Gunning for God (19 page)

The New Atheists do a hatchet job on the God of the Bible. This is just about as useful for rational discussion as the hatchet job that can easily be done with much more justification on science, if you have a mind for it (and some do). It is not hard to bring science into disrepute by concentrating on its involvement in the production of bombs, mines, weapons of mass destruction, poisons, pollution, deforestation, desertification, etc. The New Atheists would be the first to protest against such distortion, if science were the topic.

Yet their ill-tempered onslaught bristles with hostility rather than even-handed scholarly analysis — which might just strike one as somewhat ironic for a
moral
critique, let alone an intellectual one. The net result is patent superficiality. We cannot consider every example in this book; but one particularly glaring instance is Dawkins’ engagement with the biblical teaching on altruism. He dives in with: “Christians seldom realise that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and the New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group.”
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It seems to have completely escaped his research methodology that the reason Christians “seldom realise” lies in the fact that it is completely false. One wonders how many Christians he consulted in order to come to his conclusion, since most of them could easily have helped him avoid making such a clumsy and uninformed blunder.

Dawkins then authoritatively informs us that: “‘Love thy neighbour’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew’.”
²
This statement tells us a great deal about Dawkins’ complete abandonment of any pretence at scholarly thoroughness when it comes to investigating topics outside his competence. If he had taken five minutes to look at the biblical text, instead of simply culling the ignorance of non-theologian John Hartung, he would surely not have made himself look so ridiculous. The Hartung-Dawkins “exegesis” is based on Leviticus 19:18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It is clear that Dawkins (or Hartung?) was so convinced of the correctness of his interpretation that he did not bother to read the rest of Leviticus 19. He would have discovered a little further on the explicit injunction that loving one’s neighbour was
not
intended to be confined to an in-group: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
³

Not content with misconstruing Leviticus, Dawkins now informs us that Jesus was himself a “devotee of the same in-group morality”.
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As we have just seen, this in-group morality was not taught in the Old Testament. Nor was Jesus one of the devotees of such a fictitious morality. This is not a matter of conjecture. On one occasion Jesus was asked what was meant by the word “neighbour” in the Old Testament dictum “Love your neighbour as yourself.” He replied with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the whole point of which was to show that neighbourliness transcended ethnic boundaries.

Perhaps Dawkins can be forgiven for not knowing Leviticus; but he can scarcely be forgiven for displaying an equally abysmal ignorance of one of the most famous parables in all of literature. Such is the mess that Dawkins has got himself into, by failing to check the facts and by restricting himself to a single and non-expert source — the medical doctor and part-time social anthropologist John Hartung, whose speciality, perhaps unsurprisingly, is anaesthetics. A brief internet perusal of Hartung’s views on the Jewish people would lead one to shy away very rapidly from lending credibility to any assessment of biblical documents he might make. I know what Dawkins would think if I obtained all my information about Darwin from a theologian, an expert on Chinese philology, or maybe even an anaesthetist.

Such a misreading of Scripture on a fundamental yet elementary issue is hardly calculated to inspire confidence in any other pronouncement Dawkins might make on biblical teaching. There is no doubt that moral questions do arise in connection with the Bible that need to be addressed; but it will not help us in the least if that analysis is based on unscholarly, ill-informed, and incorrect views of what the Bible actually has to say.

The New Atheists are surely aware, but they omit to say, that the Bible teaches that God is not only a God of awesome creatorial genius and power, but a God of compassion, mercy, justice, beauty, holiness, and love, who cares for his creation and for human beings as part of it. According to the Bible, human beings are special: every man and woman is made in the image of God and therefore has infinite value. The importance of this teaching cannot be over-emphasized, since it lies behind and energizes the values that most of us hold to be inviolable — in particular, our Western concepts of the value of each individual human life, of human rights, and of gender equality.

The eminent European lawyer Dr Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was underlining this fact, when he made the following observation that has received a great deal of discussion: “The secular state lives from normative assumptions that it cannot itself guarantee.”
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It is for this reason that atheist intellectual Jürgen Habermas calls for secular society not to cut itself off from important resources by failing to retain a sense of the power of articulation of religious language: “Philosophy has reasons to remain open to learn from religious tradition.”
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Habermas makes it clear that the biblical idea of human beings as created in the image of God belongs to the genealogy of human rights.

History confirms this view. In his detailed discussion, historian Arnold Angenendt points out, for instance, that the early church fathers condemned slavery on the basis that no one made in the image of God should be bought with money. In the Middle Ages, Burchard von Worms said that anyone who killed a Jew or heathen person had blotted out both an image of God and the hope of future salvation. In the seventeenth century, John Milton said that “all men are free born because they are in the image of God”.
⁷

NEW ATHEIST MORALITY: THE NEW TEN COMMANDMENTS

The importance of biblical moral teaching for ethics receives a rather unexpected and unintended confirmation by the New Atheists themselves; although, to be fair, they put a different interpretation on it, as we shall see. In his section on “The Moral Zeitgeist”
⁸
Richard Dawkins observes
⁹
that most people, religious or not, subscribe to more or less the same general moral principles,
¹⁰
and he suggests that these ethics should be codified in a “New Ten Commandments” (NTC). His chosen list of commandments is taken from a web blog.

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.

3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

6. Always seek to be learning something new.

7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the rights of others to disagree with you.

9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience: do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

10. Question everything.
¹¹

Now the first thing that strikes us about this list is that, although they contain no reference to God, of course, these New Ten Commandments have much in common with the biblical Ten Commandments (BTC), which we list for comparison:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image — any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

5. Honour your father and your mother.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour’s.

The Ten Commandments have what we might think of as two dimensions: a vertical dimension to do with relationships between humans and God (1—4), and a horizontal dimension concerned with relationships between humans and their fellows (5—10). The New Ten Commandments have only the horizontal dimension in view.

Comparing the lists, the first four of the NTC roughly correspond to the last six of the BTC. The last five of the NTC relate to processes of reasoning, questioning, testing, and opinion forming, and are not, strictly speaking, moral injunctions at all, apart possibly from NTC 8. They are on the one hand a clear expression of the Enlightenment spirit that New Atheism wishes to foster — God replaced with (human) reason. And yet on the other hand we see at once that most of the sentiments expressed, like NTC 1—4, are also to be found in the Bible. Let’s have a brief glance at them:

NTC 5
. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

The Bible is replete with encouragement to be joyful — “A joyful heart is good medicine”;
¹²
and the coming of Christ into the world is heralded in the famous words “I bring you good tidings of great joy”.
¹³
These words form part of a well-known Christmas carol which, we are reliably informed by none other than himself, Richard Dawkins is happy to sing.
¹⁴
So at least some of his joy would appear to come directly from Christianity.

NTC 6
. Always seek to be learning something new.

The early Christians were known as “disciples” — the word means “learner”. It is of the essence of true Christianity always to be seeking to learn something new, to keep mentally fresh and vigorous. Christopher Hitchens recalls
¹⁵
how he gave the address at his father’s funeral in Portsmouth, choosing as his text Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things”. One of the reasons Hitchens gives for choosing that text is “for its essentially secular injunction.” However, this is essentially a Christian injunction, based on the fact that God is no killjoy (peace be to the atheist bus campaign). God positively encourages us to get interested in everything that is true, honest, just, lovely, and good.

NTC 7
. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

But that is exactly what the Christian apostle Paul instructs all Christians to do.
¹⁶
Atheists do not have a monopoly on avoiding gullibility. All of us need to heed that warning.

NTC 8
. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the rights of others to disagree with you.

Openness to dissent and upholding the right of others to disagree with us is the meaning of true tolerance; and we need to be reminded of it in an age of hypocritical and dangerous political correctness that says that we must not disagree with anyone in case they would be offended. Historically, the concept of true tolerance is grounded in the value of human beings as made in the image of God. I welcome the fact that the New Atheists profess tolerance to be one of their core beliefs. I must confess, though, that it sounds rather empty, in light of the intolerance of religious belief that characterizes so many of their statements. It sounds as if they don’t even take their own commandments very seriously.