Priest at HuffPo: Dawkins is dangerous and has damaged our culture

Amazingly, the link to the “religion” section at HuffPo seems to have vanished, so there’s no way to see its articles except by Googling “HuffPo religion”. This is good, for there’s no longer one-click access to the panoply of HuffPo pieces extolling all religions save fundamentalist Christianity, and the endless Islamsplaining articles by Carol Kuruvilla. Most of the pieces you get under “religion” seem to have been pulled from other sections of the site.

When I did the requisite Googling, however, I found a pretty odious piece, which you can get it by clicking on the screenshot below.  The author, Kerry Walters, is an retired academic and a Catholic priest. He’s quite prolific: his Wikipedia bio shows that he writes about three books a year (theologians can do that)—eight in 2013 alone. His latest is St. Teresa of Calcutta: Missionary, Mother, Mystic, (he should have added “Malefactor”), which appears to be a hagiography of the old charlatan.

Walters simply cannot abide Richard Dawkins, who’s now coming to stand for all bad things atheist and secular.

Walters begins his attack by going out of his way to pat atheists on the back—he avers that in his previous books he’s actually praised atheists, but only the Right Kind of Atheist. What kind is that? You know the answer:

People who have read my books and articles know how greatly I admire and learn from atheists who do the hard work of familiarizing themselves with the religious beliefs to which they object so that they can offer rigorous arguments against them.

Yes, he likes those atheists who have read the Bible, the Qur’an, and perhaps some Hindu scriptures, as well as some Christian theology. Well, Dr. Walters, I HAVE DONE THAT, and I still find religion a manmade set of fairy tales for which there’s not a bit of evidence.  Will you admire and learn from me? I don’t think so. What Walters is advancing is the Courtier’s Reply: that you can’t criticize religion unless you’re deeply familiar with scripture and theology.

And I agree that you have to know something about religion to criticize it—and to see its falsity. But the main criticism of religion by New Atheists is that its existence claims—about the existence of God, Jesus, and Allah, of Muhammad’s taking the Qur’an from an angel, of Joseph Smith being angel-guided to the golden plates, of the reality of the Resurrection and Moses’s journey in the wilderness—have no supporting evidence. Some of the existence claims are even contradictory among faiths: Islam, for instance, claims not only that Jesus was not divine, but that an impostor was crucified in his place. And the God-given moral codes are also contradictory. If religion is true, then there is at most one true religion.

But it doesn’t take much knowledge of scripture to realize two things. First, most adherents to religions don’t know their scripture. It’s well documented that atheists know more about the Bible than do Christians. Most believers don’t believe because evidence has convinced them that their faith is true; they believe because that they’ve simply been indoctrinated when young by parents and peers. So the claim of “brainwashing” that Walters finds so harsh and odious is in fact accurate.

Second, there is no evidence for the truth claims of religion. We have no substantive evidence (save the words in the Bible) that a Jesus person even existed, much less was divine, crucified, and resurrected. And, at bottom, the hold of religion on people depends on the existence of those truth claims. If Jesus wasn’t resurrected, if there was no Original Sin, if Mohammed didn’t take down dictation by Allah via Gabriel, then Christianity and Islam fall apart. Yes, they have moral codes, but those codes depend crucially on the authenticity of the religion’s truth claims.

I spent over two years reading theology, beginning with scripture and progressing through “folk theology”, as exemplified by C. S. Lewis, to the “sophisticated” lucubrations of people like Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart. And the deeper you dig, the more bullshit you find. It’s excreta all the way down. Sophisticated theology provides no more evidence for God than does C. S. Lewis or children’s books on Christianity. There is no “there” there. And yes, I’ve read the entire Bible and Qur’an, and some Hindu theology, as well as part of the Book of Mormon (I couldn’t finish it).

To evade this factual disproof of religion’s strong claims, Walters simply defends faith as a virtue—it doesn’t need evidence:

Additionally, Dawkins trashes religious faith by inevitably conflating it with gullibility and superstition—it’s “weird,” “brainless,” “a crutch for consolation,” and a “cop-out.” These are soundbites that people who’ve never really bothered to listen to what serious students of religion say about faith typically toss around.

But it gets even sloppier. As an alternative to faith, Dawkins recommends reason. (Never mind that this is a tiresomely false dichotomy.) But he dubiously identifies reason with the scientific method, which he appears not to understand. Science’s methodology is specifically fitted to examine the physical world and generate hypotheses about it. As any good scientist will readily concede, science oversteps its mark and betrays its own methodology when it makes untestable metaphysical pronouncements. [JAC: like “there’s no empirical evidence for a theistic god”?] But Dawkins, in the name of science, does precisely this, claiming that science proves the through-and-through physical nature of reality—a metaphysical rather than scientific assertion.

Translation: “We don’t need no stinking evidence for what we claim is true.” Seriously, that’s all this says. As someone said, “It’s called faith because there isn’t any evidence.”

In the end, Walters simply doesn’t like three things about Dawkins. The first is his supposed ignorance of religion (see above).

The second is Dawkins’s tone, the supposed stridency that we hear so much about but is really just passionate writing. And, after all, a lot of “good” atheists, which I suppose include Bertrand Russell and Robert G. Ingersoll, were just as passionate. Wasn’t Russell’s classic treatment called “Why I am not a Christian”?

The stridency sniffed out by Walters includes this:

But Dawkins does neither. Instead, he gut-punches intelligence right out of the discussion.

To begin with, he demonstrates no real familiarity with scripture, instead cherry-picking passages from the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim holy texts that, because they’re ripped out of context, easily make religion look stupid and cruel.

A representatively screechy passage from his best-selling The God Delusion gives some idea of what I mean. The “God of the Old Testament,” Dawkins sputters, is “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

No one who’s actually taken the time to read the Wisdom books, prophets, or large sections of the Pentateuch could possibly write such nonsense. This is the sort of wild exaggeration you hear only from people with huge chips-on-their-shoulders.

Umm. . . what about Dan Barker, an ex-evangelical Christian preacher? Barker’s just written a book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, which agrees 100% with Richard’s characterization, and in fact, goes through each of those 19 characteristics of God, showing how the Bible supports them. And yes, Dan knows his Scripture; he preached it for years.

Finally, Walters objects to Dawkins “coarsening the culture” by using strong language:

Having said this, however [to his credit, Walters says KPFA shouldn’t have deplatformed Dawkins], I also agree with KPFA: Dawkins’ remarks about religion, Christianity as well as Islam, have indeed been abusive, contributing to the coarsening and polarization of our culture. And lest you think, “Well, of course a priest would say that,” let me assure you that my objection has nothing to do with my faith and everything to do with my regard for reasoned and civil discourse.

When I say that Dawkins is abusive, I don’t simply mean that his harsh remarks about religion have hurt this or that person’s feelings. Feelings get hurt all the time in this world, a sad but inescapable fact. Better to grow a slightly thickened skin than to petulantly nurse an attitude of permanent grievance.

No, the damage Dawkins has done is cultural rather than personal. Dawkins has basement-lowered the tone of discourse when it comes to religion, thereby giving his adoring fan base permission to do likewise.

and

[A few years ago], I merely considered Dawkins a parvenu and a nuisance. But over the past few perilous months, with the rise of an “alternative” facts and “fake news” ethos in which truth is ignored and bluster reigns supreme, I’ve changed my mind. I now think Dawkins and his ilk are downright dangerous—not because they say nasty things about religion, but because they feed, in their own small way, our increasingly toxic culture of vituperation, distrust, and ignorance.

Voices like Dawkins’ oughtn’t to be silenced, as KPFA chose to do. But they definitely need to be called out and challenged.

What Walters seems to be saying here is that Dawkins needs to be more polite about—more respectful of—religion, and engage with sophisticated theology rather than religion as it’s practiced by the average person. Well, refuting Alvin Plantinga will have no effect on that average person, because they could care less about Plantinga. It’s more important to engage religion as most people practice it, and that means engaging its truth claims. Further, as I said above, reading Sophisticated Theology™ doesn’t give you any more confidence that the truth claims of religion are valid: it’s just C. S. Lewis dressed up in fancy language.

When Waters bangs on about Dawkins “damaging the culture”, and being “dangerous”, I sense that what he really means is an unspoken fourth criticism: Dawkins has been successful in turning people into unbelievers. There is absolutely no doubt about this, and this is what bothers Walters. That’s where the “danger” lies. Walters is losing his flock! People are starting to question and abandon the doctrines Walter preached his whole life!

Unbelief is growing throughout the West, and some of that is due to Dawkins. The “respectful” atheists—people like Robert Wright, John Horgan, or Michael Ruse—don’t deconvert anybody, because they’re always making nice with religion and, in fact, telling people it’s okay to believe in God. Most likely they don’t care about deconverting anyone, which is fine, but in the end what really scares people like Walters is not the presence of atheists, but the presence of atheists who turn believers into atheists. That is why Dawkins is “dangerous.”