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Darwin & Damascus:
Forks in the road to enlightenment

By Elizabeth Glass

Marching under the banner of free inquiry and rational thinking, a triad of pugilistic authors have chosen to go to battle with the Trinity. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have loaded the New York Times bestsellers list with titles such as Letter to a Christian Nation, The God Delusion, and God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything.

The three bombard all religion with fallacies and epithets of every shade and stripe, coat tailing on the popularity of The DaVinci Code. Are they taken seriously? The royalties piling up suggest so. Together, these three books combined have sold nearly a million copies.

These popular writers represent several disciplines and approaches, though their goals bind most of their arguments together. Two of the three are British.

Englishman Richard Dawkins is a molecular biologist at Oxford University and is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science there. Though The God Delusion (500,000 copies sold) asserts the improbability of God's existence, he previously took on similar issues in The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

American Sam Harris is author of the bestselling The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, a work volatile enough to prompt his subsequent response to readers in Letter to a Christian Nation (185,000 copies sold), by far the shortest of the three works addressed in this review.

God is Not Great (296,000 copies sold) is not Christopher Hitchens' first fevered attack on faith. In addition to his books on history and politics as well as essays in Vanity Fair, he is also the author of The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory & Practice-a severe portrayal of the Nobel Prize winning nun from Calcutta.

It should be noted from the outset that neither Harris, Dawkins, nor Hitchens have added anything intellectually fresh to the traditional arguments of atheism. Offering his critique of the three books in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and professor at George Mason University School of Law, seconds the notion. "'There is nothing new under the sun,' proclaims the book of Ecclesiastes. The rise of the new new atheism confirms this ancient biblical wisdom," he writes.

The primary targets of these collected works are hypocrisy, theocracies of violence, the psychological problems of the religious, and anti-intellectualism. Though they employ examples from many different religions-from the folk religions of the Pacific to Bible Belt fundamentalist Christianity-it is the latter that they most often tie to the whipping post. Indeed, Protestant Christianity moves Hitchens to proclaim himself an "antitheist." Peculiarly, he asserts that, "I now know enough about all religions to know that I would always be an infidel at all times and in all places, but my particular atheism is a Protestant atheism." One cannot be certain if Martin Luther would find Hitchens' laughable clarification a compliment or a slap in the face.

Interestingly, Dawkins seems to respond quietly throughout his work towards a different aim, the problem of evil-that is, the existence of suffering in the world. Though driven by this motivation, he unfortunately concludes that it is religion itself that causes suffering and evil. "Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness-its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favor in-groups and shun out-groups-would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world."

The best-selling triad may be strident, but the public is paying attention. Intellectually, this is pitiable in light of the ease with which they dismiss classic arguments for the existence of God as if they were last year's shoes. Hitchens levels that, "While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way-one might cite Pascal-and some of it is dreary and absurd-here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis-both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear."

Professor Berkowitz takes exception with this, alleging that, "The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing." While Harris and Dawkins launch attacks upon classic conservative Christian planks-watersheds like abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell research-Hitchens offers a blistering journalistic approach, sketching the problem of religion globally.

Surprises do await the reader in unexpected moments of shared ground. Hitchens laments violent Islam. Harris critiques liberal Christianity. Hitchens skewers relativism. They all mysteriously respect Bonhoeffer. And read this humorous comment from Harris: "I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms. Consequently, liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the 'Christian' I address." Harris continues: "I would like to acknowledge that there are many points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance that if one of us is right, the other is wrong. The Bible is either the word of God, or it isn't. We agree that to be a true Christian is to believe that all other faiths are mistaken, and profoundly so." Harris' aim is not a wave of thoughtless tolerance and multiculturalism gone awry, a watered down acceptance of any belief. He agrees with Lewis that it must be one way or the other. Harris simply chooses the other.

Whatever brief moment of convergence one finds with the authors, plenty of critics have addressed the whole of their thought. Hitchens' arguments are laid bare, interestingly enough, by his own brother, Peter Hitchens, an outspoken columnist for London's Daily Mail. In Books & Culture, Alvin Plantinga dissects Dawkins' assertions, exposing the flaws in his thinking that ultimately undermine his message. Christian theologian Alistair McGrath countered his Oxford colleague Richard Dawkins in a book-length response. Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren debated Sam Harris for Newsweek a few months ago. Christian author Eric Metaxas flustered Hitchens on Paula Zahn.

Additionally, while Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens applaud their own courage in facing death without an afterlife and morality without the motivating threat of punishment, they fail to note the frequent irony gushing from their own words. While Dawkins and Hitchens particularly compare the outcomes of religious devotion to a big brother, Orwellian world of possible "thought crime," they systematically render the identical result. While they rail against religion's influence in science and "personal" morality, they themselves would seek to intervene when a parent raises her child within a religion, seeing religious training as more harmful than sexual abuse. Dawkins describes his opinion on the sexual abuse cases discovered among priests: "I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place."

Dawkins asserts, "Religious leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the importance of getting the indoctrination in early." He goes on to laud his contemporary Nicholas Humphrey's haunting statement that, "Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas.parents, correspondingly, have no God-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith." Which is the witch hunt?

These authors also repeatedly draw a flawed dichotomy between faith and reason, disallowing a "reasonable" or intellectual faith. In doing so, they attack faith and pronounce it dead via their assumptions that religions are a chance byproduct of evolutionary processes.

All three writers attack the weakest form of their opponents, rather than the strongest. The best argument is one formed at the target's strongest point, disabling it and rendering it neutralized. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens surprisingly go for the "easy" hits-the violence of radical Islam, the Christians who bomb abortion clinics, the priests who abuse children, and the con men who take offerings from little old ladies. In the examples of religious violence provided by Hitchens and Harris, the scenarios are always taken from contexts with no separation of church and state.

Dawkins and Hitchens caricature the religious by declaring spiritual belief to be a form of mental illness or neurological malady. Dawkins diagnoses that, "Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these [brain] modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favor of in-group members and against strangers." He continues, "The general theory of religion as an accidental by-product-a misfiring of something useful-is the one I wish to advocate." Not only does Dawkins paint religious belief as outdated as a half-evolved wing, he also likens it to childlike, wishful yearning. Referencing A. A. Milne's poem on an imaginary friend, he claims, "I suspect the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults. Companion and confidant, a Binker for life: that is surely one role that God plays-one gap that might be left if God were to go."

Hitchens concurs with Dawkins' charge of mental immaturity when he blasts that, "[Religion] comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs)." As if declaring that religion is a cosmic blankie for the frightened and half-witted weren't enough, Hitchens ensures his disdain hits its mark. "The connection between religious faith and mental disorder is, from the viewpoint of the tolerant and the 'multicultural,' both very obvious and highly unmentionable."

Given their assessment of the religious mind, one cannot be surprised at their offhanded dismissal of sacred texts. On the triad's "critiques" of biblical texts, Berkowitz puts it best: "As for [Hitchens'] claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr. Hitchens's readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame."

Forgoing critical thinking and basic philosophy, one might easily be intimidated by the harsh tones of the provoking writers, even though they fail to distinguish "between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious teachings," as Berkowitz charges. As it is, the problem is not that one of them will accidentally disprove Christianity. Nor is the problem that they have any new critiques of faith. What is most vexing is their attempt to claim a position of the norm.

For Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, the goal is to speak for the "unheard" minority of unbelievers who represent what they define as rational, scientific inquiry and the possibility of morals without religious mandates. This latest batch of anti-religious writing frames religion not as a possible truth claim to whom one may be compelled to conform. Rather, for them, truth only arises from the natural world around us, and may only be discovered there. Religion becomes nothing more than an outdated evolved sociological pattern that is now, according to these authors, more harmful than helpful.

This much is clear, then. The best responses to Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens may not be so much defending one's denomination or specific theology (though the Christianity they attack tends to be a narrow Calvinism). With their ramped-up and hyperbolic rhetoric, the situation may require not only fighting for a team but simply defending the playing field. Thus, the unifying effect of these works is ironic. Never once have I imagined myself shoulder to shoulder with new age guru Deepak Chopra. But now it is not only Christianity that is maligned, but any and all forms of supernaturalism. The strange moment has come in which to stand with other faiths in affirming our very right to exist.

Historically, faith has survived similar frontal assaults from Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Marx. The latest breed of atheist, however, does not seem content to survive alongside the religious any longer; indeed, it seems anxious to ensure its place in the "natural selection" of worldviews. As Hitchens so calmly and eerily asserts, "the person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun, and, like all farewells, should not be protracted."

Elizabeth Glass is editorial assistant at Good News.



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