Paradoxes of Atheism: de Lubac on Atheism - 1

The influential Roman Catholic theolgian Henri de Lubac lived through an era of intense revolutionary atheism, not unlike that of our own times. He has left us with many unique perspectives. Here is a sample:

"It seems that each of the great protagonists of contemporary atheism makes it a point of honor to prove that with him, from him onwards, now for the first time, as it were, mankind has progressed beyond the narrow perspective of anti-theism; that in him it has at last become free; that henceforth, thanks to him, the idea of God can be envisaged without resentment, for resentment might give rise to suspicion as to the value of this denial of him; that the question of God will not even be posed in the future; that belief in God, then, will no longer have to be fought; that the illusion will be dispelled forever; that to our children's children he will be known only as a curio of the past. Such was the line taken by Comte and Marx; and, more recently, by Sartre and a few others. Each one outdoes his predecessor and, if he recognize any predecessors, it is he, so he thinks, who definitely opens the new era, by saying the last word on the subject.

But at the same time, the thought of God obsesses them, and the care even that they take to say they are going to deliver the human race from him once for all is a sign of this obsession, which is ever reborn. Nothing is more fiercely polemical, more anti-theist, more calculated to awaken the suspicion of resentmen, than certain of their manifestos. Each of them wishes to prove, better than his forerunners, that unlike them he is at peace in his atheism and feels no need to think of God in order to "refute" him. But all that takes up a number of pages. And the concern that he shows in this way, producing a profusion of ever greater and greater subtleties and precautions, betrays him." (Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1948) 218)

There is much to think about here, not the least of which is the almost exact description of the most recent popular atheists (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Christopher Hicthens). "End ofFaith," "Breaking the Spell," "God Delusion" --- all are "fiercely polemical" and aimed at nothing less than creating resentment, while at the same time each announcing a definitive end to God. How many times have we heard that faith is through, that reason is the only way, or that even God is dead? Thus, atheism is "reborn" once again.

I have long been decided on the fact that atheists are about the most religious people out there. Atheists must labor to convice themselves and others that they have explained the universe in such a way that God is not necessary. And Lubac is right, this effort requires a lot of paper and ink, and a lot of rationalization. The atheist's claim to intellectual victory --- to be able to rest contented with his scientific (atheistic, that is) explanation for life --- is betrayed, in almost every case, by his passion against God.

This leads me to conclude that there are no defacto atheists, but only anti-theists; for the belief that God does not exist is a choice, not a scientific fact.

McGrath Calls Dawkins. Results.

There has been a "quiet" response from Richard Dawkins’s people to the embarrassment that the atheistic propagandist received from a recent article written by Professor Alister McGrath.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=433628&in_page_id=1770

McGrath rightfully complains that he was completely, and conveniently, edited out of Dawkins’s TV documentary. Even though, or we might presume because, McGrath gave scholarly, rational, and sound answers to the atheist’s jabs for over an hour, he was not allowed to make Dawkins’s final cut, which, after all, was designed to make Christians look evil and stupid to begin with. Can’t have an Oxford Doctor of Philosophy messing up the atheist's tidy propaganda, can we?

As soon as I read McGrath’s article I remembered a game that one of my dear critics tried to play. After littering my blog site with atheistic posts, he ran back to the Dawkins online forum, and claimed victory in the "debate." He then began to "take bets" how long it would be before I deleted these alleged damaging and defeating posts from the atheists.

Well, you can see how defeated I am; and you can judge for yourself just how soundly I have been "trounced." (Note to the atheist: number of words, and number of times you repeat yourself, do not count towards intellectual weight of argument. I will, however, give you points for not getting dizzy while running in circles.)

And now we know who really likes to delete the embarrassing material, don’t we? So, I responded in the Dawkins forum thusly:

***
As for actual cowardly hack-jobs done by propagandistic editors, it was your champion Dawkins who chopped out the tough refutations from his TV series. McGrath writes:

"Dawkins and I . . . were also filmed having a debate for Dawkins's recent Channel 4 programme, The Root Of All Evil? Dawkins outlined his main criticisms of God, and I offered answers to what were clearly exaggerations and misunderstandings. It was hardly rocket science.

[...]

But when I debated these points with him, Dawkins seemed uncomfortable. I was not surprised to be told that my contribution was to be cut. The Root Of All Evil? was subsequently panned for its blatant unfairness. Where, the critics asked, was a responsible, informed Christian response to Dawkins? The answer: on the cutting-room floor."
***

Well, the "quiet" response has been to avoid responding to my post for over two weeks now, and to avoid any direct mention of McGrath’s article whatsoever. Rather, quietly, the entire hour-plus exchange, unedited, has appeared on google video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6474278760369344626&q=mcgrath+dawkins

There is also a small link on Dawkins’s website, with a string of typical atheists’ comments.

Sqeaky wheel gets the greasin.’

About the matchup, McGrath seems to me to be a particularly interesting opponent for Dawkins. The Oxford theologian’s testimony and qualifications meet Dawkins at every turn. He grew up in Belfast, experiencing the so-called religious conflicts (they are really purely political) first hand, so Dawkins’s manufactured rhetoric about Northern Ireland sounds a bit hollow compared to McGrath’s understanding of the situation. McGrath grew up as a committed atheist, so Dawkins has nothing on him there. McGrath completed his first Ph.D. in molecular biology, so Dawkins can’t play the "science" card against him either, not without being countered equally. McGrath found Christianity after an intellectual comparison of many religions, so Dawkins can’t pull the "you just grew up with Christianity" line. And McGrath is quite in touch with a vast array of intellectual Christian literature, and has contributed quite a bit to it himself, so he maintains a high level of competence and intelligence for the full time he speaks about the faith. He is likewise equally prepared and quick on his feet as Dawkins usually is.

In the exchange, I especially appreciate McGrath pressing the point that the murderous communistic governments of the twentieth century were indeed "institutionalized atheism." When Dawkins predictably tried to "correct" him on the issue, McGrath rightly insisted that atheism was not peripheral to Lenin, Stalin, et al, as the atheist claimed, but it was a core issue. This is one of the many points I show in The Return of the Village Atheist, and thank you to Dr. McGrath for sticking with the hard truth.

For those unfamiliar with McGrath’s works --- which now, I am guessing, number 40-50 volumes --- I suggest starting with his Christian Theology: An Introduction and Christian Theology Reader. On the atheism issue, see his The Twilight of Atheism, the wonderfully relevant "Intellectuals Don’t Need God," and Other Myths, and the recent The Dawkins Delusion.

Darwin's Bulldog and Russell's Terriers

"I'm like a pit bull terrier being released into the ring, as a spectator sport, to attack religious people" -Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (Feb, 6, 1999)

In his own time Darwin’s most outspoken and eloquent proponent was a man named Thomas Huxley. Coming out in a forceful and rabid public defense of Darwin’s atheistic theory, Huxley dubbed himself Darwin’s “Bulldog.”[i] He was enraged that clergy enjoyed a higher social status than scientists, and in his capacity as the “fiercest polemical writer of his generation,”[ii] awaited the time “when he could get his heel ‘into their mouths and scr-r-unch it around.’”[iii] Had it not been for Huxley’s bark, the propaganda of Darwinism may have never left the doghouse of academic obscurity.

Today we are hearing a new outburst of such barking, but this time it is high-pitched, mixed with whining. Atheist Richard Dawkins has mimicked Huxley’s nickname, and dubbed himself “Darwin’s pit-bull.” But these New Atheists are actually much less than bull dogs or pit-bulls. If it could ever be said of anyone that their bark is worse than their bite, it could be said of these guys. Pit bulls, ha! More like lap dogs that annoy with their constant and unbearably loud yipping. The whole new pack of atheists has dug beneath their fences and is out growling at every passer-by in the Christian neighborhood. It’s time to call animal control.

Stolen Bones

After spending some time studying the works of this burst of popular atheism, I have realized that they have very little to offer in the way of anything new or profound — just old bones to pick. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. The similarity in language and argument to the popular atheists who wrote a century or so ago, is quite comical. In fact, in some places they seem to verge on plagiarism. In my book, The Return of the Village Atheist, I document some of the arguments of the former Communist murderers as an eerie echo in Sam Harris, for example, but those parallels exist due to the logical conclusions of atheism (a culture of death). Here are some more instances, these smacking of intellectual borrowing and unoriginality.

For example, Harris uses the language of bygone atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Russell was a famous philosopher, mathematician, and loud opponent of religion. Among his anti-faith arsenal was the argument that the Church, “by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering.”[iv] Russell first gave this comment in 1927. Harris digs up the same 80-year old slander:

"Religion allows people to imagine their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral — that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings."[v]

Russell continued that the Church is,

"an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness."[vi]

Harris echoes, “Religion allows people to imagine their concerns are moral when they are not — that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation.”[vii]

Russell’s basis for morality was that which “would make for human happiness.”[viii] Harris repeats: for morality, “there need only be better and worse ways to seek happiness.”[ix] Same thought, no reference (and neither, by the way, could tell you exactly what happiness is, or when it is legitimate or illegitimate).

Harris could not even resist using the same example as Russell. The Cambridge scholar ridiculed what he saw as the Roman Catholic strictness on marriage:

Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: ‘This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life’ . . . I say that that is a fiendish cruelty.[x]

Harris uses the same bark, only updating syphilis to HIV:

"If you can believe it, the Vatican is currently opposed to condom use even to prevent the spread of HIV from one married partner to another."[xi]

The similarities between the two writers on this issue are more extensive yet. Russell wrote,

"Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners."[xii]

For Harris, his alleged Christian ambivalence to human suffering “explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.”[xiii] Similarly, he complains,

"We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be both safe and effective. . . . And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year."[xiv]

I refute these lies in Village Atheist. Here I just intend to show how Harris can’t even make up his own lies. Rather, he repeats Russell’s ideas, almost his very words, hoping to bring smear the Church. This level of intellectual pirating would get you expelled from any major university, and would end the career of any major journalist. But atheistdom, as we theists have been saying for some time now, is a worldview that destroys the foundations of morals. So much for the atheist’s vaunted quest for intellectual honesty.

Today’s generation of atheists even plagiarize each other. Harris seems to do so to Dawkins without citing him. In one place, Dawkins tries to argue that morality improves in history regardless of input from Christianity. Harris picks up his language without reference. Compare the two side-by-side:

Dawkins: “Although martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.”[xv]

Harris: “While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to non-violence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.”[xvi]

Dawkins himself has no real ammo against the faith, except that which he has garnered from Russell. His only defense against Christian scholar Alister McGrath’s insightful critique of him is to dig up an old bone from Russell’s back yard. Russell referred to the impossibility of disproving God as ridiculous, because, he said, it would be like disproving the existence of an undetectable teapot orbiting Mars. I have exposed the fallacy of Russell’s “celestial teapot” in a previous post; here we should just see the bankruptcy and utter tiredness of the modern atheists in their reliance on a dead and gone generation. Even though Dawkins cites his source, he nevertheless uncritically uses the same old argument. The old arguments failed once. They are just as flea-ridden today.

One Generation to the Next

But the self-designated pit-bull is still as mean spirited as any junk-yard dog. We can see Darwinist mercilessness on the part of Dawkins himself toward the weak and defenseless of his own species. During his speaking engagement at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, VA, a questioner asked Dawkins about former atheist Anthony Flew’s assent to theism shortly before his death. Flew, one will recall, was every bit as hardened an atheist as Dawkins every dreamed of being, and was so for decades. But, late in his life, he read the work of Michael Behe on Intelligent Design, and was persuaded to leave the atheist camp. His former atheist colleagues, even though Flew is deceased, are now after his reputation, and like a hyena circling an aged beast that has exposed itself from the herd, Darwin’s pit-bull sank his canines into the question. He ridiculed Flew’s decision and insulted, “He was once a great philosopher . . .” Once. Not anymore, apparently.

This is survival of the fittest among the pack of atheists. As long as you retain your atheistic belief, then your are considered smart. But relinquish that belief, even ever so slightly as Flew did, and then you’re washed up, senile, diminished, dead meat. So, the same man, same IQ, same scientific method, same mathematics and statistics, same evidence, who once was considered by Dawkins profound because of his atheism, now relinquishes his atheism, and, despite all of his other attributes and talents unchanged, is now portrayed by Dawkins as doddering and unintelligent. What gives? You can clearly see that in atheism’s dog-eat-dog world, all that matters is atheism. Godlessness. Aptitude or logic are not important. Only the presupposition and conclusion of atheism. Nothing else.

Therefore, our response to Dawkins should not be to try to sit down and reason with the man. He’ll never hear it. The response should be to feed our flocks and protect them from these terriers in wolves’ clothing. They are no real intellectual threat. They are only a media and political threat. They are merely howling to their own kind — people who already believe in atheism to begin with, and want to find strength in numbers. The constant yip-yap we hear in the media can be ended by rolling up a newspaper, and giving a few swats. Fence the yard, and call the dog-catcher. At least call your Representatives and tell them that you value your religion and will not support any anti-Christian or anti-religious legislator or legislation whatsoever. Their job should depend on your Christian moral values. This will have the atheists howling at the moon.

Above all, we must be faithful to our children’s education. These atheists’ number one agenda, currently, is to gain tighter control over education in this country (and in the UK), in order to secularize the children, especially those from religious families, from their earliest years forward (this was Russell’s agenda, too[xvii]). If we want our children to be pit-bulls for atheists, then let us do nothing. If we take our covenantal responsibilities seriously, then we will not send our children to the dog-trainers to be educated.

Concluding Remarks

You would think Russell’s terriers would learn something about evolution from their master’s own words. In a 1914 essay Russell wrote, “The beliefs of today may count as true today, if they carry us along the stream; but tomorrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation.”[xviii] Russell was expounding the alleged philosophical out-workings of Darwinism. He himself saw something devious in the belief that truth itself evolves. He continued, “Somehow, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be better than the past or present.”[xix] Dawkins actually buys into the idea that future generations will be far better than ours, simply because they will be further evolved, morally speaking.[xx] This is the utopian, leg-kicking, rabbit-chasing, dream of many atheists and Darwinists. Russell rightly saw it as a childish fantasy: to those who follow such a view he said, “the reader is like the child which expects a sweet because it has been told to open its mouth and shut its eyes.”[xxi] Such is the type of blind faith required by Dawkins’s blind-watchmaker.

There is a final lesson (for now) found in Dawkins’s, Harris’s, and others’ regurgitation of the arguments of earlier village atheists such as Russell. There is nothing new, and nothing savory, about the New Atheism. “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” (Prov. 26:11). Their atheism is the same old rancid stew, with the same old dogs returning to it. Thankfully for us, the self-dubbed “pit-bull” has told us up front what sort of animal he desires to be. We can be certain that his intellectual kibbles-n-bits are aptly repugnant.

The more I study these guys the more convinced I become: they are not careful reasoners, they are conscious propagandists. They are not respectable or loyal to humanity, as they claim, and they are certainly not mankind’s best friend. They are fueled strongly by their hatred of the Church and of religion. Just as the original “bulldog” once also called himself “Huxley-Episcopophagous”[xxii] — meaning “Bishop-eating Huxley” — so Darwin’s dogs want to devour the Church again today. They are the rabid strays of academia, fed on the garbage left by their century-old cousins. Throw out the garbage and the dogs will waste away, too.

P.S. - If you are a dog breeder, please do not be offended at my metaphors between dogs and atheists. I intended no insult to man's best friend. Additionally, I am quite aware that pit-bulls are a breed of terrier, and thus my inference that terriers are yippy lap-dogs as opposed to powerful fighters does not hold. The point, however, that the new atheists are lap-dogs in comparison to some former thinkers, does.

End Notes:
[i]. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962) 263.
[ii]. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958) 32.
[iii]. Himmelfarb, 263.
[iv]. Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” in Russell On Religion: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Louis Greenspan and Stefan Anderson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 89-90.
[v]. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) 25.
[vi]. Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” 90.
[vii]. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 25.
[viii]. Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” 90.
[ix]. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 23.
[x]. Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” 89.
[xi]. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 34*.
[xii]. Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Contributed to Civilization?,” in Russell On Religion: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Louis Greenspan and Stefan Anderson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 171.
[xiii]. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 25.
[xiv]. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 26-7.
[xv]. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006) 271.
[xvi]. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) 12.
[xvii]. Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Contributed to Civilization?,” 172.
[xviii]. Bertrand Russell, “Mysticism and Logic,” in Russell On Religion: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Louis Greenspan and Stefan Anderson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 125.
[xix]. Russell, “Mysticism and Logic,” 125.
[xx]. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 262-72
[xxi]. Russell, “Mysticism and Logic,” 125.
[xxii]. William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, Inc., 1963 [1955]) 416.