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The
Atheist Devotional: Timeless Meditations for
the Godless by M. Moore
Copyright ă 2008 M.
-Reading Number Seventeen -
Dawkins Gives God a Piece of His Mind
Excerpted from: Dawkins, The God Delusion*
The Bible’s depiction of humanity pulls no punches. It shows the full range of human experience, from the most depraved and sordid to the most exalted and heroic, from violence and perversion to love and self-sacrifice. To Richard Dawkins, this makes the Bible “weird,” what with all those Bible stories about humans and God’s dealings with them and so forth. After all, Dawkins’ idea of an inspiring story involves shrews crossing a mountain range, evolving into something else, then coming back to kill off all the unevolved shrews. So of course he hates the Bible. In his new book, The God Delusion (at this writing it has reached number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list), Dawkins repeats some of the same arguments we’ve seen him make about natural selection, God not being a reductionist explanation, etc. But he also devotes a whole section of his book to vilifying the Bible and the God of the Bible. Let’s take a look.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:”
Yes, for the wicked people in the Bible, encountering God was very unpleasant. But who wants to read about that stuff? What we need is more stories about shrews.
“a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;”
Well, unforgiving except for all that stuff in there about God forgiving sins... As for “control-freak”...one of the classic atheist arguments against God has been to ask why he allows evil things to happen. In other words, the claim that God is not enough of a control freak—he allows too much freedom. Isn’t it nice being an atheist? We can make two opposite and contradictory accusations at the same time.
“a vindictive, blood-thirsty, ethnic cleanser;”
Yes, why does God take vengeance on evil and kill off evildoers? (But remember, we can also condemn God for allowing evil. We “freethinkers” are free to contradict ourselves like that.)
“a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential”
For heaven’s sake, Richard, take a breath, before it’s too late!
“megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Yes, in Dawkins’ mind no malediction is too strong to heap upon any God who is so audacious as to be (gasp!) politically incorrect! Now Dawkins doesn’t really give any justification for why God is petty, capricious, racist, a bully, etc. But basically it boils down to the fact that Dawkins doesn’t like the things God does in the Old Testament—punishing people for sins, demanding holiness and righteousness, etc. Dawkins’ condemnations of God are moral ones, and as an atheist, the only basis Dawkins can have for such judgments is his own opinion. In any case, Dawkins sets out to disparage the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. He starts with the story of Noah.
“Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah... [T]he moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.”
Now Genesis 6:5 says that the reason God brought the flood was that humans had become completely evil:
Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
But Dawkins makes no mention of whether humans were good or evil at the time of the flood. He just says that “God took a dim view of humans.” Well, I think that’s fair, don’t you?
“Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point. We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is ‘morality flying by the seat of its pants’, so is the other.”
At least Dawkins is smart enough to realize that as an atheist he has no moral ground to stand on for attacking the Bible’s morality. So he attempts to place biblical morality on the same footing. He says that nobody really bases their morality on the Bible, even if they claim to do so. They just pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe.
“In any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian, a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures, including the story of Noah, literally.”
Oops. I guess Dawkins was wrong then, when he said just before this that we all simply pick and choose, wasn’t he? Anyway, he goes on to make fun of the idea that God would care about our “pokey little” sins. It’s arrogance, don’t you know, to think that God notices what we do and cares one way or the other. Then he abruptly turns to the story of Lot.
“In the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent...was Abraham’s nephew Lot.” Lot is supposed to be a righteous man, yet he offers his daughters to the men of Sodom to do with as they will, while Lot’s wife is turned to a pillar of salt for merely looking over her shoulder “at the fireworks display.”. Then Lot’s daughters get themselves pregnant by their father. “...If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.”
Well, maybe that’s part of the point of the story. As for Lot’s wife looking over her shoulder, some might say that it shows an attachment to the evil of what they were leaving behind rather than merely wanting to see the “fireworks display.” Lot, on the other hand, for all his being corrupted by living in Sodom, was at least willing to flee and make a break with the evil when God told him to.
Abraham is surely seen as a biblical role model, being the great patriarch that he was. And yet he lied about being married to Sarah and allowed both Pharaoh and Abimelech to take her with the intentions of marrying her. Some role model.
Yeah, some role model. No matter how many good things a person does, he cannot be a role model if he does some bad things too. Learning from the mistakes of others? Never heard of it. But rather than go on to look at Dawkins’ outrage about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac and so on, let’s take a look at his general method of attacking the Bible. He takes a two-pronged approach:
Prong 1. He attacks the Bible as being “weird”:
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents...”
...Or as you would expect of a book that is written by humans (though inspired by God) about the human condition, with all its brokenness, imperfection, and yes, quirkiness and weirdness.
Prong 2. Dawkins attempts to show that nobody bases their morality on the Bible, even if they claim to do so:
I know that today we don’t do things like they did in the Bible. “[T]hat is my whole point. All I am establishing is that modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad—a privileged source unavailable to atheists.”
Well, that’s true. No one bases their morality on the Bible...if by that you mean thinking that you have to emulate not only the good deeds, but also the sins of someone like Abraham. And that’s what Dawkins seems to think it means to base your morality on the Bible. So of course, by his definition, he’s right, though his definition is rather...weird.
And finally...Prong 3. Yeah, I know. I said Dawkins’ attack was two-pronged, but actually there’s a third prong—a stealth prong that he sneaks in there. While claiming that his “whole point” is to show that atheistic and Bible-based morality are on the same footing, because they’re both really “morality flying by the seat of its pants,” he goes ahead and attacks things in the Bible as being “morally obnoxious,” “repellant,” “appalling,” “child abuse,” etc. He makes moral attacks against the morality of the Bible after claiming that all moralities are equal. If that strikes you as weird, well...I guess Dawkins is just one of those “free spirits” Nietzsche spoke about who doesn’t care about truth or logical consistency (or maybe he just doesn’t have a good grasp on them).
But what, in a nutshell, is Dawkins’ problem with the Bible? Besides the fact that it’s weird, I mean. Well, the big one for Dawkins seems to be that God kills people or orders people killed: those children in the flood (not to mention the poor, innocent animals!)...Lot’s wife...the Canaanites...Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac. So in large part it all boils down to one question: Does God have the right to kill people or order them killed? The theist might answer like this:
Does God have the right to kill, or order people killed? Well, where do rights come from? From your opinion, or mine? No. If God is God, it would seem that all rights reside in Him as their source. So yes, He would have that right. For that matter, He would have the right to send people to hell. But how can killing people or sending them to hell be justified? Well, obviously they could be justified if those people are evil. Have you ever wished to see some person dead, someone you regarded as really evil? Or have you thought that someone deserved hell? Perhaps you’ve even told someone to “go to hell.”* So you have recognized that there may at least be some people who deserve to be killed or to go to hell. But who is most qualified to judge who deserves death or hell? Again, that would have to be God. The Bible makes it clear that anyone God kills or orders killed or sends to hell deserves their fate because of their sin. Any sin deserves death because it is rejection of God’s way. And God’s way is love and life. To reject God’s way is to reject all that is good. The only exception to this would be the innocent children. But in their case, death is (on the Bible’s own terms) a removal to a better place—heaven. The only ones who would suffer would be their parents, and again the Bible makes it clear that when God takes a child away through death in order to punish the parents (the child does not suffer from it, but actually ends up in a much better place), the parents do deserve that punishment. Sure, all that death is not pleasant to think about. Some things are not pleasant; in fact some things are horrifying. But we know that horrifying realities exist, even in this present world. We have to face them, and keep working for good rather than for evil. And trust God that He will work it all out. If God is God, He is good, and He will make sure everyone gets their just rewards.
So that’s how the theist could answer. As for having faith and trust in God...well, it’s true that we all have to have faith in something. It’s just that we atheists prefer to have faith in atheism, science, evolution, and finite human reason. We fervently believe that someday they will give us all the answers! Keep the faith, baby.
* “Excerpts” are paraphrased, except for “words in quotation marks and italics,” which are direct quotations from the excerpted work. * On page 64 of his book, Dawkins applauds another atheist for telling a Christian opponent during a debate, “May you rot in hell.”
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