God, atheism, and human needs

A spate of publications on atheism has been thrust at us recently: Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell; Michel Onfray’s The Atheist Manifesto; and Christopher Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist. The last mentioned following almost immediately on his God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

They raise many questions, the dominant ones being whether they give us any deeper insight into ourselves, our needs as human beings, and ways to conduct our lives.

On this score they fail miserably. They are negative, destroying much of mankind’s history, replacing it with an empty nothing - and they avoid a fundamental quest of the human race in the process.

They, of course, give their answer to a question that has engaged thinkers for centuries. God does not exist, or as Dawkins puts it more believably: “There is almost certainly no God.” But rather than arguments for the non-existence of God, their attacks are primarily against religion. And with those attacks Dawkins does take on the arguments for the existence of God, and succeeds in convincing us that nobody can present believable proof either way. His greatest efforts, as also with the other three, however, are spent in telling us of the evils of religion .And within that limitation they attack only the three Abrahamic religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Religion is a man-made device, they claim, developed from our fear of the unknown and of life after death. Our need for consolation in times of difficulty and to ask for help from a loving God, have also been contributors.

Dennett takes our religious history back further, ascribing to shamanism the role of forerunner to today’s organised religions. How witch doctors transformed their practices into Christian beliefs, however, or into any structured religion, and why they waited the greater part of human existence to do so, he does not explain.

The viciousness of their attacks on the three religions is disconcerting - it is difficult to pick which is the most unpleasant.

Hitchens’ introduction is brash to the point of being offensive. Religion is “irrational” or “evil nonsense”. It exposes the believers’ “dumb credulity”, characterised by an Archbishop of Canterbury who is an “old fool” or a “cretinous” Bishop of Carlisle. First prize in this slanging match, however, must go to the philosopher Michel Onfray, who writes with an overblown turgidity, without references, footnotes or an index: presumably to avoid us checking the “nonsense” and “man-made foolery” of today’s religions; and their “deceptive, travestied and hypocritically” promulgating of their beliefs.

The bellicose history of religion is a common theme of attack. “The assertion of one God, violent, jealous, quarrelsome and intolerant, has generated more hate, bloodshed, deaths and brutality than it has peace”, Hitchens tells us. Dennett, perhaps the least intolerant of these militants, is still not above describing the “fanatical … delusion” of believers, nor of placing responsibility on religion for the genocides of mankind. They do have some substance in asserting this evil face of religion, although it is not the only cause. None of them will admit that the cause of war may equally be in the winning of territory, power or resources. Nor in the megalomania of unfettered rulers.

Hitchens issues a challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made, or an action performed, by a believer that could not been made or performed by a non-believer”. His challenge, of course, is nonsense. Ten minutes walk from where this writer lives is a church that feeds the lost and homeless daily. Scattered over this city are church-run refuges, homes for the elderly, and community assistance programs. In the pubs members of the Salvation Army collect money daily for their charities.

Hitchens’ challenge is easily reversed: to identify any atheist run charity, replicated many times over, than gives help to the poor. Fortunate perhaps, that atheists are not into helping others in any organised way, given the evangelical vitriol with which the current atheistic writings condemn the beliefs of the majority of the human race.

Their failures lie more in the nature of human beings. That over history the greater part of mankind has sought comfort against the fear of the unknown is an acknowledged fact. That we also seek comfort in difficult times is human. These needs may well be the root cause of religious beliefs. But we also seek meaning in our lives. We need to have a reason for being, even though we may be no more than an accidental emergence from the primordial slime.

Religion has given meaning to millions, since time immemorial. For many of us, that meaning is of our own existentialist making. No acknowledgement of these fundamental needs, however, is put forward. Dawkins gives us ten atheistic commandments. Hitchens tries with the beauties of science and nature, the consolations of philosophy, with literature, poetry, art, music and architecture. They are presented as absorptions for a lifetime that do not depend on the supernatural, or “ghostly stories”. Wonderful as these pursuits may be, they are pastimes, pleasant fill-ins, without a deeper meaning beyond the normalities of our daily lives.

The failure to recognise the search for meaning is a criticism that must be levelled primarily at the philosophers among them, Onfray and Dennett. They are from the discipline that has, for 2,000 years, been asking this question of our meaning, our identity. These two do not even try. Do we adopt New Age beliefs? Or is it a transcendental vision of where the thinking of humans would want to take our world? Is it Ice? Or Speed? Our collective human consciousness?

And when we need comfort and reassurance? When a loved one dies? Is it meditation? Is it in the beliefs of other religions that these writers did not explore? Buddhism, for instance, that has no God? Or Daoism with its Three Jewels: - compassion, moderation, and humility? Or the teachings of Confucius, who also did not require us to pray to a God?

Or the beliefs and practices of the Druze, Zoroastrians, Hinduism or many other religions?

Religion gives support to millions. If our present day atheists want to fight for an extremely worthy cause - to eliminate the excesses of religion, they would be best advised to search for ways to reform the fundamentalists in the religions, along with fundamental atheists. The current approach of a vitriolic condemnation of basic human needs is unlikely to win many converts. The need for meaning, for a role and purpose in life is likely to maintain religious beliefs for centuries to come The practices might be as poorly observed as they are today, but the beliefs and the prayers will still be valued by those who have nothing to replace them.

If we search back through the atheist philosophies of the past, through Mill, Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, we find a questioning - a gentler, agnostic questioning. A clear condemnation of the excesses of religion, yes, along with sincere doubts about a personal God, but accompanied by an acknowledgement that we do not know.

Charles Darwin states the obvious “the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe ... as a result of blind chance … I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic”.

Along with the reality that we do not know - that of a universe without a beginning - the need for meaning, for purpose, is a base to our identity. The search has been of long duration. Until they contribute to that search, the anti-religionists will, I suspect, enjoy little success.