Against Atheism E-Book

Ian S. Markham

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 281

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In this new book, Ian Markham analyzes the atheistic world view, opposing the arguments given by renowned authors of books on atheism, such as Richard Dawkins. Unlike other responses to the new atheism, Markham challenges these authors on their own ground by questioning their understanding of belief and of atheism itself. The result is a transforming introduction to Christianity that will appeal to anyone interested in this debate. * A fascinating challenge to the recent spate of successful books written by high-profile atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris * Tackles these authors on their own ground, arguing that they do not understand the nature of atheism, let alone theology and ethics * Draws on ideas from Nietzsche, cosmology, and art to construct a powerful response that allows for a faith that is grounded, yet one that recognizes the reality of uncertainty * Succinct, engaging, but robustly argued, this new book by a leading academic and writer contains a wealth of profound insights that show religious belief in a new light

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Source acknowledgments

Introduction: Meeting Fred and Natalie

The Perspective from Fred

The Perspective from Natalie

Chapter 1: Getting inside Fundamentalist Atheism

The Concept of God is Incoherent

Faith and the Lack of Reasons

Arguments for Atheism

Atheism Provides a Healthy and Well-balanced Worldview

Islam is especially misguided

Christianity and Judaism are problematic

Bringing up children in a faith is an act of child abuse

Hitchens on Pigs

Chapter 2: Nietzsche: The Last Real Atheist

Fredrick Nietzsche: The Life

Interpreting Nietzsche

Summary

Interlude

Chapter 3: Appreciating the Faith Discourse

The Spiritual Dimension of Humanity

Cultivating a Religious Sense

The Moral Dimension

The Significance of Love

Music and Art

Chapter 4: Physics

The Anthropic Principle

Anthony Flew

To Sum Up

Chapter 5: A Revealing God

Working within Certain Limitations

The Emergence of the Hebrew Scriptures

Chapter 6: Christianity

Implications

Chapter 7: Islam

Background on Islam

Terrorism

Islam and the Revealing God

Chapter 8: Suffering, Providence, and Horrid Religious People

Providence and Suffering

Religion and Ethics

Chapter 9: Religion and the Future

The Dominant Trend: Their Books are Selling

The Religious Future

Chapter 10: Faith and Uncertainty – Believing the Truth

Being Located

Faith and Trust

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

On the Science

On Atheism

On Theology

On Providence and Prayer

On Sociology

Index

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Ian S. Markham

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Markham, Ian S.

Against Atheism : why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris are fundamentally wrong / Ian S. Markham.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8964-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8963-7

(pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Dawkins, Richard, 1941- God delusion. 2. Hitchens, Christopher. God is not great. 3. Harris, Sam, 1967- End of faith. 4. Apologetics. 5. Atheism. I. Title.

BL2775.3.D393M36 2010

239′.7–dc22

2009025994

For my brothersAnthony and Michael

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens for writing the three books that have stimulated so much debate. They have all done the Church a big favor. After years of being on the defensive, we are back into the business of apologetics. It is good to see the range of responses to this trio of atheists. Two themes dominate this reply: the first is that we need to recognize there is a case for atheism that needs a response from Christians; and the second is that science is now one of the best reasons for faith.

The genesis of this book started with a delightful lunch with Sam Lloyd, the Dean of Washington National Cathedral. I am grateful for his encouragement and thoughtfulness throughout this project. My colleagues at Virginia Theological Seminary have helped in countless ways: I am deeply grateful to Dr. Timothy Sedgwick – the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, to Katie Lasseron – the Assistant to the Dean and Director for Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, to Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo – the Associate Dean and Director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership, and to Ms. Heather Zdancewicz – the Vice President for Administration and Finance. They do so much to keep the VTS operation going such that it is possible for me to write. Dr. Amy Dyer works tirelessly as the Associate Dean of Students and also read the manuscript with close attention to the detail; Amy improved both my style and my arguments. Rev. Dr. Barney Hawkins not only serves the Seminary in vitally important ways but has become a much-valued conversation partner. I am very conscious of my intellectual debt to Barney in these pages. And my Old Testament colleague – Stephen Cook – spent several hours in conversation with me as the project was developing. For his expertise and the clarity of his mind, I am deeply grateful. As the project was coming to an end, a small group gathered to read the manuscript. Kim Seldman, David Gortner, Jennifer and Scott Andrews-Weckerly read the manuscript with care and made a variety of important suggestions.

Once again I have had the honor of working with Rebecca Harkin from Wiley-Blackwell. Her interest and commitment to this project are much appreciated. She is exceptional in so many ways. There is no doubt that the quality of religious publishing in the world has been significantly enhanced by her wisdom and insight. The professionalism of her team at Wiley-Blackwell is outstanding. In particular I want to thank Helen Gray for her hard work at the copy-editing stage. The manuscript was significantly improved thanks to her labors.

When it comes to questions about faith, my favorite conversation partners are my two brothers. My older brother, Anthony Markham, was at Oxford University at the height of the logical positivists, while my younger brother, Michael Markham, has scientific and mathematical instincts. In numerous ways my worldview has been shaped in conversation with them both. I hope they like this book: and I am delighted to dedicate this book to them.

Last, but definitely not least, I want to thank my wife and son. Inevitably, the work of writing makes one a little less present (both literally as one disappears away to finish a chapter, but also mentally as one finds oneself preoccupied with a particular set of questions). Lesley and Luke are both precious gifts in my life that make all the difference. I love them both so much.

Source acknowledgments

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Transworld Publishers Bantam Press, 2006, p.319f.). Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.;

Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York and Boston: Twelve Hachette Book Group, 2007) © 2007 by Christopher Hitchens. By permission of Grand Central Publishing;

Keith Ward, Divine Action (London: Collins Flame, 1990, p. 83): © 1990 Keith Ward. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.;

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004): Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton;

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the University of Chicago Press; and Faber and Faber Ltd.;

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, translated as The Joyful Wisdom, Thomas Common, 1910, later translated as The Gay Science.

Introduction

Meeting Fred and Natalie

To begin this exploration of atheism, let us start with an imaginative exercise, where we attempt to get inside the mind of Fred. Fred is an energetic atheist, completely persuaded by the writings of Dawkins et al. We will then explore the worldview of Natalie, an intelligent, thoughtful believer.

The Perspective from Fred

Fred has never really believed in God. As a child, his parents, who were nominal Roman Catholics, forced him to go to church and take his first Communion. But even at the age of seven, it just didn’t make sense. The similarities between God and Santa Claus were overwhelming. He stopped believing in Santa Claus when he was six (his older brother told him that Santa Claus was a lie made up by grown-ups). As Fred looks back, he is appalled that adults contrive to force this myth on children. The moment that the myth was exposed, Fred felt liberated. No longer would he have to listen to the implied threats around presents and behavior; no longer would he have to try and work out how Santa Claus got into his house, even though there wasn’t a chimney; no longer would he have to worry about how one person can visit every child on Planet Earth in one night, let alone worry about those who didn’t celebrate Christmas.

And God, for Fred, has all the same problems. What exactly should he be imagining? Is it a big invisible person who can read every mind and is all powerful? This person has no location and, according to traditional Christian theology, no time. So, if God is placeless and timeless, then how can God do anything? Surely, considers Fred, all activity requires time – after all, there must be a moment before the action, during the action, and after the action. Timeless actions do not make sense. And if God is all loving and all powerful, then surely God could have done something about the earthquake that took thousands of lives. Given God’s abilities, this is pretty disappointing behavior.

Like Santa Claus, there is also very little evidence of God’s existence. Save for the adults that persist in lying to children, Santa Claus is never seen or heard. Just like Santa, God is invisible. Naturally, muses Fred, in a pre-modern and pre-scientific age, God made some sense. There were these mysteries to solve – how exactly do planets stay in their orbits around the sun? What is the cause of the weather? Why do some people fall ill and others live to old age? Why are some nations powerful and others less so? God was the catch-all explanation. But we now know that there are explanations for all these things. We know that Newton discovered the significance of gravity in the universe to explain the planetary positions; we know that Darwin explained why and how everything fits together; we know that political historians explain the rise and fall of nations. The God explanation had been slowly and firmly pushed out.

And again, much like Santa Claus, the associated industry that keeps God alive is pretty distasteful. Santa Claus serves the needs of the greeting card and retail industry; religion serves the needs of countless intolerant, bigoted individuals and programs. It is amazing how unpleasant religious people can be. Fred’s own childhood had included the customary rants against contraception, feminism, and homosexuality. Although Fred can concede that the problems between religious groups in the Middle East or Northern Ireland include many factors (well beyond the religious), it is still remarkable how unconstructive the role of religion is. Religion, as far as he could tell, doesn’t seem to make people nicer.

It is odd, ponders Fred, that for centuries the world worried that without religion there would be a breakdown in ethics. In fact, all the major advances in ethics have come since the Western Enlightenment. Toleration, for example, is not really found until John Locke has the bright idea that a Baptist and an Anglican could coexist within the same country. Or feminism (he was proud of his mother’s achievements as a CEO of a major company), which was hardly encouraged by the Church. Or his gay friend, who came so close to suicide due to his religious upbringing, and who needed secular science to reassure him that he is not committing a sin because of who he is. In fact, Fred finds himself concluding, one is much more likely to be ethical if one is an atheist.

Fred describes himself as a secular humanist. He isn’t afraid of death: death is all around us and comes to everyone. He likes the thought of nothing as opposed to a hell or even angelic choirs (listening to choirs for eternity would be dreadful). When death comes that is the end. For Fred, this makes the here and now much more important: there is no celestial hope to compensate for problems on Earth. As a result, he has become very active in Greenpeace. As he put it to his best friend: “we have one world and we need to take good care of it.”

When Fred read Richard Dawkins’s book, he found it comforting. Being an atheist in America is difficult: and here was a powerful, thoughtful study, explaining why it makes sense. Christopher Hitchens made him smile. With humor and wit, Hitchens exposed the damaging nature of religion. And Fred thought the start of Sam Harris’s book was brilliant. Harris starts his book with a Muslim suicide bomber. The act of strapping munitions around one’s body so one can walk on to a bus and kill lots of people is a decisive reason for atheism. As a result of reading these books, Fred was moved: no longer a “live and let live” atheist (just try and get along with your deluded religious friends), he now feels morally obligated to do what he can to persuade his friends of the value of atheism. “Atheists need to stand up and be counted,” he explained to his mother.

The Perspective from Natalie

“Why should a blind person believe in colors?” Natalie asks herself. After all, they can never have any experience of colors; other people who insist that the world is full of color can’t agree amongst themselves what these colors are like and argue over particular experiences of color (some saying it is red; others insisting it is orange). It is difficult to believe in colors unless you have the gift of sight.

Natalie has always had the gift of faith. She was born into a family of believers. The daily discipline of prayer at the start and end of days (and gratitude to God for every meal) had stood her in good stead. “You need to cultivate your spiritual sense,” she explained to her skeptical friends, “It is a bit like appreciating poetry or great music.” This was her favorite analogy: she remembers those moments when opera was nothing more than large women singing loudly and how the appreciation gradually grew. Faith is the cultivation of the spiritual sense (like appreciation of opera is the cultivation of the sense of hearing) that enables you to see the divine all around.

So, in the morning as the sunlight sneaks in around the curtain or when she is sitting with her son enjoying his playful patter, she senses the presence of God. In the same way that one senses the presence of others on another table in a relatively empty restaurant, so she senses God – constantly there at the edge of her experience of everything. She doesn’t doubt God because that would mean doubting everything.

Granted God is complicated, she thinks to herself. After all, God is the Creator of the entire universe: so we are going to have to stretch our words to talk about God. God enables and sustains everything that is: so God must be absolutely everywhere. One of her favorite memories of feeling particularly close to God is a time she was in church. She remembers joining her arms together to form a big circle. “What are you doing?” her father whispered. “I am giving God a hug,” she replied. It made perfect sense: God is the presence that enables her to breathe, smile, love, and laugh. God is also in the midst of her pains (and she has had many moments of pain) and in her tragedy.

Her primary reason for believing was her all-pervading experience of God. However, she had plenty of other reasons for her faith. As a physicist she had followed the debates amongst cosmologists very closely. When Brandon Carter coined the expression “anthropic principle,” she thought he had a point. She considers it remarkable that of the thirty or so variables that shaped the universe all of them worked together, thereby enabling life to emerge. She found it funny that the skeptical alternative hypothesis was the “multiverse” theory, which claims that there are thousands of vast universes, most of which do not produce life, but that our universe is the one that does. “It is just like claiming that an elegant garden is not a result of intention, but a vast accident made possible by a million gardens existing most of which are disorderly,” she pointed out. “Surely,” she went on, “the simpler hypothesis is an agent of purpose and intention, which wanted to have a relationship of love with sophisticated creatures.”

For Natalie, there were lots of arguments pointing to faith. None of these arguments on their own are decisive, but together they can persuade someone to start the process of cultivating their spiritual sensitivity. As a scientist, beauty always puzzled her (why is the world so beautiful?). Universal moral values only make sense if they transcend human lives; the world of music and poetry are closely linked to the spiritual sense – it wasn’t surprising, Natalie muses, that the vast majority of authors and composers are people of faith.

Natalie loves church. She loves the way the liturgy of her Roman Catholic Church helps her to reflect on her life – to confess those moments when she has not been as loving as she should have been and to receive the sacrament that makes such a difference. She is perfectly well aware that her Church has not always been a force for good – sometimes, it still isn’t. But it is a bit like condemning soccer because of the bad behavior of soccer players and fans – one needs to be able to distinguish between the ideal of a tradition and the ways in which followers can so distort that ideal.

Prayer is her lifeline. When she went to Indonesia to help with the victims of the tsunami (she was a volunteer with a medical team), every day became a constant practice of prayer. “The good thing about spending every week in front of a cross on which you believe that God died,” she explained to her friends, “was that one saw the compassion of God in the suffering all around.” She had spent six months working in that camp before returning to Boston.

When Natalie read Richard Dawkins, it made her sad. Here was the blind man insisting that the world of colors was a delusion because he had never made the effort to cultivate the capacity to see. Although not a theologian herself, she knew enough about theology to know that once inside this world the dots connect in coherent and compelling ways. But she found the brazen laziness of this atheism puzzling. An Oxford Don who doesn’t feel the need to represent the positions of others fairly before taking issue with them was, she felt, committing an act of betrayal to the very traditions of academic enquiry at Oxford.

Yet she understands how Dawkins has tapped into a deep tradition of European skepticism, which many Europeans and Americans share, and feels that it is important that someone should set out to write a reply. She doesn’t want to read another polemic; it should not “do unto Dawkins as he has done to us.” Instead, it should locate, understand, this skepticism (perhaps even make the case with a bit more rigor) and then provide an account of faith that is compelling, readable, and informed. Yes, she thinks to herself, that is the book I would like to see written.

1

Getting inside Fundamentalist Atheism

The Gentle Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris

“Fundamentalist atheism” is a term that will annoy Richard Dawkins.1 So let me be clear: fundamentalism is not meant as a term of abuse. The authors of the booklet series called The Fundamentals, which appeared in the United States between 1910 and 1915, were sincere, intelligent, thoughtful scholars. They articulated their commitments to the inerrancy of Scripture, a substitutionary atonement, and a literal return of Jesus to Earth with precision and thoughtfulness. And in so doing, they carved out for themselves a position that was uncompromising and committed. There is no room for ambiguity or humility or even nuance in The Fundamentals. They argue for their worldview deeply confident that they are entirely right.

So the description “fundamentalist atheists” should invite a parallel because of the equally clear assertion of uncompromising truth. The commitments are different – “science is incompatible with belief in God,” “religion is deeply destructive,”2 and “atheists can be moral.” But the result is the same – an unambiguous assertion of a worldview in which the authors are entirely confident that they are right.

It is no coincidence that both the Christian fundamentalists of the early twentieth century and the atheist fundamentalists of the early twenty-first century do not even try to understand their opponents. None of our atheist fundamentalists have studied theology. Herein is a crucial difference with the tradition out of which this book is written. For this author, my Christian faith requires me to work as hard as I can to understand the arguments of Christian fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists. And the tradition out of which I am writing is classical Catholicism as expressed in its Anglican form.3

This is an important point. In terms of method, classical Catholicism contrasts markedly with the approach of both versions of fundamentalism. The remarkable thirteenth-century Dominican Friar, Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), has a deeply generous methodology. Having trained as an Augustinian Platonist, he then spent much of his life exploring the world of Aristotle. He read Muslim and Jewish thinkers with care and sought to synthesize the thought of Aristotle with his Augustinian training. The very structure of his Summa Theologiae4 is a testimony to his generosity and care when presenting the arguments of his opponents. In this remarkable text, Aquinas always starts by presenting the strongest arguments he can find against the position that he holds. He then identifies the hinge argument for his position before going on to explain why this position is the correct one. And the position taken by him in the Summa was, for his day, controversial and pioneering. In 1270, the views of Aquinas were investigated and condemned by a papal inquiry, which was organized by the bishop of Paris.5

Why was Aquinas so willing to read widely and explore a tradition that wasn’t his own so carefully? The answer is that Aquinas had a primary obligation to the truth. The quest for the truth is a moral absolute. If God is, then God must be the author of all truth. Aquinas saw this clearly. No text was forbidden; no viewpoint inappropriate to explore. And one follows the truth wherever it goes.

So it is this spirit of classical Catholicism that contrasts so markedly with our Christian fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists. And it is in this spirit that this book will start with a careful, fair, and even sympathetic exploration of the arguments found in three books. The best known is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The second is by Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything;6 and the third is by Sam Harris, The End of Faith.7

These books share one thing – they are all well written. They are compelling. My goal in this chapter is to put the cases of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris as accurately as I can and in fact, in certain places, to strengthen their arguments. I will engage in this exercise because it is an act of Christian duty and fidelity to be fair to those with whom you disagree. There is a moral obligation on me to make sure that when I have conversations with others I can fairly represent the position they hold, such that if Richard Dawkins was reading this book he would say “yes, you have understood what I am trying to say.” There are seven arguments found across these three books. I shall now look at each in turn.

The Concept of God is Incoherent

Sam Harris admits that having a worldview free of all contradictions is difficult. We have so many beliefs that to examine them all is – on a practical level – hard to do. Yet, Harris writes, “given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive for coherence wherever it is in doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility.”8

Harris is entirely right. Imagine for a moment a person who insisted that she has a chair that isn’t a chair. Imagine further that after questioning the person, she rejects the possibility that this is a stool or an odd table that is used as a chair. Instead, she really means to affirm the two propositions “I have a chair” and “I do not have a chair” as true. What would you think? I suspect all of us would conclude that this is a nonsense use of words and impossible to accommodate in terms of lifestyle. Given chairs are intended for sitting, you cannot sit on a chair that simultaneously exists and yet doesn’t exist.

Now this is an obvious contradiction. Most contradictions are more indirect. It is contradictory, for example, to believe that “our lives are entirely determined by the stars” and at the same time to believe that “all humans are entirely free.” At first sight, the assertion about human freedom does not directly contradict the assertion about the truth of astrology. However, as one thinks further, the contradiction is exposed because if all lives are entirely determined by the stars then they cannot be entirely free.9

If God exists, then one must give a coherent account of what this God is like. We cannot believe in something that we cannot explain. Granted there might be plenty of mystery, but it cannot be all mystery. If it is all mystery, then we are agnostics (i.e., a person who believes that there is insufficient evidence to determine whether there is or there is not a God). We don’t know what we are talking about.

This is quite good territory for the atheist (i.e., a person who believes that God’s non-existence is highly likely). Believers are notoriously vague about precisely what they affirm. It is surprising that Dawkins only explores this problem in passing. When he defines God, he tends to think it is relatively easy. So, for example, he writes, “Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.”10 However, he does feel that when it comes to the Abrahamic God, the definition needs to be modified. And at this point, he touches on the problem of coherence:

The simple definition of the God Hypothesis with which I began has to be substantially fleshed out if it is to accommodate the Abrahamic God. He not only created the universe, he is a personal God dwelling within it, or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean), possessing the unpleasantly human qualities to which I have alluded.11

Dawkins should have developed the bracket “whatever that might mean.” Christians have had enormous problems explaining the relationship of God to the universe. Take time, for example. For Aquinas, God had to be timeless – so there is no duration in the life of God. However, if God is timeless, then how can God do anything? All actions require time. You need a moment before the action, a moment during the action, and a moment after the action. If God is timeless, then God has quite literally no time in which to act. It looks incoherent. It looks like Christians are simultaneously affirming “a perfect changeless God” and at the same time “a God who acts and therefore changes.” How can we affirm both of these assertions simultaneously?

One major question for believers is this: what exactly do we mean by God? Are we claiming that God is some sort of energy that is present in the universe? Are we claiming that God is something separate from the universe and if so what? Does God have space or live in time or not? If persons of faith cannot explain what they are affirming to exist, then atheism has won. If I invent a word, say “bloop,” and cannot then explain what it means, then others are entitled to ignore me. We need an account of God; and often persons of faith are not very good at giving an account of God.

Of the three, it is Sam Harris who makes this a central issue. Harris makes much of the problem of evil: why does God allow so much evil if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving? This is a classic coherency problem in the philosophy of religion. If God is all powerful, then he must be able to eradicate all evil; if God is all loving, then God must wish to abolish evil; but evil exists, therefore God cannot be both all powerful and all loving. It looks like theism is self-contradictory given the reality of evil in the world. Harris says quite explicitly that in his view this is a decisive reason for unbelief. There is no acceptable way for Christians to evade the problem of evil. It is such a fundamental issue. Harris writes:

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.12

As theists, we should be willing to concede that (a) we need to provide an adequate account of God, and (b) the problem of evil is a major problem for belief. There is one last point that our trinity of atheists stress. They have a problem with the theological discourse in general. Christians have a technical vocabulary. For Dawkins, theological language about the Trinity is unintelligible. Having quoted St. Gregory the Miracle Worker’s views on the Trinity, he observes: “Whatever miracles may have earned St. Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity.”13 Again Christians are often not helpful at this point. There are so many Christians who seem to take a perverse pride in not understanding the point of the Trinity. Once again Dawkins is on strong ground at this point.

Faith and the Lack of Reasons

What is the basis of belief in God? This is the second area of attack for our trio of atheists. Sam Harris starts his book by contrasting “reason” with “faith.” Harris explains that “religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern – specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death.”14 It is true that the word “faith” is often used in this way. The moment in a conversation with a Christian, when the problem of evil arises, is often concluded by the Christian invoking two words, “mystery” and “faith.” It often appears that we don’t have reasons for what we believe is true.

Richard Dawkins is right to complain about those who insist that belief in God is justified by the fact that God’s existence cannot be disproved. Dawkins quotes with approval, Bertrand Russell’s parable of the teapot.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.15

This is a fair point. It is clearly insufficient for the theist to ground belief on the inability of the atheist to provide a proof for the non-existence of God. Or, as Dawkins puts it: “That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable.”16