Reitan - Is God a delusion?: a reply to religions cultured despisers

This edition first published 2009
2009 Eric Reitan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reitan, Eric.
Is God a delusion? : a reply to religions cultured despisers / Eric Reitan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8362-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4051-8361-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Apologetics. 2. Theism. I. Title.
BT1212.R45 2009
261.21dc22

2008017217

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

01 2009

To Russell Bennett and Baron Garcia, who
demonstrated in their lives, each in his own way,
what it means to live in a spirit of hope.

Introduction

At one point in his recent book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins expresses astonishment that any circles worthy of the name sophisticated remain within the Church. He calls it a mystery at least as deep as those that theologians enjoy (2006, p. 60). His astonishment is occasioned by the Roman Catholic procedure for investigating candidates for sainthood, a procedure that he thinks can only be an embarrassment to more sophisticated Catholics. But his views here express a broader perplexity a perplexity shared by other atheists over why any morally sensitive and intellectually responsible adults would believe in God.

Dawkins perplexity seems to be widely shared these days. The last few years have seen a flurry of books, both popular and academic, attacking religion in general and theistic religion in particular. In fact, a recent Time Magazine article declared that Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave (Van Biema 2006, p. 50).

Examples arent hard to find. Sam Harris, in his 2004 book The End of Faith, lists religious faith alongside ignorance, hatred, and greed as the demons that lurk inside every human mind. Of these demons, he thinks faith is surely the devils masterpiece (p. 226). In his Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), Harris continues the assault, arguing that religious faith is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas (p. 80) and that the very survival of the world depends on the victory of those on the right side of this war: the side opposing religious faith.

Others who belong to the side Harris favors include the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who seeks to demystify religion in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. While Dennett displays a philosophers caution about expressing his conclusions too boldly, it is clear where his sympathies lie: religion, for him, is a potent and potentially dangerous force that needs to be studied scientifically so that it can be controlled. The possibility that religion might be directed towards a reality inaccessible to science, that belief in a transcendent God of love might be true, is not a matter Dennett finds worthy of serious attention. He thinks that the arguments for Gods existence are weak, dispensing with them in a scant six pages (as he declares with apparent pride in a defense of Dawkins published in the March 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books). And since he thinks the existence of religious belief can be readily explained without invoking the idea that there is some kind of supernatural force making itself felt on the human psyche, Dennett is happy to view religion as delusional. He finds little reason to think the delusion useful, and so the only interesting question is just how pernicious it is.

More recently, the physicist and amateur philosopher Victor Stenger has cranked out a little book entitled God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007), in which he purports to show that recent advances in science pretty decisively establish that God does not exist. He then mirrors (more concisely, but with less rhetorical flair than Dawkins, and less eloquence than Harris) the charge that not only dont we need religion to have moral and meaningful lives but religion is an important source of evil in the world.

And for the most angry and rhetorically charged attack, we have Christopher Hitchens recent screed, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). This pugilistic manifesto digs through the annals of religious history and doctrine to uncover the very worst that religion has to offer and then holds up these disturbing phenomena as representative of the very essence of religion (while doing some furious rhetorical hand-waving to conclude that heroic figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr., were not really religious at all). As Hitchens puts the point, religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow (p. 6). While he admits that nonreligious organizations have committed similar crimes, Hitchens maintains that religion lacks any redeeming features that might counterbalance its evils. It is steeped in misrepresentation, and it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking (p. 5).

Of course, the range of works attacking religion is hardly exhausted by this list. Other recent books that should probably be included are biologist Lewis Wolperts Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (2007), Carl Sagans posthumous essays, The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006), and David Millss recently revised and updated