Yes, according to Peter Lewis, and according to a variety of writers who have challenged, for example, Richard Dawkins and his latest book the God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens and his polemical work God is not great.

One particular aspect that seems to get on these authors goat is the oft repeated claim by Dawkins or his disciples that religion is evil, or is a major source of evil in the world. Further to this it is their stated aim that they should wish to eradicate religious belief from the world. Although perhaps sometimes they would prefer to use the language of liberation, as opposed the language of intolerance. Either way it is the conviction and hope that, as Dawkins wishes: “religious readers who open this book will be atheists when they put it down.” It is towards this type of atheist that the perjorative ‘militant’ is prefixed.  Likewise Hitchens happily switches from analytical language to polemical and judgemental language in the short course of a sentence when he says: “Religion is man-made. Religion poisons everything.”

It is not worthy of serious commentary at this stage to refute the arguments that wars, intolerances, hatreds and so on are the offspring of religious belief, Anymore than it should be  necessary to keep reminding people of the particularly atheist characteristics of certain totalitarian regimes, including Stalinism and Nazism, who between them possibly contrived to industriously murder somewhere in the region of 50 million people, as recently as the last century.

That violence between one man to another, between one state to another exists is undeniable, to then specifically attribute the source of this violence (even in atheist regimes) to religion, borders on the hysterically delusional. It is a rather unfortunate and unjustified observation to attribute fault, say to religion, the behaviour of its most extremist adherents, just as unjustified as it would be to state that all Germans are culpable for the actions of the Nazis, that all socialists are tainted by Stalin and Mao, that all white europeans bear the burden of responsibility for slavery.

I am reminded at this stage of a criticism levelled at Dawkins by Alister McGrath, who reminds us that Dawkins in his own book challenges the selective use of data, yet all the while for the purposes and advancement of his own argument collapses into that very fallacious practise of data selection. Dawkins, and for that matter most of the ‘militant’ atheists for whom religion is an institution to be abolished, have a tendency to abandon the scientific, acceptable and rigorous pretences of evidence-based scholarship, often presenting examples of the pathological as though it were the normal. All the while presenting anecdote as though it had the same scholarly value as evidence garnered from a whole host of primary sources.

Then of course there is the casuistical use of scripture by its opponents. Particularly handy for this retort is the Old Testament, whose myths, tales, ritual prescriptions and socio-cultural accounts come in for a great deal of atheist critcism. For example Krauss (in the previously posted article with Dawkins in the Scientific American Magazine) declares in solidarity with Dawkins: “If one believes that homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in the Bible, one has to accept the other things that are said in the Bible, including the allowance to kill your children if they are disobedient or validation of the right to sleep with your father if you need to have a child and there are no other men around, and so forth.” Such observations of course lead Dawkins to present such rational descriptions of the God of the Israelites as being “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak.” And for good measure he adds “A misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, megalomaniac and capriciously malevolent bully.”

What is most extraordinary about this attack from Dawkins is his utter conviction that people of religion all truly believe in that ’sort’ of deity. There probably is a core band of homophobic, rascist and malevolent bullies who do glorify in such a characterisation of the deity, but then again there are equally capriciously malevolent scientists who have sought to inflict pain and misery upon their victims. Yet these demonic figures, lets use the abhorrent Dr Josef Mengele as an example, are by no means truly reflective of the benign and even benevolent majority of scientists and scientific motivations. I certainly could not criticise medical science and hold up Dr Harold Shipman as a paradigm of everything that is wrong with medicine and expect to get away with it. Yet it would appear that it is this puerile approach that Dawkins and Hitchens seem to be so ready to use.

It is incredible that in the case of Dawkins, a highly respected scientist in his own right, who in all fairness is also motivated to defend science from its ignorant detractors, he is so willing to abandon scientific notions of evidence based research in favour of personal prejudices. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton said in criticism of the God delusion: “Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.”

Where, the question goes, in Dawkins and in Hitchens work is the scientific literature on the relationship of harmful and healthy aspects of religion?

But for now lets return to scripture. Its critical use as a weapon against belief seems to bely the fact that as intelligent scholars both Dawkins and Hitchens should be aware of the nature of myth-making throughout human history. Let us take Genesis and the creation story as an example. First of all if anybody was to take an absolutely literalist view of the creation account they must at first contend with the fact that there are two different accounts given. Then as we now know through the various branches of science there is a huge wealth of evidence to debunk for example the idea that the world was created in literally seven days, or that it was a recent event in the nature of 6000 years ago. But for hundreds of years theologians and biblical scholars have proposed that seven days did not literally mean seven calendrical humanly measured days as you and I would experience it. They refer to a letter from Peter in the New Testament who says that a Day to God is like a Thousand years to us. And no, theologians did not then infer that creation took seven thousand years then. What they did infer was that the creation account was a myth chosen as a form of explanation to satiate the intellectual hunger of those who asked the philosophical questions of why, where and how?  Science of course has the methodology to give us the answer to the question how, and very often also to where, but more on that in a moment.  As for the 6000 year old earth, or young-creationist ideal, that isn’t even a biblical assertion, rather it was ‘calculated’ by a bishop many hundreds of years ago, ironically in the quest for scientific certitude. But of course, there are those Christians who hold a literalist view of Genesis and who happily and sometimes ignorantly maintain that their view is the correct one. This is just grist to the mill for Dawkins of course who can then merrily debunk them as delusional members of the lunatic fringe of humanity. But where is his account of the views of the patristic fathers? Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, Eusebius, and Basil did not believe the Genesis account depicted ordinary solar days and read creation history as an allegory as well as being theologically true. An allegorical reading of scripture would, if we are to accept the scholarly credentials of these great thinkers be acceptable. So why then is the Creation story to be taken as a myth and not as literal truth? Well, other than scientific sign posts that point to the obvious, let us consider the reasons for making myths, a peculiarly human activity. Is it not feasible to believe that at some stage in human social development, when a common language emerged and when common social cause was found, lets say in a fledgling religion, that a person enquired ‘how did it all begin?’ Accepting this as a feasible allegory in itself there are three options, respond to the enquiry with an ‘I don’t know’, respond to the enquiry with a ‘It could have been like this’, or simple ignore the question hoping it will go away.  It is pretty likely that the authors of Genesis, specifically the creation account, chose the second option and provided an answer that they hoped would satisfy the enquiry. Of course they made the myth because options 1 or 3 do not satisfy the question, and the myth as it has come down to us today, took the form that it did because the authors some hundreds of years BCE did not have the knowledge and understanding of the universe that todays scientists benefit from. Is this not comparable to the often ham-fisted or ‘factional’ attempts at explanations that parents offer to their small children when they ask sometimes uncomfortable enquiries about things, either the parents do not think the child capable of understanding, or about which the parents do not have sufficient understanding about themselves?  Is this not perhaps comparable (although not equivalent) to telling a child who asks ‘where did I come from?’ not that they came from under a cabbage patch, or were delivered by a stork (both fictions), but that they came from mummy’s tummy, or that they were born because their parents loved each other?

It would seem from the denunciations of Dawkins and Hitchens that even allegory is inadmissable. Must we then, as it would seem they propose, refuse to read the Iliad and the Odyssey because Homer’s existence is as historically uncertain as is the siege of Troy? Must we also reject the axioms of Euclid, who my never have existed and who have been the collective pseudonym for a committee of mathematicians?

But Dawkins and Hitchens have more pressing purposes at hand, surely having demonstrated the unlikelihood of God they must now demonstrate how science is a more reliable answer to all of our uncertainties. This is not to deny sciences usefulness in the field of human knowledge, but it is a small observation to make that science is hardly complete, that we are seemingly no nearer to a grand theory of everything than we were when we first embarked upon this quest. That scientific knowledge is by its nature transient, that the great theories and theoreticians of the past probably will or already have been superceded by those who have demonstrated a greater clarity and refinement in their thinking, is not beyond any doubt.

Dawkins of course subscribes to the belief that eventually one day science will know everything there is to know. Note my italicisation of the word belief, for of course, much to chagrin of Dawkins and likeminded others, to talk of a completion of scientific knowledge, something that not even the majority of scientists are convinced is going to occur anyway, is to make vague appeals and speculations about matters that they just cannot possibly know.

Another criticism of Dawkins is that having made this appeal to a future where science can show everything and knows all that is true, he is still unable to answer the question that once Liebniz posited ‘Why is there something, rather than nothing?’ Now the content of the question is unimportant, what is central though is the enquiry why? Liebniz, like many others of science and of faith, of no science and not of faith, is asking for a purpose. This is where Dawkins becomes derailed. He cannot provide a purposeful explanation, so he adheres to the theory that there is no purpose, that there is no need for explanation. “The Universe has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This of course satisfies the criticism levelled at Dawkins that he is an amateur theologian, that he does not have sufficient background knowledge of the topic to be able to speak with any authority on the matter. His response? Theology is a non-subject about a non-entity, therefore why should he waste his time learning about an irrelevance when he can be focusing on debunking the central tenet of religious belief… God?

But lets get back to purpose, or more specifically Dawkins’ view of universal purposelessness. His view, as expressed at Douglas Adams funeral is that the universe is finely tuned, in fact exquisitely finely tuned, so much so that a slight imperceptible difference in the values of gravity and the strong nuclear forces of the sun would have rendered life here impossible. Of course there are numerous other fine tuned elements to the existence of the earth and to life on earth, each of which had it been slightly different would have caused enormously varied consequences for earth and lifeforms on earth. But, having acknowledged this, Dawkins and his particular school of atheism choose to explain this by means of a non-explanation. It is all simply luck, random chance and an infinite number of improbable coincidences.  A neat, tidy but alas dogmatic and doctrinal argument that seeks to disengage from the debate.

Of course the problem that Dawkins and Hitchens et al face, is why do so many people, including scientists and people of reason, believe in a God that does not exist?

The standard answer is because believers are deluded, so much so that perhaps out of a fear of death they choose to create a God in order to fulfil their wishful fantasies about living beyond death. Interesting notion, actually I have some sympathy towards this, every religion seems to have a preoccuppation about death and what happens to the ‘person’ after death. But this does not infer wish fulfilment or delusion, it is in fact a perfectly reasonable response to a common existential problem for the living.

Hitchens and Dawkins detest faith, they detest religious belief and they would like to see it eradicated. For Hitchens “we distrust anything that contradicts science or reason.” A pity then that he should spend his life rejecting belief beyond evidence, perhaps he should become a recluse and withdraw from the world, after all he cannot enter into a taxi without having a degree of faith that the driver knows how to drive, that the car isn’t about to explode, that the destination isnt still attainable. Perhaps he should even reject Dawkins when he calls non-thinking faith ‘evil’, after all he can only take it on faith that Dawkins is who he says he is, that he knows what he purports to be an authority upon, and that the theories (seemingly sound) that he defends or promotes may not one day be so thoroughly superceded that in the future people may look back and wonder why so-called learned men were so deluded.

Perhaps also we should ridicule the geneticists who expound their theories using the model of DNA, the particle phycisists who talk with certainty of electrons and the cosmologists who maintain that the universe is full of Dark Matter, a ‘thing’ which is by its nature neither observable nor measurable. Instrumental non-existing entities, in other words belief in things beyond evidence.

All in all it would appear that many of the attacks by Dawkins and Hitchens and the ‘militant’ atheist brigade are indeed puerile and threadbare. This is not to deny that we must be vigilant to safeguard scientific progress, that we must shun the most fundamentalist forms of activity based on belief without evidence. We must of course as Dawkins is occasionally trying to do provide a critique of religion.  But to dismiss it as poison, evil, brainwashing, child abuse to name but a few of the criticisms is to fall into a horrendous observational and personal fallacy. I’m reminded and would wish to remind the militant atheists of the agnostic, skeptic, science writer Michael Sherman who stated that “Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.”