Dawkins and the bus delusion by Vic Thiessen

A series of bus adverts greeted our family on our return from Canada a few weeks ago. “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The author of the slogan is Richard Dawkins, England’s most famous atheist, considered by some to be one of the most intelligent men in the world. His book, The God Delusion, was published two years ago and was a huge bestseller.

I first heard about these bus slogans from my mother in Winnipeg. I have actually received a number emails from Canada about the bus slogans. People want to know how the LMC is responding to this incredible event, this latest illustration of western Post-Christianity. My feeling is that while this slogan has been front page news in North America, it has not been viewed as much of an incredible event in London. I have not heard any Londoners ask me how the LMC is responding to the slogan. Nor has the topic come up in conversation unless I initiated it.

Nevertheless, big deal or not, I do think believers need to respond.

Of course, there are people in London who have been upset by the slogans and who have decided to respond with bus slogans of their own. Perhaps you will also have seen some of these (overhead). This is the only one I have seen so far: Quoting Psalm 53:1, it reads: “The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.” An upcoming message from the Russian Orthodox Church will read: "There is a God. Don't worry. Enjoy your life!" I can appreciate that particular response and its positive contribution to the debate, but not the one pictured here. The responses to Dawkins which I have seen coming out of North America have also been very dismissive, like this one. But let’s face it, the fact that this slogan comes from the Bible would be completely meaningless to Dawkins and his fellow atheists who view the Bible as at best an interesting work of literature. So all this slogan does is call Dawkins and his fellow atheists fools. Not a particularly constructive response.

A much more impressive response came from the Methodist Church, which said: "We are grateful to Richard for his continued interest in God and for encouraging people to think about these issues. This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life."

With that response in mind, I would like to engage Dawkins in thinking about the deepest questions of life, responding to his slogan and to the arguments in his bestselling book.

To deconstruct this first line, I need to refer to Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Let me begin by saying that The God Delusion is one of the most disappointing books I’ve read in a long time. Yes, the book was written by an intelligent man, but who did the editing? This is a rambling, disorganised book full of anecdotes and anger (though not nearly as angry as Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great). The arguments are poorly constructed and unconvincing except to those who already believe them or want to believe them. Worst of all, Dawkins condemns religion, primarily Christianity, by attacking only its most extreme forms. He does mention that he knows there are Christians who are not fundamentalists, but he dismisses them as a tiny fringe group not worth considering. His arguments require that George Bush and James Dobson represent the vast majority of Christians, for they don’t apply to the rest of us. Hitchens goes so far as to say that Martin Luther King could not have been a Christian because he did not believe in a literal hell. How could such intelligent men be so naïve? And how could they write books criticising religion without having read some of the thousands of books which address some of their concerns from a religious point of view. To me, it is a mystery how Dawkins’ book could have become such a huge critical and popular success. It certainly says something about the cultures we live in. A lifelong friend of Kathy’s recently wrote to tell her how much she loved The God Delusion. I can only imagine that in her eyes this was a profound book full of revelations about the horrors of religion and including the definitive support for her atheist belief in the nonexistence of God.

But in my eyes, Dawkins’ book has only the rarest moments of brilliance. Let’s start with his explanation of why there is almost certainly no God, an explanation that takes the form of anecdotal muddled science for 150 pages. To me, his arguments were basically meaningless. For one thing, it’s been a long time since I thought that the existence of God could be proved with rational arguments or since I worried about whether evolution refuted my beliefs. So for Dawkins to go on and on about how the existence of God can’t be proved scientifically and how evolution and natural selection refute all attempts to prove God’s existence doesn’t mean anything to me. As I read these chapters, I kept thinking: if only Dawkins had read even one of the books by one of our Mennonite theologians, Gordon Kaufman. Kaufman presents a fully developed Christian theology from a scientific worldview which is identical to that of Dawkins. Kaufman’s short book, In the Beginning… Creativity, alone renders virtually every argument in Dawkins’ book irrelevant.

Secondly, the kind of God Dawkins says isn’t there isn’t one that I believe in either; and neither do a great many Christians. Dawkins writes: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” This is the heart of his argument against both God and religion. A great revelation? People like Kathy’s friend seem to think so, but most of us who have grown up with the Bible know all this and have come to terms with it one way or another. I have a dozen books by Christian scholars who say exactly the same thing – it’s not news and it doesn’t refute the existence of God; it just argues that people have not always understood God very well.

Dawkins goes on to argue that humanity does not need God to find meaning or a code of morality. Technically he is correct, but all he succeeds in doing is proving that everything can be explained without God and that common depictions of God do more harm than good. So what? I agree with him. The fact remains that Dawkins made no impact whatsoever on my personal understanding of God, nor did he do anything to convince me that the existence of God, as I understand God, is not at least as good an explanation for the existence of complex intelligent life as his purely scientific explanations.

So my deconstruction of the first line of his slogan leaves me with: There doesn’t have to be a God but there might be. Not particularly helpful. Let’s move on to the next words: “Now stop worrying.” Well, I’ve already alluded to the fact that the “stop worrying” part of Dawkins’ arguments relates to the way he thinks religious people understand God. So if he is referring to the kind of God my mother believes in, then this makes some sense, because that kind of God can indeed be the cause of much worry.

My own childhood is a case in point. What I learned about God as a young child, first and foremost, from my parents, Sunday school teachers, vacation Bible school teachers, Moody Press children’s books and powerful films like “A Thief in the Night” was that a judging vindictive God watched my every move and read my every thought and that the only thing that could save me from an eternity in the fires of hell was accepting Jesus Christ as my personal saviour. Apparently even that was easier said than believed, for I had to make that commitment over and over again, in summer programmes, Billy Graham crusades and so on, and it still didn’t take. By the time I was thirteen, I had accepted Jesus into my heart at least five times in public, but I still knew I was destined for hell, for I still had impure thoughts, I still lied, I still cheated, I still did unspeakable things alone and I was going nowhere but hell. As a result of this conviction, I lived in almost constant fear for years, I suffered from nervous ticks all over my body, internally and externally, I slept badly as a result and so I was sick all the time. I was absolutely convinced that I was dying and that an eternity of fire was imminent. Do I think my religious indoctrination was a form of child abuse, as Dawkins so strongly asserts in his book? You better believe I do. Dawkins’ chapters on the impact of religious teaching on children (and Hitchens says similar things) was the one section of his book that really spoke to me. I, for one, am ready to agree with Dawkins that teaching your children that there is only one way to understand God and the world and that failure to believe in that one way will lead to eternal damnation is a form of child abuse. But that does not mean I think children should not be taught about God or religion. On the contrary, I think the opposite kind of indoctrination can be just as dangerous. Our children were given a very strong Christian foundation, but they did not grow up in fear of God. They did grow up being encouraged to think for themselves, to make their own decisions about what was true about God and Christianity and how they wanted to live with that truth. This was not always easy for them either, but it certainly frees us, as Christian parents who did teach their children about God and Christianity, from any accusations of child abuse made by Dawkins. And given the dogmatic tone of his book, I wonder whether Dawkins really taught his children to think for themselves or whether they were told there is only one truth and that is the truth of science, of evolution, of natural selection.

“Now stop worrying.” Yeah, I did eventually stop worrying when I was 15 and decided to embrace a loving depiction of God rather than the angry judging God. It took me many years and a great deal of reading and reflection before I was able to reconcile a loving God with the God of the Old Testament so vividly described by Dawkins, or the God who sends all who don’t believe in Jesus to hell, but I was eventually able to do that as well. As a result, God is, for me, no longer the source of even a smidgeon of worry. On the contrary, it is when I contemplate Dawkins’ godless universe that I begin to worry. If the universe is a cold empty thing with no purpose and no future and the only thing that matters is that we, the fortunate recipients of intelligent life, enjoy the few years we have been given without hurting others, then I would start to worry. It is my firm belief that there is something else foundational to the universe that creates life and gives that life purpose and moves humanity forward toward a goal, which lets me stop worrying. The words of Psalm 139, which were read earlier, fill me with a peace that Dawkins can’t replace with his atheism or his words: “our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” Of course, just because I believe God gives life meaning doesn’t mean that either God or meaning actually exist. But my life is enhanced, not lessened, by believing it.

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” My immediate reaction to this slogan was that it was in incredibly bad taste. My first interpretation of what it meant was: Look, you’ve had this judging God hanging over your shoulder all your life watching everything you do, keeping you on the straight and narrow, and preventing you from having fun. Well, it’s not true. God’s not there, there’s no one watching your every move or reading your mind. You’re free to do whatever you want. So eat, drink and be merry; enjoy your life and stop worrying about doing the right thing all the time. The words “and enjoy your life” in this context were particularly offensive to me, as they made me think that knowing there is no God frees us from worrying about all the millions of people who are suffering with poverty, oppression, violence and disease. I’m sure Dawkins would not say this, but that is what the slogan conveyed to me. I do think we should enjoy our lives in spite of the suffering of others, but not without taking account of the suffering of others and making it a priority in our lives to work towards alleviating that suffering and making the world a better place. Again, for me this is much more difficult to do if there is no God. If there is a God of love and compassion who shares the desire to make the world a better place and who continually plants seeds of love and compassion in the world to help us work toward that better future, then it is much easier for me to enjoy life than if there is no God and we must rely entirely on the goodwill of humanity to accomplish this. The modernist vision of ongoing progress toward a better future has foundered in the face of reality. The reality is that humanity alone is making the rich richer and the poor poorer and making the world a very messy place. While I continue to hope that people will eventually open their eyes to the world they are creating for their children, I do not have enough optimism to believe people can turn things around on their own.

Which leads me to the final major theme in Dawkins’ book: whether religion helps or hurts the world. Dawkins and Hitchens believe that religions have basically been the source of untold suffering in the world, contributing in their own way to all the world’s problems, whether it is war or poverty or the environment or ethics. There is some small recognition that religions usually contain some positive values, but the claim is made again and again that religion has done much more harm than good. “Religion poisons everything” is the central mantra of Hitchens’ book. And Dawkins writes: “As the Nobel prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.’ Blaise Pascal said something similar: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” As someone who is very critical of Christianity’s last 1700 years, I understand where these views are coming from. But as Tina Beattie points out in her excellent response to Dawkins and Hitchens, The New Atheists, those men forget how the foundational values of the western world are rooted in Christianity and Judaism.

I will offer a number of short quotes by Beattie to give you a flavour of her book. Beattie writes: “Most educated Christians are well aware of the contradictions, difficulties and cultural anachronisms found in the New Testament. If one reads it as Dawkins and Hitchens do – with cavalier disregard for any questions of scholarship, interpretation and contextualisation – then of course there is ample ammunition for ridiculing Christians. But there is also a coherent social vision running through the Old and New Testaments, focused on a God who demands justice, who takes the side of the poor and the marginalised, and who calls for an understanding of love, commitment and responsibility that is radically different from that which informed other societies in the ancient world.” She also notes: “Christianity’s doctrines and theological insights have moderated a vision which seeks to balance the freedoms of the individual with the common good. In the twentieth century, the casting off of this moderating influence by previously Christian societies in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany did not produce greater levels of freedom but barbaric cruelties on a scale which would have been unthinkable to our Christian forebears. Whatever atrocities may have been perpetrated by the followers of Christ, none can rival the systematic extermination of millions of human beings in the service of these post-Christian ideologies.” Though the question of why Christians find it so easy to participate in war instead of preventing it is a mystery to Beattie. Beattie goes on to say: “The teachings and practices of the world’s enduring religious traditions have often been abused, but overall they have enabled human beings to refine and develop their primal religious impulses by channelling their energies and controlling their more irrational tendencies. They all contain guidance for ways of disciplining and nurturing our inner worlds in order to orientate these towards the glimmers of goodness, compassion and hope that flicker within us all, despite the sometimes overwhelming psychological tyranny of violence and fear. Every religious tradition is home to millennia of wisdom and reflection on the human condition and its contradictory and competing desires, torn as we are between life and death.” The excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, read earlier, is an example of this.

In the end, Dawkins and Hitchens come across as narrow-minded angry white men who feel abused (either personally or on behalf of countless others) by the way religious truth-claims have messed up their lives. I share their pain, as I have said, and I struggle with my own attitude towards the world’s religions, including elements of Christianity, but I can also see how religion has contributed in countless ways to the betterment of society and how it can continue to play a key role in making the world a better place in the future.

I have always believed that theology is not something which should be left to academics and institutions but that it should be taken to the streets, as it was for much of history. Well, here it is, on the streets of London. Despite my criticism of Dawkins’ book and his slogan, I see this slogan as a tremendous opportunity and challenge. Surely this is exactly the kind of slogan we can use as a conversation-starter with absolutely anyone. Getting people thinking and talking about their views on God and about the meaning of life has got to be a good thing. If we can do it in a way that invites further thought and questions rather than a way that suggests we have all the answers, then we can contribute to a more thoughtful society in which together with our children we can find a way forward.

That is one challenge. Another challenge will be to use this slogan to help us all think about the role of religion in our society. One of the things that bugs Dawkins and Hitchens the most is how religions get so much respect that abuses within religious communities cannot be challenged and that entire governments have to be careful about what they say when, for example, Muslim extremists respond to, and make use of, Danish cartoons. This is a fair question. One challenge this leaves us with is the challenge to show that we are not afraid to face the problems within our own religions. Regarding Christianity, Beattie writes: “This means speaking out against the ongoing injustices perpetrated by Christian churches, and it means cultivating a spirit of resistance to the ethical abuses which proliferate when Christians value unity more highly than integrity. In a fractured world such as ours, the idea that gun-toting fundamentalist housewives who hate Muslims and gays with equal fervour belong within the same world-view as Christians working tirelessly for peace and reconciliation among the world’s religions and peoples is not viable.” If we are to respond to Dawkins and be relevant in a culture which sees Dawkins as a great thinker, we also must not be afraid to examine our faith claims with intellectual integrity; to ask the hard questions which make it so easy for Dawkins and Hitchens to condemn religion.

A final challenge is to identify and strengthen that which is common to both atheism and religion. Beattie writes: “The division today is not between believers and non-believers. Rather, it is between those who see violence as the solution to the world’s problems, and those who recognise the urgent need for a more peaceful international order. While the new atheists preach division at their book launches and public debates, there is a growing coalition who recognise the need for us to overcome our religious and ideological differences in order to struggle together for justice for all the world’s people.” In responding to this slogan, Simon Barrow wrote in the Guardian that “compassion is surely one thing we could all agree on. Compassion – an identification with the suffering of others so that you feel the need to alleviate pain and challenge injustice – is at the heart of the best kind of humanist thinking and living, and also the best kind of religious thinking and living.” Simon continues: “Indeed, the New Testament suggests that those who go around proclaiming that they love God while actually hating their sisters and brothers (in modern times by bombing them or condemning them out of hand) are actually liars – their religion is false, and they haven't got a clue what they are talking about when they use words like "God" and "love".”

In the end, believers and atheists need to work together to challenge all the oppressive structures of the world’s systems (including religious systems) that prevent people from living fully.