Is Dawkins a Modern-Day Nicodemus?

Easter is the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ after he died for our sins. Easter time is, of course, an opportunity for us all to reflect on the continuing relevance of this story to us today and, indeed, on the contemporary relevance of religion in our society. One way of reflecting on these questions is to ask what the resurrection story means, including what it means to say that Jesus rose from the dead, and, more generally, what it means to believe in God.

Richard Dawkins has provided one answer to these questions. He has famously claimed that the resurrection story and the question of God’s existence are both straightforward factual issues that can be assessed by scientific methods. And for Dawkins, there is no evidence that Christ ever rose from the dead or that God exists. His book The God Delusion (2006), which has become an international best-seller, is aimed at converting anyone who believes otherwise to atheism. In that book, Dawkins presents religion as essentially a primitive scientific theory aimed at explaining the origin of life, a theory that has subsequently been supplanted by Darwinism. He argues that if one takes seriously the achievements of science in the last two centuries, particularly the achievements of Darwin and Wallace, then it is impossible, today, to adhere to religious beliefs. His main diagnoses for the continued influence of religion in the face of these advances are (a) ignorance of the achievements of science and, in particular, Darwinian evolution as an explanatory theory for the origin and complexity of biological life-forms, and (b) a culture of fear and superstition which prevents people from fully freeing themselves from their religious convictions. For Dawkins, then, the meaning of the resurrection story and belief in God is a straightforward matter: these are issues that can be resolved by applying the methods of science. And, since we have much better theories to explain the things for which God and the resurrection story were introduced, the Easter story has no real or abiding relevance for us today.

The themes discussed in Dawkins’s book have been enlivened again with the publication of Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design (2010), in which Hawking claims that it is unnecessary to look to a creator God to explain the origin of the universe. Hawking’s book is less concerned with a thorough discussion of religion, but the claim that it is unnecessary to regard God as a requirement in explaining the origin of the universe clearly presupposes that people who believe in God do think that God is required, and that the disagreement between them is the kind of disagreement that can be settled conclusively by science. In this respect, he offers a similar answer to Dawkins to the question of the meaning of religious belief, and so shares with Dawkins the following assumption: belief in God is belief in a rival theory to the theories that the two scientists are expounding in their respective books.

In this essay, I want to reflect on the contemporary relevance of the Christian belief in God and the doctrine of the resurrection by questioning the assumption that Dawkins and Hawking share. I aim to show that Dawkins and Hawking succeed in refuting, not religion, but superstition. Although each scientist conflates them, religion is not the same as superstition, but it is easy to misconstrue some religious practices as based on superstition. However, the claims made in religion and, in particular, the version of religion represented by Christ, are completely unlike scientific claims, and only once we recognise this are we in a position to appreciate the significance of the Easter story and how it can be rational to profess belief in God, in spite of the advances of science. My main focus will be on Dawkins’s book, simply because he is the main exponent of the view that religion is a rival—a defeated rival—to science.

We can find a particularly succinct expression of Dawkins’s view that belief in God is a more primitive theory about the origin and existence of life in his analogy of the pebbles on the beach, given in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins introduces this analogy to explain in simple terms how nature can “organise” things, to show, in other words, that natural selection is not random. If you walk up and down a pebbly beach, you will notice, he says, that the pebbles are not arranged at random. The smaller pebbles are typically found in segregated zones running along the length of the beach, the larger ones being found in different zones or stripes. The pebbles have therefore been sorted or arranged. Dawkins then comments:

A tribe living near the shore might wonder at this evidence of sorting or arrangement in the world, and might develop a myth to account for it, perhaps attributing it to a Great Spirit in the sky with a tidy mind and a sense of order. We might give a superior smile to such a superstitious notion, and explain that the arranging was really done by the blind forces of physics, in this case the action of waves. The waves have no purposes and no intentions, no tidy mind, no mind at all …

For Dawkins, people believe in God because that belief enables them to explain the otherwise mysterious things of nature. Just as a tribe might invent a spirit in the sky to explain the ordering of the pebbles on the beach, so, presumably, we invented God and Jesus Christ to explain the apparent design of nature. God and Jesus Christ are mythological beings whose explanatory value has been superseded by Darwin’s theory of evolution. The account of the virgin birth and the resurrection are equally scientific claims—they are either true or false. If you believe them, you believe that they are real events in human history, and whether those events took place can therefore be investigated by scientists and historians to prove whether they happened or not.

Yet are things really so straightforward? If the question of God’s existence has come to be seen as so obviously a question of fact, could this not nevertheless be a consequence of how we have continuously set up the question, which forces us to think about the issue in a particular kind of way? Has it not become a bit like the question, “So when did you stop beating your wife?” Is it really plausible to think of Jesus as a scientific theorist—just a more primitive one—but essentially in the same business as Darwin, with his own theory of the origins of life? There are very good reasons for doubting so.

Let’s begin by looking at the notion of the existence of God.

1. Is belief in the existence of God like a belief in the existence of a planet?

D.Z. Phillips once said, following Wittgenstein, that a precondition to assessing a religious belief is the clarification of the meaning of certain claims being advanced in the debate. This task is of fundamental significance because, if we don’t know the meaning of the claim being advanced, we cannot assess whether it is true or not—we may either find the claim unintelligible and so incapable of any assessment at all, or alternatively, we may assign the wrong meaning to it, and so assess what is in effect a different claim from the one being advanced. For example, when Dawkins sets out to convince the reader that there are no good arguments for believing in the existence of God, Dawkins takes the meaning of “God”, “belief in God” and “God’s existence” for granted, without first explaining these expressions. He assumes that he knows what it means to say that God exists, and believes that his task is merely a matter of proving that claim to be false, so far as this is possible.

To use an analogy, Adams and Le Verrier, who first postulated the existence of what came to be called the planet Neptune, did so in order to explain the irregular orbit of Uranus. They believed another planet existed, because this was the only way in which the irregular orbit of Uranus could be explained. Subsequently, their belief was confirmed when a planet was actually discovered and was named Neptune. When Adams and Le Verrier believed in the existence of another planet, they knew what it meant to claim that there must be another planet; they understood that the planet would be a large celestial object that must meet certain (roughly defined) criteria in order to qualify as a planet; and anyone who doubted the existence of the planet before its eventual discovery knew what they were doubting. No definitional issues were raised by the debate, and it was simply a matter of proving whether that other planet did or did not exist.

Dawkins assumes that the question of God’s existence is just like the question of the existence of Neptune, before its discovery. He asserts that it is a scientific question amenable to resolution by scientific methods in just the same way that the question of Neptune’s existence was. And he considers himself to be showing the overwhelming evidence against the existence of God: unlike in the case of Neptune, we will never discover that God exists, according to Dawkins. Indeed, there is no equivalent good reason to postulate God’s existence at all. The one remaining basis for postulating his existence—as an explanation for the origin and complexity of biological life—has disappeared, because we now have an adequate explanation with the theory of evolution by natural selection. Those who continue to believe in him are deluded, hence The God Delusion.

However, the notion of God is notoriously difficult, in a way that is acknowledged by the sacred texts themselves. Thus the problem with Dawkins’s approach—unlike the approach to the question of Neptune’s existence—is that the concept of God is a contested concept, even in the Bible. It is an essential part of Judeo-Christian doctrine that God is a mystery, and, as Stephen Mullhall has noted, in Faith and Reason, it is no accident that the Bible regards certain kinds of representations of God as idolatry. Indeed, the representation of God as an object of any kind presents him as a finite entity, and therefore as one object among others in the universe, rather than as Alpha and Omega. To that extent it is a species of blasphemy. He is not to be conceived as an object among objects (this is a religious command), but rather as that through which everything else is possible. Acceptable descriptions said to do justice to him are that of light, which allows everything other than light to become visible, or that of the “element” through whom we live, move and have our being. Connected with this, the concept of God is a religious, not a scientific, concept. He is therefore conceived of differently in the canonical texts, for different purposes. This is crucial: the instability of the concept permitted in religious contexts would not be acceptable in a scientific context, but to reject it for that reason is to confuse it for a scientific one.

An important place to start is therefore with the canonical texts, in this case, the Old and New testaments. In the Genesis creation story, for instance, just after the story of the fall, God is said to walk in the Garden of Eden, calling out for Adam. This represents God as a finite being, a being like a human being. At other times, however, God is represented as invisible, revealing himself by means of his voice or by ciphers such as the burning bush. Even when he reveals himself with his voice, the account given in the Bible is extremely figurative, his voice being compared to rushing waters, which opens the text up to a variety of possible credible interpretations. And when he speaks to his people, he speaks through the prophets. Unlike a messenger from the king, who delivers a message on behalf of the king, when God speaks through the prophets, God himself is speaking. What does this say about the relationship between the prophets and God? At the very least, it suggests that the relationship between them is not like the relationship between a prophet and another physical being. If there are two things here, prophet and God, then they do not stand to each other as prophet and another physical object, as would be the case if we were dealing with a prophet and a king or a prophet and a statue. In other cases, God is said to talk to the prophet in a dream. In one case, God does not allow Moses to see his face. What is the significance of this? In perhaps the most famous self-definition of the Bible, to Moses’s request of God to explain to him what he is to say when he goes down to pass on God’s message to his people, God tells Moses simply to tell them, “I Am sent you.” This is one of the most cryptic things written in the sacred texts.

At still other times he is represented as a guiding force by means of which King David, for example, conquers opposing armies and crushes them. David is said to accomplish these victories only by the might of the Lord. Again, God is represented figuratively in such cases, where the “hand of the Lord” is said to have guided David to victory or where the hand pushed an army back. David did of course believe that God literally helped him win those battles, but it is doubtful that he took “the hand of the Lord” literally. It is easy to see that the use of “the hand of the Lord” in this context is not meant to be taken literally—at least in the sense that God is not meant to have hands the way that human beings have hands. Does Dawkins think it is meaningful to ask whether the Tree of Knowledge was subject to the pressures of evolution? Wouldn’t that be an absurd question?

Matters are only slightly different when it comes to the New Testament. Jesus famously says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”, describing himself as the Son of God and as one with God (“I and the Father are one”). An obvious meaning of this statement—one that fails nonetheless to occur to many people—is, “You don’t need to bother about the mystery of the Father. You’ve seen him by knowing me.” Paul talks of God in the following terms: “In Him we live, move and have our being.” This echoes Jesus’s statements, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Clearly, it is not possible to understand the Father as a physical being in these quotations.

Once we take these various conceptions of God that emerge in the canonical text into account, it becomes clear that it is too simplistic to try to answer “Does God exist?” along the model of the question “Does a planet exist to explain the orbit of Uranus?” Clarification of the meaning of “God” is therefore an essential first step.

To be sure, Dawkins does attempt the following definition of “God” on page 52 of The God Delusion, before going on to try and prove that such a God does not exist: “a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”.

But this definition immediately runs into difficulties and raises as many questions as it appears to answer. It does not do sufficient justice to the variegated conception of God in the canonical texts that we have just touched on. Arguably it captures some of the representations of God in the Old Testament. But does it capture Jesus’s conception of God as Father? There is no justification for merely assuming that it does, especially given the ambiguous relationship between Jesus and the Judaic tradition, not to mention the multitude of representations of God in just the Old Testament alone, before we even get to the New Testament. Furthermore, although Dawkins’s definition acknowledges that God is regarded as supernatural, he goes on to speak of God as a natural being in his book, claiming that if he existed and had the level of intelligence believers attribute to him, he could only have arisen towards the end of a long line of evolution, because only complex beings are capable of exhibiting intelligent behaviour and complex beings only arise later on in the history of life forms, evolving as they do from a state of simplicity. Dawkins therefore assumes that God, if he existed, is himself a creature of some sort and is some kind of natural, rather than supernatural, being, and thereby moves away from the definition of God he purports to be disproving—if God is a creature than he is not creator, and if he is a physical entity, then he is something within the universe, a finite being locatable in space and time.

Now, consider this. If God were a natural being, how would silent prayer be possible? It is a common practice for people to pray inwardly, in silence. It seems ludicrous, not to mention blasphemous, to picture God as having incredibly sensitive ears, so sensitive that they are able to pick up silent prayer. For however sensitive his “ears” may be, they could not pick up a prayer that is said inwardly without producing any sound at all. These aspects of religious practices call for understanding and explanation, but they are conveniently forgotten by atheists like Dawkins. But it is essential to take them into account and explain them, for they seem to lead to the conclusion that it is at the very least too quick to assume that “God” refers to some (for Dawkins, non-existent) natural entity “out there” like a planet.

2. Is religious belief like a scientific belief, only less well founded?

Connected with Dawkins’s tendency merely to assume the meaning of “God” to be self-evident and to proceed straight to the question of whether belief in God is true, is a related tendency to take for granted the meaning of “belief” and the meaning of the related term, “faith”. Dawkins is not alone here either. In nearly every discussion you will find on the issue, it is always without question assumed that religious belief—faith—is merely a belief in a matter of fact for which there is very little, if any, evidence. Because there is no evidence, we are said to take things “on faith”. This assimilates faith to scientific beliefs again, this time to a specific kind of scientific belief: a hypothesis that has yet to be confirmed. For example, it has not yet been confirmed whether dark matter exists in the universe. Many scientists assume that it exists because it is a good explanation for observations made about gravity. But dark matter has yet to be detected and its existence has not yet been confirmed. We therefore do not yet know whether it exists or not; rather, some scientists believe that it does, and some believe that it doesn’t. One way in which a scientist’s belief in the existence of dark matter may be misrepresented is to say that they have faith that it exists. But the reason why this is a misrepresentation is that its existence is not the kind of thing any scientist—whether they believe in the existence of dark matter or not—would take on faith; on the contrary, they press on and try to acquire the requisite knowledge that would finally be able to help them tell one way or the other, keeping an open mind in the interim. Scientific beliefs, when they are beliefs and not yet knowledge, are always provisional waystations and not the final destination. Genuine religious belief—faith—is not a belief of this kind at all, and that is why Dawkins misrepresents it when he presents it as an unfounded irrational belief. He thinks it’s irrational because he assumes it’s just like a belief in dark matter, only much less well founded. It is irrational, for Dawkins, because there is no evidence for such a belief at all; on the contrary, all the evidence is against it.

If Dawkins is wrong though, then what exactly is religious belief, what I am calling genuine faith? Consider this point: the scriptures present a failure to believe in God as a sin. This is a significant clue, for it seems to mean that I have some control over what I believe, that I can take responsibility for it. This means that it cannot be a belief in a matter of fact or a scientific matter. For how can my acceptance that any claim about a matter of fact or any scientific claim is true or false ever be a matter of choice? When there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of some state of affairs, I cannot choose not to believe it. For instance, I can’t today choose to doubt the existence of Neptune. Its existence has been conclusively proven and something would seriously be amiss if I chose to doubt it. I would lose all credibility. And even where there is no evidence conclusively showing something either way, the correct position to take is not to advocate yes or no, but to reserve judgment until the evidence comes in. It can’t be a sin to reserve judgment on something for which there is not enough evidence. In short, when it comes to beliefs about matters of fact for which there can be different amounts of evidence available, there is no such thing as choosing to believe or disbelieve; the notion of choice—and therefore or responsibility for what one believes—does not apply here. So if it’s a sin not to believe in God, the kind of belief in question cannot be a belief in a matter of fact. This is a conceptual or logical point about faith: once reminded of it, we accept it as a truism.

How, then, are we to understand doctrines like the virgin birth and the resurrection if we are to take on board these logical points about the meaning of “faith’ and “religious belief”?

3. If the doctrine of the resurrection is not a question of fact amenable to science, then what is this doctrine?

We have seen above that faith is not to be understood as a kind of scientific belief or, indeed, as belief in any matter of fact. For we know that beliefs in matters of fact, whether they be ordinary non-scientific beliefs—for example, that I left the hot water tap running—or scientific beliefs—for example, that evolution explains the origin of complex life forms—are not really matters over which I can exercise any choice when it comes to believing the putative facts or doubting them. Once the evidence is in, I have no choice but to believe. And when the evidence is not in yet, the correct position to take is a cautious wait-and-see position, rather than a dogmatic yes or a dogmatic no, neither of which can be supported by the evidence we have available to us. This gives us a clue to the type of belief faith is. It must be more akin to believing in truth, or holding a moral belief, than a belief in a matter of fact. Nonetheless, it may be thought that the doctrines of creation, of an afterlife or the possibility of eternal life, and the resurrection story, all suggest otherwise. Aren’t these, after all, quintessentially religious beliefs, and aren’t they beliefs in matters of fact, matters over which there is insufficient evidence and therefore over which we must decide “on faith”, that is, without evidence?

I do not doubt that this is often how those beliefs have been presented. But again, this account of what a religious belief is assimilates religious beliefs to factual or scientific beliefs. Again, why should the fact that there is no evidence for a belief result in a virtue on the part of those who believe in the face of the lack of evidence? There is no virtue involved in asserting certainty that things are so when there is not enough evidence to establish the case one way or the other. On the contrary, as noted, if we can apply the concept of virtue here at all, the most virtuous thing to do is simply remain undecided until there is more evidence. Second, these beliefs are not ordinary beliefs. The supposed possibilities we are being invited to believe in are, at the very least, obscure. Although Dawkins asserts that these kinds of claim—that Jesus rose from the dead, that there is an afterlife, that God created the universe –are straightforward factual claims that can be assessed by science, the meaning of these claims is notoriously controversial. That, after all, is why we have such disciplines as theology and biblical hermeneutics. We don’t need such disciplines for other doctrines which have the superficial ring of history. There are historical debates about Churchill and Caesar, but there are no genuine debates about what these entities mean, and debates about the significance of their actions rarely reach the level of a conceptual debate about what it means to say that they did such and such. However much Dawkins wants to insist that the claims about the virgin birth and the resurrection are straightforwardly factual or historical, his insistence is unsustainable. The claims are sufficiently bizarre to invite conceptual scrutiny—the question of their meaning comes before the question of their truth.

That this is so can be seen from the following analogy: if someone claimed a relative had risen from the dead, our reaction would not be simply one of wanting to investigate whether this claim is true. Rather, we would be more likely to assume that the person making the claim was having a particularly strong reaction of grief, and would only begin to investigate if the body had disappeared. And even here, the investigation is not into whether the claim that the relative had risen from the dead is actually true, but simply into the mystery of what happened to their body—we are looking for the corpse. By contrast, if a relative goes missing, we look for them, not their body.

There are other clues that support my claim. Even if we leave aside the controversies in scholarship about what constitute the authentic texts in the Gospels—what each author’s agendas were in writing them and how they differed from the agenda of the authors of the other Gospels—and focus exclusively just on the words that appear in the text, there are clues in each Gospel that the resurrection story is not a straightforward factual claim like the claim that Jesus scratched himself or that he went to various towns and cities during his mission. For instance, when he is raised, no one recognises him—he is presented as transfigured. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. Indeed two apostles walk with a man for a long time, conversing with him, but do not recognise him as the risen Lord. If the claim was a straightforward claim about the man rising from the dead, he’d surely look the same and be recognised straight away. I recently visited the chapel of rest to see my deceased stepfather before he was buried. If by some miracle he’d risen from the dead and started talking to me, I would have had no difficulty in recognising him. The fact that people don’t rise from the dead is one thing. But that in itself is not going to stop me recognising him if, per impossibile, he rises from the dead. A lesson is therefore indicated by the text at this point—no person recognises the risen Christ. He’s transfigured. What is the significance of this? This is a clue here that this is not to be understood as an ordinary empirical claim. A religious message is being conveyed, and this ties in with the claim that faith, as opposed to ordinary empirical beliefs, is a calling, something over which I have responsibility and a choice.

The point can be brought out more sharply when we consider the teachings of Jesus and juxtapose those teachings with belief in an afterlife. There is no question that some believers consider that the belief that we will die and rise again and go to heaven is essential to what it is to be a Christian. But once again, we need to know what the claim that we will rise again and go to heaven actually means. And, again, there is a significant clue about how not to understand these claims in the Gospels themselves, even without taking into account the enormous scholarship and debate that have been generated by these texts.

One of the central tenets of Christ’s teaching is the need to be reborn into a new life. At one point, Nicodemus shows confusion at this statement—he misunderstands what Jesus is saying and asks him: how can I go back into my mother’s womb and be born again? And of course Jesus immediately corrects him, and says he is talking about being born of the spirit: your spiritual, as opposed to your biological, parent is the Father. You are to become sons of the Father (Nicodemus’s mistaken literalism is reminiscent of Dawkins’s literalism, a point we will return to). This means that we stop investing in the cares of the flesh, defining ourselves by perishable things that we could lose any moment, and instead invest in the cares of the spirit—doing good to the poor, ridding ourselves of false wealth, and defining ourselves by a preoccupation with the needs of others, rather than our own needs. In particular, we are called to die to the flesh and live for the spirit.

Now, suppose that our motive for doing all this is so that we can be rich in heaven. How, then, have we really obeyed the command? Consider the story of the rich official who comes to Jesus. The official says that he has spent his life obeying God’s commands and asks Jesus if there is any more that he can be doing. And Jesus looks at him and sees his wealth, and says to him: there is one thing that still remains for you to do. You need to sell everything you have, and give all your money to the poor. And, as is well known, the rich man walked away, unable to do it, an event which is the context for one of the most famous statements in the Gospels, namely, that it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than it is for him to enter the kingdom of heaven. What if, though, Jesus had said to the rich man: give everything you have to the poor, and I’ll see to it that you are even richer when you get to heaven. Wouldn’t that detract from the whole message? Doesn’t that reduce to an economic transaction in which the rich man gains, rather than loses, his wealth? What difference does it really make that the riches are offered in an afterlife, rather than later in this life? Is the lesson supposed to be merely that we have to trust Jesus at his word, as we will always be uncertain that there is an afterlife? If that were so, it would be very shallow indeed. And, in any event, it could be achieved by Jesus saying: sell everything, and give all the proceeds to the poor and, when you have done so, God will reward you by giving you another palace in the next town, just like the one you currently live in, only better, and here the self-defeating nature of such a doctrine is perspicuous.

Thus, in order to understand the meaning of an afterlife and the resurrection, we must first always consider the essential teaching—neither of these doctrines can be understood outside that context. We cannot straightforwardly assume that they are historical claims amenable to the assessment of science as Dawkins does. We must first look at the claims in the context in which they are made, including, most obviously, Jesus’s teaching. And when we look at that teaching, and take into account that it represents a complete transvaluation of values whereby I am to put others before myself, love rather than hate my enemies, do good to those who persecute me, turn the other cheek to be struck as well, take the shirt off my back and give it to someone else whose need for it is as great as mine, go to give the good news to others with no money or food to see me through, we can see clearly that a literal interpretation of the doctrines—assuming that such a literal interpretation can even be given a sense—undermines the whole tenor of the teaching. Dawkins, and those who opt for that literalism, commit the fallacy committed by Nicodemus when he expresses his confusion by asking Jesus, “surely I can’t go back into my mother’s womb”. There is a reason that story of Nicodemus is in the Gospels—it’s to steer us clear of the wrong reading.

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