IS GOD A DELUSION?

OCTOBER 7, 2007

Is God a delusion of our minds? That is the opinion of self-proclaimed atheist Richard Dawkins in his book, “The God Delusion”. Dawkins’ book is one of a number of books and essays that have been published in recent times, claiming that there is no supreme being, whom we call God, and that to think and live as though he existed amounts to a mental disorder. In short, Dawkins claims, God is a delusion of the mind. Dawkins defines a delusion as a persistently held belief in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. It is clear from the outset that he thinks he has examined the available evidence, and that it all leads to the conclusion that there is no God.

Dawkins’s book calls for a response, first, because it has achieved much notoriety, and second, because it is representative of a widely held but mistaken view that religion is somehow opposed to science, and that faith is somehow opposed to reason, so that we must choose between the two. I certainly do not wish to attack Richard Dawkins personally, but I do want to attack some of his claims, in this and my next two columns. More important, I want to show the Church’s view on the relationship of faith to reason and of religion to science.

Let us begin with his attack on God. Not surprisingly, Dawkins offers an ugly caricature of him. “The God of the Old Testament,” he writes, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal…”

What Dawkins’ fails to grasp is that God gradually revealed himself over time, and so the people had to grow gradually in their knowledge of the true identity of this mysterious, saving God. Because their knowledge of God was imperfect and incomplete, it is not surprising that they sometimes portrayed him inaccurately and imperfectly, according to their human perceptions. And so, sometimes they justified violent deeds by invoking his name. The world would have to wait for Jesus Christ to bring the fullness of God’s revelation of himself as a loving Father.

Dawkins also attacks religion, claiming that it has been and remains the primary cause of human misery, death, and destruction. In so writing, he disappointingly abandons principles one would hope to find in a career scientist; namely, dispassionate commentary seeking only to report in an unbiased manner the fruits of scholarly research and consideration. Instead, Dawkins writes with open displays of hostility toward religion.

Dawkins, however, ignores the countless acts of violence, hatred and cruelty carried out by godless individuals and more notably the blood on the hands of godless regimes throughout the ages. The 20th century, for example, gave witness to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism in Europe. Dawkins wishes us to believe that because Hitler never publicly renounced his Catholicism, he counts as a religious person. He reminds us that Stalin as a youth studied for the priesthood, so religion supposedly helped make him evil. At the least, Dawkins argues, religion has nothing to do with whether people lead good or evil lives.

There are several things wrong with this argument. First, neither Hitler nor Stalin ever invoked religion as the reason for their conduct. Second, both showed themselves enemies of the Church by imprisoning or killing religious leaders, and by seizing Church assets. Stalin, as an atheistic Communist, tried to eradicate religion; Hitler tried to manipulate it.

Dawkins fails to mention any other regimes of terror in the last century that were clearly without religious roots, such as those of Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong Il, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Francis Duvalier. Looking back further in history, who can forget the immense cruelties of godless men like the Mongol Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, or Robespierre? None of these despots claimed religion as a motivation or justification for his acts. Some of the regimes of those figures were atheistic in principle, others were so in practice. One thing they all had in common was either contempt for religion or, more commonly, hatred for it, and a determination to wipe out its practitioners. If any of them had really practiced religion, they would have lived lives of charity and service.

Dawkins also fails to make the crucial distinction between those small numbers in the past and present whose motives for violence have been rooted in warped religious zealotry, and the much larger numbers whose motives were purely political, and who merely invoked religion manipulatively as justification for their actions or in hopes of winning the support of the ignorant for their wars. It is true that religious differences have sometimes become the lines of demarcation between two warring factions, but in those cases religion has been the excuse rather than the real cause of hostilities. Were both parties to have practiced the moral teachings of their religions, there would have been peace and concord between them, and not war.

Next week we will assess his views on science and religion.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap