Faith and the Evidence:The Answer to Dawkins

8/7/2019 Faith and the Evidence:The Answer to Dawkins

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FAITH AND THE EVIDENCE:

THE ANSWER TO DAWKINS

BY TOM WOODMAN


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Front Cover Image Credits - Manuel Velasco

Purchased from - www.istockphoto.com

Reference Number - 4874373

Published by Tom Woodman

Copyright Tom Woodman


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Religion, Good and/or Bad

The practice of religion is in serious decline in Europe and

especially in the United Kingdom, but this is certainly not

the case in the rest of the world. Globally about 85% of thepopulation is estimated to be adherents of one form of religion

or another.1Quite apart from the growth of militant Islam there

are huge numbers of Christians in Africa (up from 10 million

in the nineteenth century to 200 million now), South America,

the former Eastern bloc, and even in China, which now has a

large number of conversions. UK church attendance has beendeclining for many years, however, and this accelerated very

fast from the 1960s on. Now only about 6% of the population

attends a place of worship regularly. Non-attendance at church

is not, of course, the same thing as lacking all religious feeling,

and Pope Benedicts comments about the aggressive secularism

of Britain on his recent visit seem to have been modied by

the time he returned to Rome. What does seem to be thecase, however, is that a whole generation has grown up with

very little knowledge of conventional religion or of the Bible.

Our own unfamiliarity and insularity can sometimes give us

the impression that religion is dying or made up entirely of

fundamentalism, superstition and violence, but this is a very

skewed perception of what is going on in the world at large.

After September 11th attitudes to religion changed for the

worse. Thereafter the fear of Islamic terrorism became a huge

factor in the thinking of Western governments. Three days

later Professor Richard Dawkins wrote a piece in the Guardian

called Religions Misguided Missiles claiming that the atrocity


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was the result of religion. Later, July 7th was to make the

British people very aware that support for the Iraq War had

made this country a specic target. At the same time the Neo-

conservative Bush regime, widely supported by American

born-again Christians, became very unpopular here, and therewas a growing consciousness of the unfortunate inuence of

that strand of American Christianity. Dawkins book The God

Delusion became a remarkable best-seller in 2006, and he

became a cult celebrity, appearing as himself in Doctor Who,

for example. Facebook reveals a wide network of fans who call

him better than Jesus or say that he would be their God if they

believed in God! His aggression and prestige have emboldened

other critics, and atheism in some circles has become militant

and evangelical, with the London bus campaign Theres

probably no God (January 2009), and various controversies

about faith schools and religion in the public sphere.

Although such aggressive secularism only represents asmall minority there is no point in denying that it has also had

a real impact on the general public. At one point in recent years

a survey suggested that 42% of the British people regarded

religion as a source of harm (Sunday Times February 9th 2007),

and the gures are even higher when young people are surveyed.

Through no fault of their own Dawkins more youthful fans havelittle experience of religion themselves, and they are not aware

that they have become the victims of a pre-emptive strike, a

very one-sided presentation by an expert who has very limited

qualications for speaking on the subject at all. Almost all those,

believers or not, who are well informed about religion do not

respect Professor Dawkins work on this subject, and it would


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be revealing to see how he would get on if he were quizzed on

purely factual matters such as the history of religion and what

the world religions actually teach.

This does not mean, of course, that there is no truth inanything that he says on the subject. There is no point in denying

that religion can be dangerous. Since there have always been

such a large number of religious believers of one kind or another

in the world it is not hard to nd examples of many who have

been bigoted, hypocritical, superstitious and nasty. Religious

fundamentalism can be intellectually bankrupt and even morally

harmful. Those who bolster their own egos and opinions with

the belief that God is on their side, as for example with those

Americans who somehow nd the right to bear arms part of

the biblical revelation, can be a source of danger to themselves

and others. As everyone knows not only individual believers

but the Church itself has been responsible for many evils over

the centuries, and there has been considerable and very blatantcorruption in various forms. Religious motives have led people

to persecute those of other faiths and none, and have often

become intertwined with nationalism and other ideologies. There

have been special links with terrorism in the past few years, and

over the course of history religion has undeniably been a factor

in many wars. The great satirist Jonathan Swift, himself anAnglican priest, pointed out long ago that:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of

lives; for instance, whether esh be bread, or bread be

esh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or

wine Neither are any wars so furious and bloody,


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or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by

difference in opinion, especially if it be in things

indifferent. (Gullivers Travels, Book 4, Chapter 5)

Those who have the interests of true religion at heart willalways have to try to acknowledge these things in sincerity

and humility. In fact it is believers who have always been the

most passionate critics of religious institutions and their abuses:

the Old Testament prophets, Jesus himself, and those such as

St Catherine of Siena (who rmly corrected Popes), Martin

Luther and John Wesley in the long history of the Church.

All that we can reasonably ask of Professor Dawkins and his

allies is that they try to grasp that there are different kinds of

religion and different kinds of belief and believers. They are

over-generalising wildly in lumping all religion together and

painting only the very bleakest of pictures. It sometimes seems,

for example, that the Crusades are the only historical fact that

people now know about the Church, and Anne Widdicombewas quite right to point out on BBC Question Time that they

happened a long time ago and that we should look at them in a

wider perspective now. People in other centuries had different

values to us and cannot always be judged completely by modern

standards. Times have changed anyway. The Spanish Inquisition,

to take another notorious example, was run by the state with theassistance of the Church. No one would blame modern Spain for

it but they continue to blame the modern Church.

It would be helpful to adopt the elementary precaution

of learning to make certain distinctions. There are various

kinds of fundamentalism, for example. American Bible-belt


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fundamentalism is not exactly the same kind of phenomenon as

Islamic fundamentalism, although it has some things in common

with it. Most fundamentalism is not violent and dangerous, even

though we might well quarrel with it intellectually. Much of it

is the product of narrow education and cultural isolation, but tocondemn all religion on this basis is like condemning science on

the grounds of the general publics grasp of scientic concepts.

The Amish in the United States are clearly fundamentalists and

they refuse to use modern technology. Yet they have a long

tradition of pacism and conscientious objection and represent

no danger to anyone at all. Islamic fundamentalism itself is

much wider than terrorism and must not be identied with

it. Terrorism exploits and abuses religious fundamentalism,

but is not in any simple sense caused by it. An MI5 survey in

this country identied actual religious practice as a contra-

indication to terrorism (7th October 2007,Daily Telegraph). As

the political thinker John Gray has pointed out, most terrorism

actually has secular roots such as Marxist-Leninism.2

To see religion as the main cause of war will not survive

a look at the historical facts either, although any war that has

religion as its pretext is a terrible scandal. Yet the overall picture

is a much more complicated one than the enemies of religion

suggest. As Swift once again said: We have just enoughreligion to make us hate our neighbours but not enough to make

us love them (Thoughts on Various Subjects). The solution

would seem then to be true religion, not the abolition of religion.

Religion has been able to transcend its links with sectarianism

and nationalism and to be a great source of peace-making as

well. Everyone knows that Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi and


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Martin Luther King were religiously-inspired men of peace. If

we take the notorious example of Northern Ireland we see that

religion became intertwined with nationalism and a sense of

oppression but that religious people were also in the forefront

of the peace movement. Can we have any doubt which impulsemost truly represents the spirit of religion? It is a terrible slander

on many believers in the world not to recognise that they

live peaceable lives and want to continue to do so, and this is

because of their religion not in spite of it.

History shows that all institutions are awed, especiallyvast worldwide ones with a long and complicated record,

and individual believers who make up the members of

religious institutions or even become leaders of them are often

hypocritical, sinful or deluded. The fact that there have been

multiple failures in living up to the best (or any) standards of

faith is hardly an argument against faith itself. The recent sex

abuse scandals have been a terrible blot on the Church, and stillmore perhaps the attempted cover-ups. To say anything to try

to mitigate this would seem to be defending the indefensible.

Yet the fact remains that the widespread exaggeration of the

numbers involved or the attempt to defame the whole Church as

a result are not justied. If a school teacher is caught up in such

a scandal no one speaks as if all school teachers are involvedor schools themselves are a bad idea, and yet this is the view

the media seems to have succeeded in encouraging about the

Church.

G. K. Chesterton was right in a way when he said that

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been


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found difcult and left untried.3Or to put it less extremely, there

is a real distinction to be made between faith and religion: the

former a living and personal encounter; the latter the necessary

but often very imperfect institutional forms to which many

believers adhere with what may be very limited understandingand very conventional practice.

Intellectually as well as culturally Professor Dawkins and

his allies, as has often been said, share with their most extreme

religious opponents a desire to sideline more thoughtful

believers. We must be careful not to let the creationists, for

example, set the agenda but we must equally refuse to let the

enemies of religion get away with the idea that most believers

are fundamentalists. Only a small minority of people in this

country believe in creationism, for example, and it is by no

means the case that the majority of Protestants in the world do.

Pope Benedict XVI has reafrmed that Roman Catholics do

not believe in creationism and he has also refused the requestto endorse the theory of intelligent design. The great medieval

theologian St Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274) was very clear that

God worked through secondary causes and was to be seen as the

ultimate cause or reason behind the physical causes of creation

rather than the physical cause Himself. Today theologians speak

of the universes dependence on God as the space in which Hewill nally work out His purposes. These are not easy matters

to conceptualise, but it is disappointing that a scientist of the

eminence of Stephen Hawking did not investigate theological

ways of thinking before announcing that the universe has no

need of God. The brains of highly intelligent non-believers

desert them on these subjects just as much as the brains of


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simplistic believers do (and with much less excuse).

To sum up this whole section it can be said that the claim

that all religion is bad is simply untenable. To lump together St

Francis of Assisi and suicide bombers; the Inquisition and theSalvation Army is absurd. Looking from a purely secular and

objective point of view the scientist Freeman Dyson makes the

point in a way that ought to be denitive:

We all know that religion has been historically, and

still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great

good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars

and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of

religion. We have also seen large numbers of people

inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing

education and medical care to the poor, helping to

abolish slavery and spread peace among nations...4


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Where is the Evidence?

At the core of the Dawkins case is the assertion that religion is

irrational. This is actually no more than an assertion, but it has

been repeated so often and so loudly in recent years that manypeople in this country have come to take it as an established

fact, including intellectuals who ought to know better. But

where is the evidence for this assertion, or more accurately,

what possible kind of evidence could there be that would prove

it to be true? Looking at the universe around them and in the

light of their own experience as well as their traditions manypeople have concluded that there is an ultimate spiritual power

that they call God. Theologians of the major world faiths have

attempted to argue their case logically and carefully (theology

as an academic discipline has to use the methods of reason

and documentation of evidence). At a completely different

level the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, to take one very

impressive example, has found time and again in the veryimmediate details of practical experience that invoking what

they call a persons Higher Power has extraordinary effects in

rescuing people from addictions. These and many other such

experiences and convictions may be founded on a genuine

mistake. It is difcult to see, however, how they can simply be

described as irrational.

Of course, as already said, many believers may have

simple views of their faith, and their religion may be mixed

with superstition or at the very least they may be unable to

articulate it in mature terms to themselves or others. (This does

not necessarily mean that their actual relationship with God is


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inadequate.) Yet Pope Benedict was very insistent in his recent

Westminster Hall address that religion needs reason to guard it

against various errors and dangers of the kind already discussed

here.

What it comes down to in the end is that Professor Dawkins

and his allies adopt a lowest common denominator approach,

presenting a travesty of religious concepts. Dawkins himself

is remarkably honest about his refusal to read theology, and

this creates a very convenient situation for him. It is all

irrational rubbish anyway, so he therefore doesnt have to readthe arguments of those throughout the ages who have tried to

present their case in reasonable terms. The consequence is that

he assumes he knows what Christian faith teaches and instead

of nding out knocks down the scarecrows he has set up himself

whilst attacking believers for their credulity in believing his own

distorted version.

It is Dawkins scientic background that leads him to ask

Wheres the evidence? and this is an entirely legitimate

question; only he has refused to listen to the answers. Believers

are not expected to believe without reasons and as a leap in the

dark, as is sometimes supposed. How could we be expected to

believe anything under those circumstances? As one theologianputs it very clearly, Belief in God, if it arises at all, arises out of

observed facts, and belief in the Christian God arises out of the

observed facts concerning Jesus.5

We must be careful, however, not to allow ourselves to be

boxed into a narrowly conceived purely physical denition of


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what evidence is. That is not how we conduct our lives in

other respects. In a well known article about religious language

Ian Ramsey refers to its validity in terms of a comparison with

the experience of trustworthiness in personal relationships

of friendship and love.6

Can we scientically prove thetrustworthiness of our mother, our spouse, our friend? No, but

we empirically experience it if we are fortunate by a series of

repeated events that in the end convince us beyond reasonable

doubt.

Evidence is not a scientic word but a legal one, and

we nd in the legal system not only forensic science but also

circumstantial evidence, testimony from witnesses, character

evidence, and an intuitive sense that has to sum up the relative

weight of all these factors to reach a verdict. Interestingly

enough witness and testimony are both religious words too,

words used to indicate trustworthy reports about matters of faith.

What we need to understand is that religious discourse comes

not from philosophical speculation but from human experience,

reected on in its deepest meanings. Just as in some aspects

of physics, we can only understand spiritual realities by a kind

of echo-chamber effect of their reverberations in the world of

matter. As the greatest psychologist of religion William James(never even mentioned in The God Delusion), writes in The

Varietiesof Religious Experience,spiritual energy ows in and

produces effects within the phenomenal world.7Professor

Dawkins has a very short section on religious experience in The

God Delusion, and he takes such experience entirely in the sense

of extraordinary phenomena: visions, the hearing of supernatural


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voices and so on. Naturally enough from his perspective he

regards them as hallucinations and illusions. He does not seem

to realise that all mainstream religions and all the best known

mystics caution against placing trust in them. Even, for example,

the dramatic events at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal, whichDawkins discusses, are not so much afrmed directly by the

Catholic Church as allowed by it, said not to be in conict with

it.

Religious experience as a whole is not about the world of

ostentatious miracles but about human experience seen in its

spiritual and religious dimension. Ian Ramsey in the article

referred to above presents various contexts and usages in which

the word God may be held to have an experiential and even

empirical context. All human beings, whether they know it

or not (although a remarkable number of people who are not

specic believers testify to it), have some evidence of God, and

this comes to them through their human experience (of whichreason is a part): their sense of life as a gift or as a blessing or

as a mystery or as making an unconditional moral demand on

them. Theologies and arguments for God have been built up on

these grounds, and it is true that they are especially helpful in

opening up possibilities for dialogue with non-believers.

For believers, however, the crucial evidence is much more

specic. The scientist A. R. Peacocke goes so far as to insist on

using the language not only of experience but even, by analogy,

of experiment in talking about God. He says that we gradually

come to compare religious doctrines with the historical accounts

about Jesus and with our own experiences in life in our present-


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day communities of belief. This process of checking one against

another amounts to an empirical testing of the worthwhileness

of the public formulations which summarize past Christian

experience and events.8

General theoretical and abstract arguments about the

existence of God or God as original creator are thus not really

the point. The great French Christian and scientist Pascal

famously proclaimed, The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,

the God of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers (Memorial

found sewn in his clothing after his death). The author of the

popular religious novel The Shackputs it quite nicely by saying

God is a verb not a noun.9God is known in his action, in

encounter in the world of history. He is the one experienced as

liberator and law-giver by the community of Israel in the Old

Testament, who did not arrive at their faith by conjuring

up or inventing a deity but came to realise his action in what

happened to them.10 This is the God who is the agent and thesubject of the Kingdom in the New Testament. For Christians,

of course, God is above all the one encountered and experienced

in and through Jesus Christ. Professor Dawkins patronisingly

mocks Christians as having an imaginary friend. He has

a genuine respect for Jesus himself, and once proposed an

atheists for Jesus movement, but he does not seem to realisethat Christians believe Jesus, a real human being, whose

historical existence no reputable scholar doubts, to be the

mediator and revealer of God. As one theologian says, it is

not possible to doubt the reality of God, once we have known

One in whom God is recognisably present, drawing us into

fellowship with Himself.11


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Faith in the Community

The Bible is a central record and report of religious

experience, and it also has the evident capacity of passing that

experience on to us. The biblical communities of Israel carryforward into the life of the early church, since Christianity

would not have come into existence without the religion of

Israel. The life of that early church in turn leads on to the life of

the post-New Testament church, and continues up to the present

time. Through reading the original documents as passed on

by the early communities it is possible to some extent to sharetheir reported experience. It is very much the claim to evidence,

witness and testimony that is made there:

That which was from the beginning, which we have

heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we

have looked at and our hands have touchedthis

we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The lifeappeared; we have seen it and testify to it.We

proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that

you also may have fellowship with us. (1 John 1:1-3)

From these very earliest times in the history of the Christian

community believers recognised that they experienced notjust the memory and meaning of Jesus but also something

very much more profoundthey realised that in a mysterious

way they were able to share in his continued life, activity and

presence. They also came to understand that they were able

to be the presence of Jesus for each other and for the world

at largethat as a group, as modern English might say, they


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embodiedhis presence. A famous statement attributed to St.

Theresa of Avila (1512-1582) says that Christ has no body

now but yours. In and through the community of today we

are able to encounter Jesus, as energy ows from the original

source through the historical communities and into each of usin the present. Another well known spiritual guide, the French

Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), writes: Jesus Christ

has lived in the past and still lives in the present; he began in

himself and continues in his saints a life that will never nish

O life which is initiating new operations at every moment!12

Or in the strikingly contemporary terms in which I heard a

missionary nun put it, it is still possible to access Christ today.

At the same time we also realise that such an encounter is not a

purely subjective experience, any more than our experience of

any other person is. It is validated by the other members of the

current community and by comparing the reported experience of

the original foundational community with our own.

To use the same bodily metaphor in an alternative

sense, these early communities experienced that they were

incorporatedinto Christ, given a new identity that was shared

with others who also became part of him. This is the traditional

doctrine of the church as the Body of Christ, and although it is

not a way of thinking that is very familiar in the modern world

it can come to be a very deep and rich reality. Certainly in the

Bible these ideas are far from just being metaphors. Israel in the

Old Testament is seen as one entity, a kind of collective person

which draws its sense of identity from the whole community

in which the individual members share. The New Testament

goes further: not only is the Church the Body of Christ, the way


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in which he now lives in the world, but Jesus is seen as the

new Adam, the new representative human being. It is because

of this that his life, death and resurrection affects everyone,

whether they are believers or not. For believers, however, it is

by our experience in the community that we can approach thisbelief of the early Churchs in the special, representative and

central quality of Jesus. We come to grasp a whole new sense of

meaning, even a new sense of identity, in recognising in him all

the fullness of what it means to be human, an experience which

extends the whole range of meaning and understanding of each

other we had before and modies it pervasively.

13

As an American professor of Religious Studies Will Deming

points out, there is a sense in which such religious assertions

cannot be contradicted. There is a radical personal choice

involved in deciding what is of ultimate signicance for human

beings: No scientist, using the methods and data of science, can

claim that the Buddha did not achieve enlightenment, that Jesusis not the Son of God, or that Mohammed is not the prophet

of Allah.14

On the other hand any genuine commitment to a

belief in the fullness to be found in Jesus is bound to involve

claims of his signicance for the whole of humanity as already

suggested. We also nd that part of our experience of choosing

Jesus is that we have not so much chosen him as been chosenourselves. We can choose to devote our whole lives to football,

for example, but we cannot of ourselves make the choice to

become a great professional player. In that case the gift chooses

the player or at least invites them, in that they would not have

the choice without it, and not to respond would be a pity. We

cannot simply decide to believe of our own free decision; it is a


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gift. So we come to nd it necessary to maintain that in Jesus,

fullness and signicance, ultimate meaning, seeks us in grace

and revelation. God is the one who validates Jesus Christ and

perpetuates his life in the life of the community. God is the one

who takes the initiative. We fndultimate meaning. Those whoproperly undergo the experience of that meaning could only

fail to afrm it by denying their own integrity. In one way they

have a choice, but not if they wish to be true to themselves and

to what they have experienced.

Furthermore, the decision about ultimate meaning canbe evaluated, even in some senses veried. It has empirical

implications. The person who chooses food or train-spotting as

his or her deepest interest and commitment and who nds the

real point of life in that can be compared, for example, with

the person who chooses Christ. The New Testament claims

that this new life in and with Christ is a lifeto the full (John

10:10). There are certain tests and criteria that can be applied:for example, does this commitment seem entirely self-centred

or does it have relevance to the recognition that other people

have the right to make claims on us? Does it have implications

for the fact that we are bound up with the whole human species

and for that matter with the future of the planet? Does it seem

to have transforming effects, making the person more joyfuland more open to life or does it make them narrower? Does it

have anything to say in the face of death? The Catholic spiritual

writer Henri Nouwen writes of his conviction that our few

years on this earth are part of a much larger event that stretches

out far beyond the boundaries of our birth and death.15

Can

the commitment of which we speak suggest, in other words, a


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signicance that lasts in some way that is humanly recognisable

to us, an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade (I

Peter 1:4) rather than being simply made meaningless in the

annihilation of death?

These are some of the questions which the gure of Jesus and

the Christian communitys experience of him lead us to. They

are certainly not irrational ones, and there is an abundance of

evidence of various kinds that can help to provide answers to

them.


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10. William K. Mcelvaney, The Saving Possibility, Nashville

and New York, 1971, p.15.

11. H.R. Mackintosh, The Divine Initiative, London, 1934, p.54.

12. Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence reprint London,

1959, p.26.

13. Cornelius Ernst, The Theology of Grace, Cork, 1974, p.60.

14.Rethinking Religion, New York, 2004, p.137.

15.Life of the Beloved, London, 1993, p.110.

All bible references are taken from the New International

Version (revised 1983).


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Further Reading:

In addition to books mentioned above I recommend Alister

McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion (London, 2007) and his other

works, and Keith Ward,Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford,1997) and What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for

Fundamentalists (London, 2004).

Other good rejoinders to the new atheists continue to appear,

including the works of Karen Armstrong, who does not write

from a traditional theist perspective.

The best analysis of the ways in which Jesus is still present in

the world is in Part One of Luke Timothy Johnson,Living Jesus,

New York, 1999.


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Many people, especially young people, have been impressed

by the arguments of Professor Richard Dawkins and

Christopher Hitchens against religion. More generally

there is a fear of links between religion and violence. This

pamphlet provides a brief and balanced survey of these

controversies. It goes on to offer a contemporary answer

to the frequently-asked question, where is the evidence

for faith?

About the Author

Dr Tom Woodman is a former Senior Lecturer in English

at the University of Reading. He has published extensively

on the topic of literature and theology.

ISBN is 978--0--9568645--0--5

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Faith and the Evidence:The Answer to Dawkins

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