When I was fallen away, I thought Richard Dawkins was interesting. I recall the time I saw Dawkins speak at a bookstore (Powell’s in Portland, long ago). At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the new “Pharisees” of the modern age and sowing discord among the “Christian hypocrites” as I had yet to realize that we’re all sinners. But in watching and listening to Dawkins it dawned on me after only about ten minutes how miserable he seemed, even in his arguments. The smugness filled the room. In contrast I thought of my grandmother with her rosary and the joy in her that she brought to her family. I thought of the billions of people who found hope in faith. His uninspiring message made me leave that talk feeling empty, the opposite of how I felt around my grandmother and other Christians. I entered as a Dawkins fan, only to leave repulsed by his message.
Now, with that said I am somewhat grateful for Dawkins because without pure materialists like him, I may never have come back to the faith. It was like a prescribed burn in a field clearing the weeds so that the new life could spring forth. I do believe that is what’s happening today in the wider world.
Dawkins is the only one who really puts all his chips in the middle and lays his cards on the table. Atheists don’t buy the bluff that much of postmodernism is selling. He would reject transgenderism and Baal the storm god in the same breath — as would Catholics. Dawkins even knows that deists are just hedging their bets on a bad hand. The only card player left for atheists to play against is those who believe in the one God, the God Most High. The interesting thing about atheists is that they are closer to coming back to belief in the one God than they ever realize, or would ever care to admit, because they’ve seen through all the smoke and mirrors of the meaningless and dead gods. They actually are closer to understanding the God who sits outside of time and space — who created time and space — than they realize because they reject all of the nonsense and cling ultimately to mathematics.
However, I see this as a long process of preparing the seedbed for faith. Because I don’t think many modern atheists have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or a study Bible like that of Ignatius Press or Word on Fire. Few people have read St. Augustine’s Confessions or the Imitation of Christ outside of Catholic circles. And they certainly have not read Veritatis Splendor or Fides et Ratio or Dignitatus Humanae. But if they ever did, they would find that the God we believe in in the Catholic faith is logical, beautiful, and bigger than anything we can ever imagine in creation. But of course, that revelation of a living God comes only by cooperation with God’s grace, which is always ready and waiting on a no-interest loan for those who simply ask, seek, and knock. The beauty of the Church is that you get to keep your reason, all of it, and faith makes it soar higher.
Dawkins just says what many have been thinking all along, which is this: God doesn’t matter. Thomas Jefferson went halfway, but Dawkins just comes out as openly apostate. He is saying that the Emperor has no clothes. He is also like the Emperor Napoleon, when an officer suggested that “God willing” they would take Brussels in the morning. Napoleon allegedly said, “God? God has nothing to do with it.” That’s the same answer Dawkins gives. To Dawkins, there is no God, or gods, living or otherwise, outside of our brains. Hence, he’s razed the weeds and prepped the soil for coming back to what Abraham and the Apostles and St. Agnes meant by “God.”
Of course, Dawkins’ grand bet on the selfish gene goes too far. He’s all in with all the answers, but he left out of the equation an important variable. He fails to solve for Y, as in “Y are we here?” That is the problem with this worldview, because in a world without meaning, you have to live in that world. So does everyone else, and everyone else is not necessarily an educated PhD who can spend a lifetime inspecting in all corners of science and history. Everyone else lacks the funds and leisure time to find meaning. Everyone else, for the most part, in the end, has to rely on what someone says is true. I take it on faith that germs cause disease and not fairies, even though I have never actually saw either of them infect a person. Dawkins and company can win arguments about how the world works, but what they cannot win an argument about is why a sunset is beautiful. When there is no satisfactory ultimate why, people spend a lifetime searching for that variable. In the end, what the world without a living God results in is someone else taking control by force and dictating that the value of Y must be what they say it is, simply because they said so.
So even though I’m not a Dawkins fan, at least he isn’t hedging his bets. He’s all in, and I actually think deniers like him are closer to finding God than the builders of Babel or the deists like Ben Franklin ever were. Having the door half-open to God is like letting the heat out of the house in winter. At some point, you have to make up your mind to go outside or stay inside. This makes me realize, truly, that we should pray for Richard Dawkins. He may end up bringing more people back to faith in God than we could have ever realized. He is almost at the top of the circle, since when we run away from God, we often find ourselves running right into the arms of God.
Today, we are witnessing the outcome of what happens when the ideas of Dawkins are taken to its logical end. The reason Dawkins is wrong is that he doesn’t understand what the builders at Babel and the deists like Ben Franklin understood well. The ancient emperors from history and American Founders knew that people needed religion, and to pull that rug out from society would cause the city itself to collapse. Now we are seeing funny religions pop up, because we pretend we don’t need one.
The root problem for Dawkins is that he has a middle-school concept of God that he never outgrew. He’s also operating as an autonomous speaker of “his truth” without a plan or concept of how to organize a world. He doesn’t have employees or mouths to feed or an economy to plan. In the walled-in academic world where the idea of “no souls” exists, Dawkins fails to realize something rather large. His theory of the “Selfish Gene” starts from the bottom, instead of the top, and therefore he cannot describe the whole. His answer of “Because of genes!” is too simple. A toe does not describe the wholeness of a person any more than a gene does, and genes cannot explain the totality of human nature. Dawkins is so smart, but he can’t understand what simple farmers and mothers and the poor with no education understand perfectly well. You would think an evolutionary biologist would be very equipped to understand the parable of the grain of wheat, but somehow he misses it completely. I find this to be marvelous irony.
We need religion. People need religion. Or they will find one. And it won’t be what you expect. In the clean, childless world of our universities, ideas sound good that lack depth. Dawkins’ answer is from the atomic layer, and he emerges from a quiet library to tell us that we are nothing but atoms. Meanwhile the bustle of the street doesn’t hear a word he’s said, because life is happening far beyond the atomic layer. When Dawkins’ burst forth from his library, he was telling a very different message from what the apostles told when they emerged from the Upper Room at Pentecost, after having received the breath of life, touched by tongues of fire. No, when Dawkins and his disciples emerged in their lab coats to tell us the good news, their message was that respiration is a selfish act to propagate our genes and that there is no meaning to any of it. The apostles had a message of eternal life, while Dawkins made us ponder suicide.
So while I commend Dawkins for his honesty, he is actually more foolish than the leaders of Babel or Jefferson. At least the leaders at Babel and Jefferson were offering something to believe in: “Look, here’s a tower. It’s a Gate to God. See?” And Jefferson and Franklin offer something, too: “Look, here’s a sacred document, a Constitution, where we make a nod to God — and also — over there — see the Statue of Liberty?”
Dawkins only offers the abyss. And our brains revolt at the idea. We all know the Big Empty is there, but we don’t really want to stand on the edge and look into it. We can’t. Not for long. The temptation to believe that Dawkins is right draws us all, as doubt is more natural to us than faith. So even if we dabble in disbelief, most move away from the edge in search of a Higher Power of some kind. The search for God, when thwarted or stifled or silenced, erupts like boils, in strange places and in uncomfortable ways. We are already seeing strange religions being born in America now, almost more strange than that of the pagan gods of Babel or America’s traditional worship of the rule of law, wealth, and the slippery thing called “Liberty.”
The Tower of Babel or the Constitution may be an elaborate way to justify power, but it is a better attempt at meaning than what Dawkins offers the masses. But again, Dawkins is the only honest one, which is also why his idea is the most dangerous. He’s the anti-Jesus (I don’t want to call him the anti-Christ, because he lacks the charisma needed for that). Dawkins tells us that we are purely material beings without souls. He goes all the way.
Most people hold back and speak the old common language that dances around this fact, finding idols and obsessions to occupy or fence off the Big Empty. Dawkins has spent his life shouting this message and now we are seeing what fruit it bears, where we are in fact atomized, solitary beings (kind of like his selfish gene!). When we are just chemical machines, we do indeed act like the “selfish gene” writ large. Again, not only is this message the polar opposite of Christ, but it’s brings the polar opposite result. Where people know Christ, they form communities, families, and fellowship. There is warmth amid the struggle. It’s not perfect. But when suffering comes, there is a prayer, and a church, and a people, and the Body of Christ. Dawkins inability to get past a small understanding of God leaves him on the playground all alone.
As we watch millions of community organizations and church groups fading away in America, we are clearly becoming more atomized, as people sit at home watching TV alone instead of joining the Lions’ Club or a bowling team. What is worrisome about this is that Hannah Arendt, who dissected the rise of 1930’s totalitarianism, said that loneliness, a.k.a atomization, is a first step toward totalitarianism, because isolated people without purpose or faith are attracted to a powerful ideology that delivers some kind of meaning. Hence, the transgender craze we are seeing is not surprising at all. Those people are seeking God, but it’s a long way home. I sympathize because I did the same thing, but with liquor. That’s also a long way home.
To me, in the end, Dawkins’ worldview makes Kurt Cobain or Morrissey seem light-hearted.
