As anyone familiar with antireligious polemics knows, a recurring
atheist criticism of religious belief is that it is infantile—a childish
delusion which ought to have disappeared as humanity reaches its
maturity. Throughout his career Dawkins has developed a similar
criticism, drawing on a longstanding atheist analogy. In earlier
works he emphasized that belief in God is just like believing in the
Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. These are childish beliefs that are
abandoned as soon as we are capable of evidence-based thinking.
And so is God. It's obvious, isn't it? As Dawkins pointed out in his
"Thought for the Day" on BBC Radio in 2003, humanity "can leave
the crybaby phase, and finally come of age." This "infantile expla
how to persuade "dyed-in-the wool faith-heads" that atheism is
right, when they are so deluded by religion that they are immune
to any form of rational argument. Faith is thus essentially and irredeemably
irrational. In support of his case Dawkins has sought
out Christian theologians who he believes will substantiate this
fundamentally degenerate aspect of religious faith. In earlier writings
he asserted that the third-century Christian writer Tertullian
said some particularly stupid things, including "it is by all means
to be believed because it is absurd." This is dismissed as typical religious
nonsense. "That way madness lies."
He's stopped quoting this now, I am pleased to say, after I
pointed out that Tertullian actually said no such thing. Dawkins
had fallen into the trap of not checking his sources and merely repeating
what older atheist writers had said. It's yet another wearisome
example of the endless recycling of outdated arguments that
has become so characteristic of atheism in recent years.
However, Dawkins now seems to have found a new example of
the irrationalism of faith—well, new for him, at any rate. In The
God Delusion he cites a few choice snippets from the sixteenthcentury
German Protestant writer Martin Luther, culled from the
Internet, demonstrating Luther's anxieties about reason in the life
of faith. No attempt is made to clarify what Luther means by reason
and how it differs from what Dawkins takes to be the selfevident
meaning of the word.
What Luther was actually pointing out was that human reason
could never fully take in a central theme of the Christian faith—
that God should give humanity the wonderful gift of salvation
without demanding they do something for him first. Left to itself,
human common sense would conclude that you need to do something
to earn God's favor—an idea that Luther regarded as compromising
the gospel of divine graciousness, making salvation
something that you earned or merited.
Dawkins's inept engagement with Luther shows how Dawkins
abandons even the pretense of rigorous evidence-based scholarship.
Anecdote is substituted for evidence; selective Internet
trawling for quotes displaces rigorous and comprehensive engagement
with primary sources. In this book, Dawkins throws
the conventions of academic scholarship to the winds; he wants
to write a work of propaganda and consequently treats the accurate
rendition of religion as an inconvenient impediment to his
chief agenda, which is the intellectual and cultural destruction of
religion. It's an unpleasant characteristic that he shares with other
fundamentalists.
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