The Twilight of Atheism?

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The Twilight of Atheism?

• Professor Alister McGrath
• Oxford University

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The Origins of Modern Atheism

• - Desire for autonomy
• - Oppression by church
• - Longing to break with the past
• William Wordsworth (1804) on the French
  Revolution
• Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
• But to be young was very heaven!

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The Golden Age of Atheism

• A period of exactly two hundred years
• 1789 the fall of the Bastille, and the beginning
  of the French Revolution
• 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the
  collapse of atheist regimes in eastern Europe

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The French Revolution 1789
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The Dawn of the Golden Age

• Hostility towards the French Catholic church
• Church seen as oppressive
• Christianity seen as holding people back from
  their true destiny
• Voltaire (1694-1778)

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Voltaire
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Voltaire

• Is it any wonder that there are atheists in the
  world, when the church behaves so abominably?

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But revolution doesnt need to be atheist!

• Think of the American Revolution of 1776!
• Hostility on the part of Americans to the
  established Church of England did not translate
  into hostility towards Christianity itself

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Dostoyevsky (1821-81)
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Dostoyevsky

• If God exists, then everything is His will, and I
  can do nothing of my own apart from His will. If
  theres no God, then everything is my will, and
  Im bound to express my self-will.

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The Berlin Wall
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1989 The End
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The Origins of Modern Atheism

• Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72)
• Karl Marx (1818-83)
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Richard Dawkins (born 1941)

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Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72)
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The Essence of Christianity (1841)

• Basic idea is that belief in God is a
  projection of human longings
• There is no God so we invent one
• Later developed by Freud into the idea of God as
  a wish-fulfilment

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Problems with Feuerbach

• Things dont exist because we want them to - but
  it is nonsense to say that, because we want
  something to exist, it cannot exist for that
  reason!
• The argument works against both theist and
  atheist
• Christian doctrine of creation has much to say
  here!

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Atheism today

• A new form of atheism has emerged in the last few
  years, partly in response to 9/11
• Leading figures are Richard Dawkins, Daniel
  Dennett, Sam Harris

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• As Dawkins book The God Delusion has now been
  published in Dutch, we will explore some of its
  basic arguments

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Richard Dawkins
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Richard Dawkins (born 1941)

• The Selfish Gene (1976)
• The Extended Phenotype (1981)
• The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
• River out of Eden (1995)
• Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
• Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
• A Devils Chaplain (2003)
• The Ancestors Tale (2004)
• The God Delusion (2006)

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The God Delusion

• If this book works as I intend, religious
  readers who open it will be atheists when they
  put it down.

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The God Delusion

• Four major points
• Belief in God is irrational
• Science shows us there is no God
• Faith in God can be explained away on scientific
  grounds
• Faith in God leads to violence

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1. Belief in God is irrational

• Faith in God is infantile

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Faith is irrational

• Belief in God is a persistently false belief
  held in the face of strong contradictory
  evidence.

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Faith and Proof

• Can Gods existence be proved?
• Or disproved?
• Arguments about Gods existence have been
  stalemated for generations
• Atheism and theism are both faiths neither can
  prove their case with total certainty.

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• If the natural sciences necessitate neither
  atheism nor religious faith, we seem to have two
  broad options about belief in God
• 1. The question lies beyond resolution
• 2. The question has to be resolved on other
  grounds

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Inference to best explanation

• Gilbert Harman, "The Inference to the Best
  Explanation." Philosophical Review 74 (1965)
  88-95.
• More recent explorations include
• Peter Lipton, Inference to the best explanation.
  London Routledge, 2004.

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Inference to the best explanation

• Idea developed by Gilbert Harman
• There are many potential explanations of the
  world
• So which offers the best fit?
• The simplest? The most elegant?
• Not a knock-down argument but an important
  attempt to evaluate how we make sense of complex
  situations

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The idea of "empirical fit"

• What worldview makes most sense of what we
  observe in the world?
• What "big picture" offers the best account of
  what we experience?
• Inference to the best explanation" is about
  working out which explanation is the most
  satisfying

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The idea of "empirical fit"

• Richard Dawkins
• "The universe we observe has precisely the
  properties we should expect if there is, at
  bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no
  good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
• River out of Eden, 133.

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The idea of "empirical fit"

• C. S. Lewis
• "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the
  Sun has risen not only because I see it, but
  because by it, I see everything else."
• C.S. Lewis, "Is theology poetry?", in Essay
  Collection and Other Short Pieces. London
  HarperCollins, 2000, 10-21 21.

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God as a virus of the mind?

• Problem 1
• Real viruses can be seen for example, using
  cryo-electron microscopy. Dawkins cultural or
  religious viruses are simply hypotheses. There is
  no observational evidence for their existence.

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Tobacco Mosaic Virus
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God as a virus?

• Problem 2
• On the basis of Dawkins criteria, isnt atheism
  also a virus of the mind? He has no objective,
  scientific method for distinguishing between his
  own faith (atheism) and that of others (such as
  Christianity).

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Are all beliefs viruses of the mind?

• Dawkins holds that belief in God is a virus of
  the mind.
• But there are many other beliefs that cannot be
  proven including atheism
• Dawkins ends up making the totally subjective,
  unscientific, argument that his own beliefs are
  not viruses, but those he dislikes are.

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2. Science shows us there is no God

• If so, why are so many scientists Christians?
• Francis Collins, The Language of God
• Owen Gingerich, Gods Universe
• Dawkins real scientists dont believe in God!

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The limits of science

• Dawkins argues that science proves things with
  certainty
• Anything worth knowing can be proved by science
• Everything else especially belief in God! is
  just delusion, wishful thinking, or madness

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Science and KnowledgeOne Viewpoint

• "Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be
  attained by scientific methods and what science
  cannot discover, mankind cannot know."
• Bertrand Russell

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Science and KnowledgeAnother Viewpoint

• "The existence of a limit to science is, however,
  made clear by its inability to answer childlike
  elementary questions having to do with first and
  last things questions such as "How did
  everything begin?" "What are we all here for?"
  "What is the point of living?"
• Peter Medawar, winner of the 1960 Nobel prize for
  medicine.

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A q uestion . . .

• If the sciences are inferential in their
  methodology, how can Dawkins present atheism as
  the certain outcome of the scientific project?
• Richard Feynman scientific knowledge is a body
  of statements of varying degree of certainty
  some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none
  absolutely certain.

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3. Explaining the origins of religion

• Are we predisposed to believe in God?
• Dawkins suggests that there is some psychological
  need to believe in God
• Basic argument
• There is no God
• But lots of people believe in God
• Therefore they invent God to meet their needs

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The meme

• Dawkins invented the meme in 1976
• Nobody else takes it with great seriousness
• But its crucial to his argument in The God
  Delusion
• So what is a meme . . . .?

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Four fundamental problems about memes . . .

• 1. There is no reason to suppose that cultural
  evolution is Darwinian, or indeed that
  evolutionary biology has any particular value in
  accounting for the development of ideas.

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Four fundamental problems about memes . . .

• 2. There is no direct evidence for the existence
  of memes themselves.

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Four fundamental problems about memes . . .

• 3. The case for the existence of the meme rests
  on an analogy with the gene, which proves
  incapable of bearing the theoretical weight that
  is placed upon it.

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Four fundamental problems about memes . . .

• 4. Quite unlike the case of the gene, there is no
  necessary reason to propose the existence of a
  meme as an explanatory construct. The
  observational data can be accounted for perfectly
  well by other models and mechanisms.

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Simon Conway-Morris on Memes

• Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple
  mental exercises. In any wider context, they are
  hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic. To
  conjure up memes not only reveals a strange
  imprecision of thought, but, as Anthony OHear
  has remarked, if memes really existed they would
  ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought.

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4. Belief in God causes violence

• Dawkins rightly points out that religion has
  caused lots of problems such as intolerance and
  violence
• But so did atheism in the twentieth century
  witness its attempts to forcibly eliminate
  religion
• The real truth is that beliefs (religious or
  atheist) can make people do some very good and
  very bad things.

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Religion and Violence

• Religion provides a transcendent motivation for
  violence
• But what about transcendentalization of human
  values?
• Example of Madame Roland (executed 1792
• Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!

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What about Jesus?

• Jesus was a devotee of the same in-group
  morality coupled with out-group hostility
  that was taken for granted in the Old Testament.
  Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented
  the idea of taking the Jewish God to the
  Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I
  dare Jesus would have turned over in his grave
  if he had known that Paul would be taking his
  plan to the pigs.

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Religion is a bad thing

• Now "science has no methods for deciding what is
  ethical." - A Devils Chaplain, 34.
• So how do we determine that religion is "bad"
  empirically?

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• W. R. Miller and C. E. Thoreson. "Spirituality,
  Religion and Health An Emerging Research Field."
  American Psychologist 58 (2003) 24-35.

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A key review of the field

• Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen. The Link
  between Religion and Health Psychoneuroimmunolog
  y and the Faith Factor. Oxford Oxford University
  Press, 2001

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• Of 100 evidence-based studies
• 79 reported at least one positive correlation
  between religious involvement and wellbeing
• 13 found no meaningful association between
  religion and wellbeing
• 7 found mixed or complex associations between
  religion and wellbeing
• 1 found a negative association between religion
  and wellbeing.

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• Alister E. McGrath, "Spirituality and well-being
  some recent discussions." Brain A Journal of
  Neurology 129 (2006) 278-82.

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Conclusion

• Who is this book written for?
• How should Christians respond?
• What does this tell us about the present state of
  atheism?

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