The God Delusion by the atheist apologist, Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor, reader, thinker, and prolific writer of atheist literature, should go down in history with all other religious texts. He's not just an avowed atheist, but a man who believes it is the "right" way to be. Therefore, the stated purpose of the book is to sway people to atheism. He's very persuasive, I found myself leaning towards conversion several times as I was reading. "Almost thou persuadest me to be a[n atheist]" (see Acts 26:28, With apologies to King Agrippa)
In this purpose he develops an interesting dilemma. Having defined atheism as a belief system, and not just another belief system, but actually "the correct" one to which he can create converts, he transforms what was before just "not religious" into an equivalent religion. He now has a doctrine, dogma, and, most importantly, us and them, dividing the world into two groups: 1) those who are ignorant and primitive because they believe in some sort of supernatural creator, and 2) those who are enlightened and have come to the conclusion that there is no God. Thus, the book is filled to the brim with irony and logical fallacy.
Ignorance
The irony is that he has to come from a position of ignorance to prove his point. For example, as a "monist" he can conveniently ignore, and thus remain blind to, the existence of a spiritual nature in man. The physical mind likes the idea of atheism because it can rationalize, explain everything, and be freed from the tyranny of the spiritual mind. Thus, it is very tempting to ignore the spiritual and pass it off as "hallucinations" or "hysteria." Using a metaphor to generalize this argument it would sound like, "since I'm blind, light doesn't exist." This doesn't work for those who see. The blind can argue all day with any sort of sophistry to explain why those whose eyes work are deluded, but those who see will just laugh. The atheist argues that all the seeing people in the world can become enlightened by giving up on the idea of the existence of light (no pun intended). After all, there are so many blind people who contradict each other about the nature of light. The personal evidence of the existence of light to a blind person is never forthcoming; he must have faith, which means garnering evidence from those who have vision. Whether he is actually blind, or just closing his eyes doesn't change his ignorance.
The problem in the context of God is that less than one in a thousand actually see, and since there are so many who profess to know the Light because they've learned the terminology but don't really see, it's hard to know who can be relied-on to give good information. The answer, according to the enlightened atheist, is to throw the baby out with the bath water; it seems easier to deny light exists than to do the work required to understand it. The ultimate ignorance is to ignore a whole part of our own existence. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Like Plato's cave, the atheist sits in a darkened room with a small window to the huge, beautiful and enlightened world outside, out of which he refuses to look; the window is high and it would take some effort to see out of it. He will only believe what is in that room, immediately in front of him. He denies that the window exists, "the light just filters in by itself," he reasons. But rather than look he argues over the various rational theories that explain its existence. Outside of this little room lies an infinite world of wonder, of life, of creation, of connection, and of beauty. The atheist states that he has enough to deal with in his little room and spends his whole life trying to understand what he sees. He is going to pontificate and argue about theories and ideas endlessly when just outside is the Light that makes everything immediately clear and obvious. He sees no rational reason to believe in the world outside, it makes no sense because it's so different from his little room, and those who do believe are misguided, irrational, mistaken, uneducated, simple, and delusional.
The Holy Bible
The Bible is just a collection of some of the writings of prophets and is by no means comprehensive; there are many prophets referred to or quoted within it whose writings are not currently available. Nevertheless, it has spiritual value. The word "Holy" is added to the title for good reason. "Holy" means "set apart" or "separate." Why is it separate, and what is it separate from? -- all the other books in the world. Since all human words are filtered through the authors' perceptions, beliefs and experiences it could be said that we only write what we know -- autobiography. Mr. Dawkins' book is his autobiography; he tells us that he created this religion because he has a problem with the law of chastity -- it's all about him. In fact, in this sense the entire corpus of the written word is autobiography -- except for the writings of prophets. The prophets speak or write in allegory, and only spiritual maturity can tell us what is to be taken at face value. Just as you cannot give your gift of eyesight to one who is blind, the prophet cannot give his gift of spiritual vision to another. Just as you had to use metaphors to describe a rainbow to the blind man, the prophet has to use metaphors to describe God, Heaven, and the infinitude of life. If ninety-nine percent of the people misinterpret the metaphors, it doesn't mean they aren't valid; even if one hundred percent don't understand them it doesn't mean the prophets are wrong.
The Bible, for example, is used by atheists as evidence that there is no God because it doesn't teach in a way that is expected. This wrongly assumes that the Bible is primarily a book about "how to live a moral life." If God does something we don't expect or agree with, like kill one or a group of people, can we then logically conclude that He doesn't exist? This reasoning is based on assumptions of an anthropomorphic god created in ones own head, not the true God. Arrogance enters into the logical fallacy, "If I were God, I would do such and such, and since He didn't do that, there is no God." Spiritually immature mortals understand no more of the mind of God than the suckling infant does of its mother. The prophet clearly stated this, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD." (Isaiah 55:8) The human brain is not capable of understanding something it has not experienced. Back to the blind man: It's impossible for the blind man to understand the stars in the night sky. You can use words like light, twinkling, hue, points, billions, Milky Way, and so forth, but he's going to get a very different understanding from the one that you intend to relate. To assume that, "if I don't understand it then it's wrong" is too tempting for the immature mind. On the other hand, those who seek enlightenment assume their own ignorance and seek to understand why God acts as He does, thus producing spiritual growth, and coming to understand God.
Both believers and non-believers alike use to the Bible to bolster their positions. Believers assume that if the Bible could be corroborated by historical records or archeology they would be in a better position while atheists assume that if it is all just mythology it could be ignored as untrue. Both are false. The Bible isn't history. It isn't meant to be history. Moses wasn't writing a history, and neither were the other prophets. It's a spiritual work using images, people and events of the world as metaphors to explain spiritual things. Spiritual immaturity is manifested by the need to prove or disprove the Bible by physical means. It is as inane to use archeology to prove the Bible as to use tensor calculus to prove the Declaration of Independence. It's equally vain to try to say it's false based on lack of evidence. Evidence for what? Spiritual information? Those who try to prove the Bible to be false are using irrelevant arguments - using intellectual arguments to try to disprove spiritual things. It's like dismissing Aristotle's
Politics because it doesn't contain any information about quantum physics.
Dualist believers
When one is blind to the existence of the spiritual it's very convenient to lump all those who have spiritual understanding and/or desires into one category. The reasoning then becomes much less complicated. There are so many different concepts of god that it would take a lifetime to sort them out. It's easier to put them together and prove a couple of them wrong so we can throw them all away -- the "straw-man" fallacy. If Zeus and Thor are false gods then they all must be false. Besides being illogical, this is just laziness. It's easy to give up after a couple of tries. My children often use this same reasoning after a brief attempt to find a lost article of clothing, "I've looked everywhere, but I can't find it -- it doesn't exist." Mr. Dawkins is perplexed at the idea of groups of primitive people forming a religion to explain the miracles of modern technology; they needed an explanation for these "miracles" and their hypothesis was wrong. Using the same reasoning he generalizes this example to explain away the existence of all religion as just a primitive way to explicate our ignorance -- the god of the gaps. It follows, then, that when we fully understand our physical world, there will be no need for religion. This argument has two big problems: 1) understanding how God works does not make him cease to exist anymore than the plummer ceases to exist when we understand how pumps and pipes magically bring an endless stream of clean water to the faucet; and 2) it is simply denial of what the real need is. When we can explain every bit of our physical world (which is unlikely to be soon) there will still be a void deep in the heart of every person. If it isn't filled with the true God, people will look for false gods to fill it. Nothing will change.
One argument for atheism is that a belief in gods is destructive, bringing wars and atrocities of all kinds upon mankind over all of known history. This is accepted as prima facie evidence that religion is wrong, therefore there is no God. This is a very weak argument (though it's really not even an argument), "if false religion exists then there is no true religion, and no true God." The fact that false religions exist everywhere in every time and place is not even remotely related to the existence of God. Anyone can make up a religion. For example, the communists in the USSR had to replace the Church with heroes for the people to worship, who immediately gave them up when the USSR fell and the Church was reinstated. Moreover, it doesn't take belief in a god to be violent or bloodthirsty. Karl Marx defined communism as an enlightened, atheistic system of economy and government, and more people have died in its name than under any other, including all the religious wars ever fought in history. Somehow that doesn't sway the atheists or the communists that their belief system is wrong. Besides, most, if not all, religious wars are really political wars (fought for power) in the name of religion; the belief system is just a tool to motivate the people to take sides, and not the reason for the war.
Though they are the only way to begin to understand God, personal religious experiences are easily rejected, "If you see something that I don't then you are having a hallucination." I do this with schizophrenic patients. One in particular who is very articulate can tell me that he sees things that I can't see. I explain how this happens: the problem in his brain is like dreaming during the day. His dreams are vivid and very real just exactly the way people dream at night and wake up in a cold sweat from a very real and scary nightmare. To the body it's real in every sense of the word. However, a personal religious experience is not the same, and must be personally experienced; the essence of it cannot be transmitted by words. Once one person sees, he can help others, but only to show them how they can see for themselves - thus the need for missionaries. How can we know the difference? Personal spiritual experiences bring growth. Growth never happens without effort. Hallucinations create dependence. Besides, anyone can experience God by going through the same steps, but this is not an option with hallucinations.
The question of "the Ultimate 747" puts a smug smile on the face of every atheist: who created God? This is simply another anthropomorphic assumption of God. The reality is, God isn't exactly like us, in fact, He has given His own origins -- Yahweh. This means "self-existent" indicating his eternal nature; He has always existed. What is time to a being not limited by the dimension of time? Because of our existence within the fourth dimension, humans aren't endowed with the ability to think in infinite terms, we automatically want beginnings and endings. We are therefore blind to the possibilities that exist outside of our "box" of time and can't understand eternity. To assume that if we can't understand something it isn't possible is not only arrogant; it flies in the face of reason. The evidence shows that there are many things that cannot be understood that exist. Return to the blind man who cannot understand light except in metaphor, or a deaf person who cannot understand a Beethoven sonata. Why don't we insist that our five-year-olds begin math by learning calculus? Mr. Dawkins' own admission that he (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot understand quantum physics, yet accepts it on faith based on the evidence of its predictive value, indicates that truth may, at times, be difficult or impossible to understand while we are yet untutored. If indeed God does exist outside of the fourth dimension as He has stated, the "Ultimate 747" argument falls apart.
Defining truth
What is truth? Maybe truth is what everybody believes; if everyone agrees that something is true then it is. This isn't reasonable because even the things that everyone has agreed-on in the past have turned out to be wrong. Then maybe truth is what predicts future events. If I have a theory that predicts what will happen in the future it can be taken as fact. The Greek model of the Universe predicted accurately the position of the stars at future dates, but was really not true at all. Then maybe truth is whatever is logical and rational, as Mr. Dawkins seems to imply. This would be very dangerous to assume because philosophers have tried for thousands of years to arrive at truth by this means. No. Truth cannot be proven to another. We can only seek and find it ourselves. When the atheist ignores the duality of existence he is limiting himself to only what his physical senses can perceive. Any truths outside of the physical will then be out of his reach. He is left to be perplexed, as Mr. Dawkins stated he is, at the words of the prophets and the spiritual senses of the rest of humanity.
Truth is things as they are, independent of our senses, ideas, feelings, or interpretations. It cannot be given to another in any realm, intellectual or spiritual; all we really transfer is belief. We are therefore only able to seek truth and find it for ourselves. All truth is arrived at in the same way. It starts with belief (hypothesis), which may be based on experience or not. After one has a belief he seeks evidence for it. As he gathers evidence, the belief may be modified or even changed completely, and thus eventually arrives at truth. (Ideally, but as Socrates lamented at the end of his life, "I only know that I know nothing.") Without belief evidence is meaningless, which is why only individuals who believe and seek for themselves find truth - it cannot be given to another.
All we can ever pass on to others is our autobiography - our own experience through filters. We can state our own experience, and if others believe it, they may just hold on to the belief based on our word, or, if they want to know for themselves they would have to corroborate it by gaining their own experience. However, another may study the same evidence and find a different conclusion. For example, Mr. Dawkins gives his testimony of the theory of Evolution - God almost certainly doesn't exist because "Natural Selection" can explain our self-existent state (the Anthropic Principle) - a belief he holds based on concepts he has acquired through observation, the thoughts and ideas of others, and his own rational thinking. He presents natural selection as a simple, rational, gentle slope up the backside to the peak of the evolutionary cliff. However, a critical look at the theories presented with the same material evidence could produce a different conclusion.
Empirical evidence for Evolution isn't in any way proof of why it exists. If I can find a theory that seems explain what I can see, such as the existence and diversity of life, it is in no way evidence that it's spontaneous. We explain what we already see, assuming we see everything. The Greeks had a model of the Universe that explained everything they saw, until Copernicus formed a competing theory, and Galileo produced the evidence for it by seeing more. Mr. Dawkins specifically stretches excessively the idea of natural selection to explain away the existence of the spiritual nature of mankind. It's a big stretch, but all it has to be is reasonable and he can accept it. So, how do we swallow an elephant? one bite at a time. The problem here, as we've just seen, that the bites we try to take become as big as the elephant. There's no evidence for it. However, if you just believe hard enough, you can imagine the slope up the back of the mountain to be level enough to walk up, but even that takes both planning and energy. All order in the Universe requires both planning and focused energy. Without these we are left with a passive system such water. Water will not climb up the face of Mr. Dawkins' cliff, but neither will it flow up the back side, no matter how gentle the slope. In fact, like everything else in the Universe it takes planning and exactly the same amount of energy to perform either task. There is much more evidence for a self-existent God than a self-existent Universe.
The war between science and religion isn't true. Those who are "religious" who fear to look at scientific theories because they think any evidence could ever disprove God are hypocrites - their beliefs are more important than the truth. Likewise, atheists who think that they have found proof that there is no Creator are fooling themselves. Science attempts to answer questions of "what?" and "how?" but doesn't have the tools to answer "who?" or "why?" Isn't it ironic that just as science is discovering the relativity of space and time the growing atheist movement is denying the possibility of a being that exists outside of our space and time? Synchronicity is relative to the frame of reference. Quantum physics insists that there be more than one frame of reference for matter, space, and time. Clearly, the existence of a being that exists outside of our frame of reference, that isn't limited by time - a higher dimension, perhaps - falls within both our theoretical and experimental evidence. Thus, the "scientists" who ascribe to atheism commit the same error of hypocrisy, their beliefs are more important than the evidence.
Old is new
The religion of Nature has been around for thousands of years and is therefore probably the most primitive of all religions. The sun, moon, and stars, and every person are self-existent; humans are created from Gaia out of nothing, or without direction or planning. When we die we go back to our Mother Earth and join in "the circle of life." This ancient religion now has a new face of "science" to put on called "Atheism," not as an organization, but a belief system. Albert Einstein is regarded as a prophet in this religion on the same level as Moses for the Jews (ironically). Mr. Dawkins even names the religion after him - "Einsteinian religion." Charles Darwin is also posthumously recruited as a prophet, who wrote the most important scripture elucidating the doctrine. It's easy to resurrect intellectually mature people who never fully elucidated their spiritual maturity. Atheism could be viewed as a sect of the "New Age" religion (which acknowledges its primitive roots). Both believe in nature, rejecting a personal god. Both are existentialist. Both are belief systems without organization.
The naturalist religions, including atheism, carry the same weaknesses as all the competing religions as attested by competition itself; presenting an argument that "I'm right and you're wrong" indicates a lack of security in your own knowledge. Humans like to believe we have arrived. Whenever we're in the car on a long trip the children ask "are we there yet?" every five minutes! People who join a religion like to believe they have arrived at truth so they refuse to look at other possibilities. This is the very reason why religions fight against each other -- insecurity. Now, Mr. Dawkins has joined in the fray. He wants recognition for his beliefs. He is right, enlightened, and progressive, while all others are ignorant and immature infidels. Why wouldn't everyone want to convert to rationalism, naturalism, and atheism? It's so logical and obviously enlightened. Everyone feels the same way about their own beliefs -- we are there!
Propaganda tools are used to support Atheism just like any other religion, such as "bandwagon," that everyone important and intelligent was, is, or is becoming atheist; they're coming out of the closet. Moreover, he uses selective comments from great historical figures such as Einstein and Darwin to make them appear to ascribe to this religion. This is the same tactic used by the personal-god-believer religionists to try to bolster their own faith. For example, both sides use the Founding Fathers of the United States of America to bolster their opinions, and both misquote them because they can see only that which supports their beliefs. People who aren't strong in their own knowledge need to bring in others for support.
The accusations brought against all the other religions of the world apply equally to atheism. Most religions have a self-existent god just as the atheist god of random. Ignorance forms the foundation, ignoring the spiritual nature of man. Belief without evidence is required of all who are going to accept that everything is self-existent. Though spontaneous generation flies in the face of reason and evidence, you must believe that some day science will progress enough to understand. They believe their god is in the gaps of their knowledge, that some day they will figure it out. Hypocrisy permeates the religion that says science is its ally, but denies the evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Laziness is the essence of explaining away or brushing off the experiences of most of humanity throughout history rather than trying to understand them. Thus, atheism attempts to replace one set of immature belief systems with another. It's really just the old nature religion, with a twist they call "science." As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Carr so aptly stated, "
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose."
