I’m wading through Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion right now, and am unfortunately feeling the same pangs of annoyance that I felt watching his documentary The Root of All Evil? (Google Video: Part I | Part II) recently. While hypocritical televangelists like Ted Haggard (whom Dawkins captured making his official stance on homosexuality clear…before being outed) are always easy targets, it doesn’t feel like enough to offer examples of the most egregious examples of abuse in the name of religion to make a case for atheism. It also doesn’t help to trot out the names of highly intelligent people, like Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, and vigorously make the case for the fact that they were or are atheists. And it really doesn’t help the case for atheism to suggest that those making concessions to theists are committing “intellectual high treason”.
Richard Dawkins’s behavior frankly reminds me of the people who take a good point too far. Some facts are stand well enough on their own to make a case. You don’t have to believe George W. Bush eats babies and secretly prays to Adolf Hitler to unquaveringly believe he is an awful president. There are plenty of facts and logical trains of thought that support his incompetence without having to resort to hyperbole and silly conjecture. The same goes for Dawkins’s arguments in favor of atheism. The case for atheism should arise from its own arguments, not tangential information such as some religious zealots’ propensity for violence or attempts at curtailing others’ rights and freedoms in the name of religion. Not all religious people are guilty of crimes committed in the name of their religion, and the areligious can conceivably be just as prone to intolerance, hatred and violence as their faithful counterparts.
Then again, an argument in favor of atheism alone does not a book make, and a guy’s gotta eat. Even Oxford University professors have to hustle a bit.
But really, the fact remains that there are questions that science can not answer, at least not yet. Even if we were to be thoroughly assured that our universe began with the Big Bang–that is, if the current theory were to become fact–then we have to ask, what existed before the Big Bang? What created the matter and energy in the first place? What exists beyond the reaches of our universe? Why are we here? What purpose does existence have?
As a person who grew up with no religious convictions, and thankfully no real compulsion to feel them by my parents or peer group (or, at least, none that I could ever take seriously), I don’t share Dawkins’s and others’ antipathy towards religion. I can understand why people desperately want to believe something. I can understand the fear of death and the unknown. I can understand why people either invent fanciful ideas about the supernatural and its ethos, that somehow mirror our own natural inclinations towards leadership and subservience, and species survival. I don’t agree with any of it, but I don’t see why people should have their illusions shattered when they derive solace from them, and provided they don’t harm themselves or others from them.
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