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?

Article

Comment

Identity

Romance

6 June 2024

5 min read

Celibacy, the Pope and the dating app

There’s a desperate need for a new sexual revolution.

David Bennett

David is a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford University’s Theology and Religion faculty.

An advert on a Underground platform shows a person next to the slogna: Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.

Bumble's controversial ad campaign.

Recent news has sparked a furore over celibacy, and, as I will explain, the need for a new sexual revolution. Feminist theologian, Sarah Coakley, points to in her book, The New Asceticism, points to why we need this new sexual revolution

“the problem with desire is that it has become so heavily sexualised in the modern, post-Freudian period as to render its connection with other desires (including desire for God) obscure and puzzling.”

A glance at the media on both sides of the Atlantic provides evidence. Senator Tim Scott’s singleness is derided on the US news cycle, and London Underground adverts for dating app Bumble undermined the choice to be a nun or make a vow of celibacy.

For decades, the bowdlerised notion that Freud saw celibacy as a form of suppression, has created a deeply damaging myth that if you are not having sex, you are not just repressed, you are not even human. In its inaner, but still hurtful forms, if you are celibate, you are not trustworthy, a repressed pervert, or worse, worthy of being socially excluded. Of course, bad celibacy has had terrible results in and outside the Church, but so has bad marriage, and yet we do not treat the married or marriage this way.

You would expect to turn to the Roman Catholic, Anglican or mainline churches for a nuanced and profound contradiction to a culture obsessed with what they see merely as a ‘lack of sex.’ Instead, the Pope was recently reported to have made the comment that there was already too much “frociaggine” in some seminaries. The Italian word roughly translates as “faggotness”. Matteo Bruni, the director of the Vatican’s press office stated: “As he [the Pope] has stated on more than one occasion, ‘In the Church there is room for everyone, everyone! Nobody is useless or superfluous, there is room for everyone, just the way we are.’”

“The Pope never meant to offend or to use homophobic language, and apologises to everyone who felt offended [or] hurt by the use of a word,” Mr Bruni concluded in the Vatican statement.

The Pope has made other comments about celibacy, dissuading gay people from entering the priesthood just on the basis of sexual orientation. It is hard to argue that this is anything but discrimination. If the Pope wanted LGBTQI+ people to inhabit a traditional ethic, then provide a way constructively for them to do so.

This billboard ad reveals a culture which is erotically moribund and which has lost the fact that love is inevitably sacrificial in nature.

Now to turn to the dating app world, Bumble, aware of the new rise of singleness and celibacy (around 51 per cent of the American population is single), particularly among young women, struck out against this choice with controversial adverts.

This billboard ad reveals a culture that is erotically moribund and which has lost the fact that love is inevitably sacrificial in nature. My heart sank as I saw this billboard on the Underground. As someone who wrote their doctorate on celibacy, and has chosen to be dedicated to a love greater than sex and marriage, and who chose to be consecrated and vowed to celibacy, I felt angry at the notion that my choice, and that of millions of people, was derided as fanciful. This felt like another chip off the liberal project that I want to believe in of true diversity of opinion, and a shared city and society.

However, the value of sacrificial love at the bedrock of late modern and post-secular society was revealed as still as powerful as ever with Bumble receiving a wide response of outrage, and the marketing manager responsible being subsequently fired.

If we are to love someone, we must learn to deny choices and narrow our field of volition where we choose them over other pressing concerns.

In reading this I felt that some justice had been served. I could not escape the words of Pope Benedict XVI : “When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.”

For a moment, this radical love reflected in a healthy, non-repressive celibacy, which gives itself up for God and the other, and marriage as its sacrificial counter-part, was vindicated and, for a moment, was given the value it deserves, and which Bumble, and even at times, that God’s own church, have betrayed.

If we are to love someone, we must learn to deny choices and narrow our field of volition where we choose them over other pressing concerns. Such a view of love has been lost both inside and outside the Church.

Only a new asceticism, as Sarah Coakley avers, can purify “desire in the crucible of divine love, paradoxically imparting true freedom through the narrowing of choices.”

The fact we have gained such an impoverished ascetical or moral imagination for our loves does not bode well for how not just single people, but all people can flourish. A life of flourishing which does not involve sexual acts or in which a love beyond sex can be expressed in friendship speaks to a hope beyond sex and marriage, without which the human heart will remain restless and unsatisfied.

As Pope Benedict XVI states in his essay, Deus Caritas Est: “God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape.” Our society, from Pope Francis all the way to Bumble needs a new sexual revolution, which sees that sex is a clue to this deeper love of God for which we were created and which beckons us as with a faithfulness and passion no other lover can provide.