkins believes? Is this what modern atheists believe? It does sound pretty close to the quote from Dawkins above. But if he believes this how can he believe in an ordered universe, one that is susceptible to rational and scientific observation?
Since when can one see science as “nonsensical” if there is no intrinsic (i.e., God-given) meaning to physical phenomena? Science works, whether it’s done by an atheist or a believer. Is it nonsensical to give antibiotics to an infected atheist, or for an atheist to develop new drugs? That is a meaningful endeavor regardless of whether there is a god. Suffering is relieved, regardless of whether the moral view that suffering is bad comes from God or an atheist. I swear, when I hear an educated priest make statements so palpably false, it makes me see how deeply religion can corrupt rationality.
And while I can’t speak for Professor Dawkins, yes, we atheists believe that humans make their own meaning in life, that science is a valuable thing to do, and that we can be moral without god. These are all observable facts. And we also believe that an ordered universe can arise from principles of physics, and does not require a caring God.
