Should We Read Richard Dawkins Literally or Allegorically?

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As a Christian, there are few things I detest more than an atheist pontificating to me on the subject of religion. Self-professed atheists and agnostics are testaments to the loss of nerve for living life as human beings; rather than seeking meaning and purpose in life as humans have done for at least as long as recorded human history, they decidedly abandon the project altogether. In lecturing the rest of us with absolute certainty on the meaning of life and the necessity of human freedom, in the end all they have to tell us is that there is no meaning, certainty or freedom in the universe.

This is precisely what nauseated me while reading University of Texas physicist Steven Weinberg’s Times of London review, “A Deadly Certitude”, of fellow atheist Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion. (HT: Worldmagblog) In grotesque display of condescension and bigotry, Weinberg – a Nobel Prize-winner and recipient of the US National Medal of Science – so wantonly wallows in his ignorance of the Christian faith and Christian history that it betrays his blind faith in the dark dogmas of doubt.

(For a devastating analysis of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, see Terry Eagleton’s article in the London Review of Books, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching”)

Weinberg doesn’t get past the first paragraph of his review before making several glaring (and self-serving) factual errors. He mockingly cites the Second Century Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria as examples of dim-witted biblical literalist Neanderthals who believed that the earth was flat. But this is flatly (pardon the pun) not true. Rather than being biblical “literalists”, Theophilus and Clement were two of the more prominent advocates of an allegorical approach to Scripture – a position that Weinberg seems to accept as not quite as detestable as biblical “literalism”. In fact, it is Theophilus’ explanation of Genesis 1-3 that is perhaps the section he subjects most to his allegorical reading of the Bible.

One wonders if Weinberg reads Darwin’s Origin of Species, James Watson’s The Double Helix or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time literally or allegorically? If he takes these texts literally, can’t we just dismiss him as some secular fundamentalist crank?

Having read the Bible regularly for almost twenty years, I have yet to come across anything that advocates a flat earth. That must be why he has to qualify his position that “verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat” (my emphasis), an admission that a non-literal approach to Scripture – Weinberg’s preferred method – is what is required to arrive at a very conclusion he deplores.

The acceptance of helio-centrism in Christian Europe is the next straw man that Weinberg sets ablaze. He states that “the more radical idea that the Earth moves around the Sun was harder to accept.” This is partially true, but again, the culprit was not biblical literalism. Galileo’s tormenters were not literalist zealots, but rather, Renaissance Humanists unwilling to discard the ideas of the Greek rationalists, in particular Aristotle and Ptolemy. It was Aristotelianism and Ptolemy’s terra-centric universe that Pope Urban VIII was so desperate to protect against Galileo’s ideas, not the biblical literalism that Weinberg is so quick to deride. Exactly how did he win a Nobel Prize with such shoddy scholarship?

Of course, secular humanism has been such an advancement to humanity over monotheism, hasn’t it? What with the Reign of Terror and its goddess of Reason, Napoleonic total war, Prussian militarism, Marxist revolutions, Darwinian eugenics and racism, Bolshevik communism, Stalin’s collectivization of the kulaks, Italian fascism, German Nazism and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Stalin’s purges, Third World “liberation” movements, Nasser’s Arab socialism, Soviet gulags, the brutal crackdown on the Prague Spring, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq, Sandinista death squads, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Securitate, and those atheistic paradises on earth, Enver Hoxha’s Albania and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea, it is amazing that religion exists at all these days and that atheism hasn’t been universally embraced for the empowering and humanizing idea that it is.

Then again, the estimated 100 million people murdered in the name of atheism in the 20th Century alone so far surpass the collective abuses and persecutions launched in the name of Christianity over the past two millennia that the two are entirely incomparable – not really a record of the joys of secularism that Dawkins or Weinberg are really interested in revisiting.

Perhaps the most striking feature of atheism is the self-loathing manifested by the most strident atheists. In all of my travels, I have never met a happy-go-lucky atheist. This is only natural; as creatures created in the image of God, to be consistent they must not only hate the reflection of that image in others, but themselves as well. This explains the unparalleled butchery of the 20th Century: as a measure of sheer survival, atheists must vent their rage homicidally to avoid its suicidal implications; only when there is no one else left to kill will they finally eat their own ideological bullet.

Much like a man whistling past a graveyard, Weinberg assures us that all is well with atheism. This, too, is an article of his blind faith. He chides Dawkins for “he does not seem to realize the extent to which his side has won. Setting aside the rise of Islam in Europe, the decline of serious Christian belief among Europeans is so widely advertised that Dawkins turns to the United States for most of his examples of unregenerate religious belief.”

The simple fact is, however, that both atheism and the Europe “inspired” by it are dying a rapid death. Inevitably, atheism like Cronus is forced to eat its own. This is the subject of Oxford scholar Alister McGrath’s recent volume, The Twilight of Atheism (I should note that McGrath, now a theologian, holds a doctorate in molecular biophysics from Oxford).

After reading Weinberg’s review of Dawkins, I was prompted to pick up G.K. Chesterton’s devastating critique of modern thought, Orthodoxy. Chesterton long ago had seen the end of atheism:

It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed once we see free thought reign. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world…Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophical freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set…We have no more questions to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers. (1990 Image edition, p. 37)

Atheists have long ago worn out their welcome to flog the rest of us on the matter of religion, particularly those of the rabidly bigoted variety represented well by Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg (among many others). In their malicious handling of Christianity and its history we find that they are not intellectually honest; this should be no surprise to us, however, as they don’t have any reason to believe in honesty.

Bereft of anything meaningful or insightful, they must resort to the tired secular mythologies and endless litany of errors to tear down the Christian faith in order to make it appear that they have actually built something on their own. In the end, all atheism leaves us with is nothing more than a pile of intellectual rubble. The demise of atheism would be so much more fun to watch if they didn’t keep trying to dismantle the rest of humanity in the endeavor.