Article

Atheism

Belief

12 April 2024

5 min read

Dawkins is wrong about the nature of belief

You can’t rejoice in its collapse and like its cultural inheritance too.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man sits and speaks, against a background of a bookcase.

Dawkins on LBC.

Richard Dawkins sat in a tree,

Sawing every branch he could see,

As he sawed through the branch on which he sat,

He raged, "It's not fair that I should go splat!"

I am a recovering New Atheist. I was such a New Atheist that I have a claim to fame: I have given what-for to Anne Widdecombe and the Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja. I was there, as a spotty, greasy haired, angry teenager when Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry socked-it-to the Roman Catholics at an Intelligence Squared debate. The motion was ‘The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World’. The question I asked was so poorly formed that the moderator deemed it a comment.

I was a callow youth. Forgive me.

I am now not quite so young and not quite so spotty. Now that I am a man, I have put away childish things. I have abandoned atheism and embraced faith in Jesus Christ. I am a priest in the Church of England, fully in favour of the Ten Commandments and the moral framework of the Church. Clearly, I’ve been on a journey.

So, it seems, has Professor Richard Dawkins.

The author of The God Delusion, and scourge of many public Christian thinkers and apologists, has recently made some turbulent waves. Having surfed the tides of New Atheism, he now seems to be swimming against the current. He is a proud ‘cultural Christian’. In an interview on LBC he forcefully defended the Christian inheritance of this country:

“I do think that we are culturally a Christian country…I call myself a ‘cultural Christian’… I love hymns and Christmas carols…I feel at home in the Christian ethos… I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country…”

Professor Dawkins went on to clarify (several times!) that he doesn’t believe a single word of Christian doctrine or the Bible. He was cheered by the continued decline in the numbers of believing Christians in this country. This wasn’t his Christianity. He argued that the distinction between a ‘believing Christian’ and a ‘cultural Christian’ is such that one can be both a very firm atheist and a ‘cultural Christian’. He doesn’t want people believing the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection of Jesus, but he does want us to keep our Cathedrals and beautiful parish churches. At first reading this could be seen as positive - an unlikely defender of the Christian faith coming to the rescue of a beleaguered Church.

It isn’t.

What the interview demonstrated was that Professor Dawkins doesn’t really understand the nature of belief or the nature of culture. If he did, he would understand a basic principle: culture doesn’t just magically appear and grow. Culture is formed and maintained from fundamental beliefs.

You can’t have the fruits without the roots.

Professor Dawkins likes church music. He likes the architecture of grand Cathedrals. He likes living in a society with a Western liberal ethic. All three of these fruits have grown from roots of the Christian tradition, and not just any Christian tradition. They have grown out of the BELIEVING Christian tradition.

Why on earth would people spend inordinate amounts of time and money building Cathedrals if they didn’t actually believe the worship of God was important? Why would musicians pour out the best of their creativity into sacred music if not for a love of Jesus? Why would they structure our society in a way that sees the care of the poor and oppressed as a fundamental necessity if they don’t take the Sermon on the Mount seriously?

People don’t die because they quite like a soft cultural inheritance - they die because they believe!

Professor Dawkins finds himself living in a world that has been so shaped and saturated by Christianity that even our secularism has been called ‘Christian’. He lives in a Christian house. He likes it. Now he thinks he can have it and keep it while seeking to undermine and destroy the very beliefs that are the foundation, the stones, the mortar.

He can’t.

You don’t get to demand that everyone build their house on sand, and then complain that it is collapsing…and he does worry that it is collapsing. Predictably, he opened the interview by discussing his qualms about Islam and how he wouldn’t want this country to change from being ‘culturally Christian’ to ‘culturally Muslim’: “Insofar as Christianity can be seen as a bulwark against Islam I think it’s a very good thing.” I find this invocation of my faith offensive - not just because I believe my faith is ‘the truth’ (not just a club for angry atheists to bash Muslims with), but because it is so stupid!

I use the word advisedly.

It is a comment from a man who can’t seem to understand cause-and-effect. People who don’t believe strongly in something don’t fight for it. Rejoicing in the collapse of Christian belief while expecting it to protect you from other religions is about as obtuse as an individual can get. The Church grew, and spread, and produced the hymns and cathedrals and ethics that Professor Dawkins loves so much, because of people’s firm belief in Jesus Christ as our Risen Saviour. People died to spread this faith - THIS CULTURE! As Tertullian said: “…the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” People don’t die because they quite like a soft cultural inheritance - they die because they believe!

It was this realisation that led me to where I am now. I found that everything I cared about flowed from the Christian faith I rejected, so I rejected it no more. I wanted to continue enjoying the ‘fruits’ of my ‘cultural Christianity’, so I stopped hacking away at the ‘roots’ of ‘believing Christianity’. Professor Dawkins is seemingly wilfully blind to this fact: ‘believing Christian’s make it possible to have ‘cultural Christians’. Take away the belief and just watch what happens to the culture.

“I don’t was to be misunderstood. I do think it’s nonsense.”

As a believing Christian I respond: can we please have our culture back, then?

Column

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

14 November 2024

4 min read

Proposed euthanasia safeguards insult our NHS

We must defend a collective sense of care and generosity.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A gable end mural depicts a nurse in scrubs and a mask turning and looking towards the viewer.

A mural of an NHS nurse during COVID, Manchester.

Mural Republic

It was, I believe, the late political satirist Simon Hoggart who coined the Law of the Ridiculous Reverse, which held that, if the opposite of a statement is plainly absurd, then it was not worth making in the first place.

This law comes to mind when Labour MP Kim Leadbeater promises that her Assisted Dying Bill will have the “strictest safeguards in the world”, one of which is that those patients who have ordered their fatal dose “would be allowed to change their mind at any time.”

Where, exactly, has it ever been suggested that an individual, having asked for an assisted death, would not be allowed to change their mind? I’m just wondering which legislator or medical professional has proposed that once a lethal draught has been prescribed then there is no turning back.

I’m struggling to picture the circumstance in which a terminally ill patient is pinned down and killed, the last words that they hear being: “I’m sorry Mrs Simpkins, but everyone’s gone to a lot of trouble. You asked for it and you’re jolly well going to get it.”

This is important because, apparently, being able to change your mind about asking for help to kill yourself is one of the strictest safeguards in the world. I hope Ms Leadbeater will forgive me for pointing out that this doesn’t really stack up.

And what’s serious about it is that it’s also a massive straw man argument. The clear and rather devious implication is that one of the arguments being made against the introduction of an assisted suicide law is that patients won’t be able to change their minds about it, which I think we can all accept simply isn’t a fact at all. It’s absurd – a Ridiculous Reverse.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

It’s also hugely contemptuous of the medical profession in general and rude to the NHS in particular. That’s because there’s a snide impression behind Leadbeater’s comment there may be hundreds of budding Harold Shipman out there, but her powerful safeguards are going to protect us from them.

We’re in danger of becoming inured to this kind of insult from politicians directed at the NHS. And it’s worth exploring why they might think we need to be protected from unscrupulous doctors and nurses. In this case, one possible reason is that the NHS isn’t being particularly helpful in giving the euthanasia enthusiasts what they want.

Doctors and their staff have plenty of ethical objections to assisted suicide. But leave those aside for a moment. At the practical level, the NHS has made it clear that it doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate a policy of assisted deaths safely. And it can’t afford to set one up. So a government that introduces assisted suicide is going to have to organise and regulate its own assisted death agency.

“Oh,” the assisted dying lobbyists seem to exclaim, “we’d presumed you’d do as you’re told.” Just hand out the hemlock. Take your instructions from the legislature.

But the NHS is better than that. And it’s that kind of high principle that so infuriates feckless politicians. It was the late Nigel Lawson who said, somewhat ruefully, that the NHS “is the closest thing the English have to a religion”. The right wing of politics regularly tells us it’s time to renounce that religion.

To worship the NHS as a religion would, literally, be idolatrous. But it’s not so to acknowledge its religious qualities. Just look at the word – the Latin religio means something like “good faith”, the essence of who we are, what makes us good.

The NHS, in its post-war incarnation, has been central to who we are as a people and what defines us. It’s something to do with our collective sense of care and generosity to one another. Its members, like our national Church, make up a single body.

This is not to co-opt the NHS as the medical wing of the Church. It’s no part of the NHS’s brief to proselytize – rather the reverse; Christian medical staff have been in deep disciplinary trouble for evangelising. It is a profoundly secular organisation.

So the NHS emphatically isn’t in the business of propagating the gospel. But that’s not to say that we can’t be in the same business. Many priests have stories of their most affirming work being in the company of people of other faiths or of none.

The NHS’s proud heritage is to offer treatment free to anyone at the point of access. Put another way, it will seek to heal anyone who comes to it. I make no apology for saying that sounds familiar.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

And when NHS professionals tell us where we can stick our assisted suicides, I respectfully suggest we give it our solemn attention, rather than patronisingly offering a Law of the Ridiculous Reverse.