Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Why We Can’t Return To Christian Values

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There has been a spate of articles recently advocating for a return to Christian values in the UK. Some, like that by Madeline Grant, don’t specify which values they have in mind. Nonetheless, Ms Grant worries about these unspecified values being replaced by the ‘terrible new gods’ of wokeism, while Douglas Murray – an agnostic commentator I admire and enjoy a great deal – argues for the revival of Christian forgiveness. Elsewhere, Richard Dawkins repeats his call for the preservation of ‘cultural Christianity’ in the face of less ‘decent’ religions like Islam.

I’m sure there are good arguments to be made for exercising more forgiveness both in our personal and national lives, though the idea is not without its difficulties. Dawkins too is right to express concerns that the vacuum that may be left as Christianity declines might be filled with more unsavoury and less charitable values.

But what are the Christian values that these writers see less of in modern life? For Dawkins it’s the chiming of church bells and rousing hymns, which, as pleasant as these are (I would not like them to disappear either) do not have any bearing on our morals and values.

According to Total People, our values in the UK are Democracy, the Rule of Law, Respect & Tolerance and Personal Liberty. Certainly the UK has long regarded itself as a tolerant country – though those on the receiving end of intolerance in the past (early immigrants, gay people for example) might disagree – and we have always aspired to show respect without necessarily achieving it. Our morals on the other hand, especially with regard to sex (and Christians invariably mean sex when they talk about moral decline) have changed over the last 30 or so years, becoming more tolerant of, for example, same-sex relationships and less accepting of adulterous or abusive ones.

The question is, however, do we owe our values and morals to Christianity? I’ve argued before that we don’t. I’ve also tried to demonstrate that there is no time in the past we could pinpoint and say, ‘here’s where the country demonstrably and consistently upheld Biblical principles, showing us just how far we’ve fallen since.’ I applied this criterion to the USA when Don Camp suggested there was a now lost Christian golden age, taking random points in US history and demonstrating there never was a time when Christian values prevailed. Any such golden age is a myth, in the States, the UK and anywhere else. It always has been so; read Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth to see how far even early cultists fell short of his ideals. Christians themselves don’t and never have demonstrated the high standards the bible demands.

Why is this? Because Christian morals and values are impossible. Even those who think they live with the Holy Spirit in them fail, and frequently fail dramatically, to practise what they preach. They don’t love their enemies, a ridiculous expectation of Jesus’s that certainly can’t be extended to nations. Many of the righteous don’t demonstrate love for their neighbours (other than bombarding them with the gospel) and frequently showing an appalling lack of empathy for fellow-believers (take a look at the abuse that goes on in the church at large.) They don’t, in the main, sell all they have and give the proceeds to the poor; give to anyone and everyone who asks and give away their shirt as well as their jacket when it’s demanded of them. They do judge others but don’t – sorry, Douglas – forgive fellow-believers seventy times seven, let alone those of us they regard as the great unwashed. Perhaps it’s as well; what would a culture be like that repeatedly forgave its criminals, abusers and bullies?

The frequently ignored Golden Rule of ‘do onto others as you would have them do unto you’ predates Jesus by centuries, while the more realistic, secular version of it, tolerance and respect, likewise doesn’t derive from the Bible, Jesus or the church. This Holy Trinity of terrors demonstrate a marked absence of tolerance and respect for any positions other than their own and ‘personal liberty’ is not a concept known to them. Didn’t Jesus insist his followers become his slaves? His Father, meanwhile, is intolerant of everything human beings do and everything they are.

A Christian who commented on Grant’s article asked those who disputed her premise – that we need to return to Christian values – whether they would prefer to live in a country dominated by Christian, Islamic or Marxist values. I’ll leave his question with you – answers on a postcard please – and return to it next time.

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Theology: Much Ado About Nothing

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Toothfairy2

I heard Richard Dawkins speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival recently. He suggested that the best way to understand views that are the opposite of one’s own is to study them for oneself. He was then asked by a smart-alec in the audience, that if this was so, how many works of theology he had read. Dawkins responded by saying he wouldn’t waste his time reading ‘pure theology’ because, in discussing the nature of God or the Trinity or the mechanics of the Resurrection, theology presupposes that the supernatural is real. As there is no evidence it is, there is no point in reading books the sole purpose of which is to discuss the nuances of the non-existent.

It was a good answer. There is no such thing as intellectual Christianity (or Judaism or Islam, or any religion.) No matter how complex the arguments become, they are essentially ones about nothing. Debates about theological matters, within and between the many versions of Christianity, are, as I’ve said before, as relevant as arguments about the colour of the tooth fairy’s dress.*

*Actually she wears a white dress to symbolise healthy teeth. I know this because of my deeply held faith and personal experience of tooth fairies.

Why God could not possibly have created the universe (pt 3)

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Sun

Posts here and here considered two reasons why Christians’ claim that their God created the cosmos is preposterous. A third reason is that –

God as creator leads to an infinite regress.

Christians like to assert that everything that has a beginning has a cause; the universe had a beginning therefore it had to have a cause. That cause – watch the unwarranted leap of faith here – can only have been have been their god. My previous arguments notwithstanding – that God needed to create everything from nothing (which according to Christians is impossible) and the immaterial cannot produce the material – the notion that god caused everything begs the question, as Richard Dawkins points out, of who caused his being. If, as Christians like to argue, everything has a cause then their god must have one too. Their assertion that he is the exception because, by definition, he has no beginning and consequently has no need of a cause is merely special pleading; why should he be different from everything else?

Christian apologists – William Lane Craig, for example – always assume that the first cause is their god, without a beginning and need of a cause. Their thinking goes as follows: everything that exists has a cause; the universe must have had a first cause; this first cause was somehow sentient; we are going to call this sentience ‘god’; this god must be our god, YHWH.

Yet they provide no evidence that there is, or was, a first cause; there could have been several contributory causes, including chemical, physical (gravity, for example) and activity on a quantum level. They then make the unwarranted assumption that this cause must have been sentient, again without evidence, and load this presumption with further insupportable connotations when they label it ‘god’. Finally, they make another leap of faith by claiming this ‘god’ is their god, YHWH.

This is all so much special pleading, insisting everything has a cause except the thing Christians don’t want to have had a cause. But God cannot be excluded; he too must have a cause (and indeed he does). So who or what caused him and gave him his start? And who or what created whatever it was that created god? Who or what created that? And on into infinite regress.

Those who offer such arguments put the proverbial cart 613.772 billion years before the horse. As Richard Dawkins says in The God Delusion, intelligence and creativity have only ever arisen as a result of evolution, specifically the evolution of the (human) brain. We know of no other means – there is no other means – by which intelligence and high-level creativity are produced. For a creative, super-intelligent mind to exist prior to the beginning of everything is, therefore, an impossibility. As I suggested in the second part of this series, the physical always precedes the immaterial; the natural world produced the advanced human brain about 200,000 years ago, and that brain has, ever since, projected its gods backward to the beginnings of the universe. This does not mean that a being without a beginning was actually there, much less that he produced the whole show. It means we know the cause of god. It is us.