This is why I could never become an atheist or part of the skeptic community. Too many factions, divisions, snarls, petty fights, and so on. Worshipping the goddess Reason, they descend into frenzies of irrationality at the slightest provocation. I am tempted to say of them what Chesterton once observed about the enlightened ones at the French Revolution. They worshipped at the altar of the goddess Reason, when that was the deity who had smiled upon them least.

But there are upsides, I suppose. Pope-toppling is always a fun game, especially when the pope involved is silver-haired, magisterial, and clearly engaged in a torrid love affair with his own Dignity.

In the meantime, despite enjoying that aspect of this junior high food fight, we should all of us take a few steps back and observe how skepticism and rationality would solve all our problems, if only we would all bow our heads and ask strict empiricism into our hearts.

NB: some of the language in the link is objectionable. Don’t print it out to read aloud to your kids. Some in the skeptic community talk like the first mate on a tramp steamer, only without making sense.

In this last Dawkins installment, I want to do two things. The first is to briefly summarize his last chapter and respond to it. The second task is to develop something I mentioned in an earlier post — viz. that Dawkins is more than half ashamed of what he is doing — and for good reason.

This last chapter can be divided into two portions. The first part addresses issues like the power of religion to console.

Dawkins responds to this by pointing out, quite rightly, “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true” (p. 352). Of course not — a doctor could console a terminally ill patient by lying to him, and telling him he is going to get better. Lies that offer good news can console along with truths that actually are good news. Quite right. False gods can be a consolation just as the true God can be.

But there is a deeper question. Why does the human creature need consolation? A desperate longing thirst in the desert doesn’t turn every mirage into water. But surely it argues that there is such a thing as water. Why would natural selection develop such an odd dead end? It would be as though we were all thirsty in a world without water, or hungry in a world without food, or full of sexual desire in a world without another sex, and so on. When we long for consolation, Dawkins tells us that it need not be God that we are longing for. He probably isn’t there, and so we should just deal with it. All right. What is it that we are longing for? And why does atheism fail, in a spectacular way, to address this particular need? Scripture says that God has placed eternity in our hearts, which accounts for this longing for the transcendent. But on Dawkins’ account, this longing is entirely illusory, and so he offers us something else. But why does that something else fail to satisfy? It is as though I am fainting from thirst because I want to drink from one of the brooks cascading off one of heaven’s mountains, and Dawkins offers me a bowl of sawdust paste instead.

Dawkins is capable of fine description in his writing, and in the second part of this final chapter, he sets out to tout the marvels of the sawdust paste. He tries to generate a lofty feeling of awe in us by describing various aspects of the physical universe in such a way as to make us say whoa.

No limits. And we shall be as God, knowing good and evil.

But the problem is that the religious need that human beings have, created as we have been in the image of God, cannot be satisfied by the pretensions or posturings of any idol. Eternity is in our hearts, and that longing cannot be filled by watching things go by us really fast, by becoming the most famous person in the world, by sacrificing a virgin in front of a stone idol, or by anything else that men may think up to do. If we understand that the created heavens and earth are a metaphor for the triune God who made them, we can be satisfied to hear of Him through His creation. The heavens declare the glory of God. Through the things that have been made the divine majesty is announced to every sentient creature. But when His creation is severed from Him, as atheism seeks to do, all we have is a bunch of stoms banging around. And if we reflect a bit more, we realize this means that our thoughts are just the result of atoms banging around, which means in turn that we have no reason for trusting our thoughts. But that means we don’t even know if there is such a thing as atoms banging around. Martin Luther famously took his stand because that is where God had lead him, and his heart was captive to the Word of God. Richard Dawkins takes his stand because he doesn’t have anywhere to go.

And this leads to the broader point. Dawkins’ college at Oxford, New College, was founded in 1379 by William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. In the endowment, he provided for ten chaplains, three clerks, and sixteen choristers. If the college income failed, they alone were to be retained. The purpose of the college was to provide for a place where people would be enabled to pray for the good bishop’s soul. “Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the centuries” (p. 359).

Dawkins tries to say this with a sense of ironic detachment, but he covers up his sense of unease unsuccessfully. It comes out in a number of places in the book.

It is a loyalty that Dawkins wishes he could participate in, his wistfulness barely concealed.

In various places in the book, Dawkins refers to his Anglican upbringing, and in a number of places some sort of affection and yearning show through. At the end of chapter nine, he takes an odd turn, arguing for the retention of the Bible as a significant part of literary culture.

This is followed by almost two pages of phrases taken from the Bible that enrich our reading — phrases like “go to the ant,” physician heal thyself,” “through a glass darkly,” and so on. Immediately after the list, Dawkins says one of the few things that I agreed with completely, not to mention enthusiastically.

He has a point. My kids learned a great deal about the Bible from reading it themselves, and from church, but they also learned a good bit of it from Bertie Wooster who, as you should know, once won a prize for Scripture knowledge.

But this kind of affection is not sustained or consistent. The mask goes back on, and Dawkins is back to snarling about how the Bible is a pathological piece of work.

In other words, we can cut down the tree and still treasure how the leaves shade the house in the late summer. Dawkins wants to hate the root (which is our Lord Himself) and somehow retain the fruit.

All this is to say that Dawkins is not a sheer atheist, not by a long shot. He still feels the gravitational pull of the Christian faith, particularly of Anglicanism. And because a man is more than the sum of the propositions he affirms in his head, this is highly significant.

I have to assume some things here, but I think they are safe to assume. It is clear that Dawkins is a baptized Christian, brought up in the Anglican communion. I don’t know if he was disciplined or excommunicated, but, given the state of the Anglican church, that is unlikely in the extreme. He is one who lost his faith, and his way, but this does not change the covenantal obligation he still has (and obviously still feels) to the Church he grew up in. That obligation is objective — it has nothing to do with what Dawkins says he believes. He is a baptized Christian, which means he does not have the right to his unbelief. This means that Richard Dawkins has a covenantal obligation to repent by next Saturday night and return to communion on Sunday.

For American evangelicals, I have to translate. I am not saying here that Dawkins is saved, or that his hatred of God is somehow okay because he was baptized as an infanta. I am saying that being a Christian has two levels. One is objective, like a man getting married. The other is subjective, like a man loving his wife. In the Church, the former is sealed by the sacraments of the Church. The latter is sealed by the Holy Spirit when He converts our hearts so that we come to love God through Jesus. Richard Dawkins still has the former, and it still eats at him. He has never had the latter.

Use the illustration of marriage. Dawkins is like a man who got married, and who had a covenantal obligation to remain with his wife, loving her. But for some reason, he lost that love, and walked away from his obligation, discarding his covenantal vows. The subjective loss of love accounts for the walking away, but it does not justify it. Neither does the loss of love erase the obligation. At times he speaks of his previous attachment with affection, but at other times he remembers he has to justify his infidelity, and so the anger returns.

And this accounts for Dawkins’ strange obsession with people saying things like “a Christian child.” He spends a good portion of chapter nine on it (p. 311), but it was a point he made early on in the book as well (p. 3). This is worth mentioning because this is what was done to Richard Dawkins. He was baptized in infancy, and brought up in the faith. He mentions that his parents taught him to think for himself, but at the same time they did commit him in certain ways, and Dawkins is still bothered by it. This is not irrational; he ought to be bothered by it. He is still obligated. It is strange that he has this degree of sensitivity, because almost no one talks this way about baptism anymore, or teaches this. But he feels it nonetheless.

The water of his baptism has not yet evaporated. We should pray that he is increasingly bothered, and that he comes to the point of full and deep repentance.

The ninth chapter of Dawkins’ book is entitled “Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion.” The chapter is almost impudent in its intellectual dishonesty, and more than impudent in its proposal.

Dawkins begins by telling a heart-wrenching story from 19th century Italy, in which a young Jewish boy (Edgardo Mortata) had been secretly baptized by his babysitter. When this was discovered, the Inquisition required that he be removed from his parents, and brought up in a Catholic home, which then happened.

As Dawkins writes about this, every sensible reader is right with him. This was an appalling thing to do, and is surpassed only by Dawkins telling this story as an introduction to his proposal to do precisely the same kind of thing. He professes astonishment that these 19th century Catholics felt a duty to protect this young boy from being raised a Jew. He then serenely passes on to his subsequent argument that we moderns have a duty to protect young children everywhere from being raised by religious people who consider it their duty to raise their child in their faith. Dawkins’ real problem is apparently that not enough children were removed from their homes. If Dawkins or his editor had not been in the grip of their smugitudinous secularism, they would have seen the glaring contradiction in this chapter. When it comes to lack of self-awareness, in this particular argument Dawkins was “in the zone.” Dawkins begins his chapter by grossing us all out with a story about how some people several centuries ago ate some cockroaches. He then makes this the foundation of his argument for eating centipedes instead. And he does not see that this is what he is doing.

The title to the chapter contains the word “abuse.” And this is the hinge of Dawkins’ proposal. Parents who teach their children so that they share their parents’ faith are, according to Dawkins, abusive parents. Dawkins thinks he can make this charge and remain tolerant because it is okay with him if the parents want to be Christians (gee, thanks!). But if they baptize their children, or provide them with a Christian education, or both, then they are not to be considered Christian parents, but rather abusive parents.

And what do you do with abusive parents? Well, you make them stop, and if they won’t stop, then you remove the child from that home in order to protect them — just like what happened to little Edgardo. Coming at this from another angle, as horrible as the sexual abuse of children by priests might be, Dawkins says, “the damage was arguably less than the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place” (p. 317). So not only is providing children with a religious upbringing abuse, but it is arguably worse kind of abuse than sexual abuse.

It is not a crime, according to Dawkins, to be a Christian in the presence of your children, at least for the present, but it is a crime to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And Dawkins favorably quotes a colleague, Nicholas Humphrey, who delivered this for our consideration:

So far, such abuse would include infant baptism, teaching children about God’s judgment of the human race, the fact that the Bible is the Word of God, and memorizing verses to recite in the annual Christmas pageant. All these things are, by definition, child abuse. And decent society has a duty to protect children from child abuse, does it not? Get those kids out of there — just like the Catholics did with Edgardo.

Humphrey (and Dawkins) were both appalled at the multicultural reaction to the discovery of the body of a young Inca girl, the “ice maiden,” who had apparently been killed in a ritual sacrifice. All the usual progressive suspects were gushing over the fact that in her culture “being selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed” (p. 327) was an honor indeed. But Humphrey says that she only thought this way because she didn’t know the scientific facts about the material universe. If he had brought her up, and gotten her a proper education, she wouldn’t have thought the way she did, and she wouldn’t have wanted to be sacrificed. This is quite true — she wouldn’t have wanted that if she had been brought up in a conservative Christian home either. But it is also beside the point.

The myth of neutrality has both Humphrey and Dawkins by the throat. They want to protect all the children of the world from the abuse of their parents’ religious opinions, and the standard they propose for evaluating all the opinions of all these parents are the indisputable facts that make up their worldview. As Popeye would say, what a coinkydinx. This is because they are right, darn it, just like the 19th century Catholics. And, incredibly, they cannot see that this is what they are doing.

But the Christian belief is that the Incan priests should be blamed for their ignorance, because they were supressing the truth about God in their unrighteousness and were worshipping a lie. The way to deal with this is through preaching the gospel to them, calling upon them to repent and forsake their idols. But the Dawkins approach is breath-taking. His proposal, if we want to dignify it with such a name, is to have all the parents in the world — Christian, Muslim, Jews, Buddhists, and so on — to be required to raise their children the way Dawkins would, and then, when they are eighteen (or whatever), they can become whatever religion they want, provided it is not a religion that has anything like infant baptism in it.

The implication here is that children are all wards of the state, which must be secular. Your children are not yours. This is more than the separation of church and state; it is the separation of church and children. It is not a separation of the state and children.

No, thanks. Not going to do it. I said a moment ago that Dawkins does not see that he is demanding that all worldviews defer to his. Because he is right, and because everyone else is wrong, children must be removed from homes (or not) on his principles. He will brook no dispute or discussion on the point. The scientist worldview is right, and evolution is right, and children must be removed from homes where Dawkins-think is not properly taught. One of the reasons for doing this is that Dawkins was appalled by an instance in 19th century Italy where a child was removed from a home where Catholic-think was not properly taught. I have honestly never seen anything like this in a book that people were taking seriously. And Dawkins teaches at Oxford.

But I don’t fault Dawkins for insisting that law should be based on the worldview that he considers to be correct. What else should he think? That is not where his problem is. All law is imposed morality, and everyone who has a morality believes that the law should be based on that morality which is correct. This is what everybody does, and it is inescapable. Nobody wants to impose a morality that he believes to be a false morality and actually immoral.

The problem is that Dawkins doesn’t know that he is doing this. He is unaware of the fact that he is looking out at the world through his own eyeballs, and his worldview, frieghted with all kinds of radical assumptions, is simply invisible to him. What he sees is simply what “is,” and what others see is the result of inexplicable superstitions. And we gotta get their children out of there.

This comes up in another way in this chapter. Dawkins has heard about a group of Christians who want public policy to reflect what they believe to be correct. Dawkins acts like he has never heard of such a thing. The ideer! Them?

An American colleague writes him in breathless excitement:

In the first place, judging from the terminology being used here, Dawkins’ intelligence-gathering is about twenty years out of date. In the second place, to report this as though the recons will be taking over tomorrow if the secularists are not capital V vigilant is an exercise in capital H hyperbole. But let us not get hung up on that kind of stuff, and just point out that all cultures reflect the central cultus. All cultures are embodied religion. Dawkins wants to have his religion be the basis for all public morality and law. Good for him. So do we. He doesn’t believe in Jesus, and wants that unbelief enshrined in the public square. We believe in Jesus, and want His Lordship to be recognized in the public square. Of course there are some differences, based on the different nature of the worldviews represented. For example, I wouldn’t want to have a Christian state kidnap kids from atheist homes, and he does want a secular state to kidnap Christian kids from Christian homes. But although our moralities differ, we both want those moralities to form the basis of the surrounding culture.

Dawkins steadfastly refuses to recognize the situated nature of his own knowledge. Because he denies the one true God, the only one who has immediate (non-mediated) knowledge of all things, Dawkins has volunteered to fill that vacancy himself. He will know things immediately, and he will know them without corruption. And from that pristine vantage point, he will give the order to have our kids taken away from us, and raised in an anti-septic and scientific way. God deliver us.

In the next chapter, Dawkins seeks to answer the question, “Why are you so hostile?” So believers in God are delusional. So what? Why get that datum wound tight around your axle?

He also has to explain why, given his adversarial stance toward Christianity and creationism, he never takes “part in debates with creationists.” With regard to this, he records the deliciously snarky response from a scientific colleague who replies to creationist invitations to debate with this: “That would look great on your CV; not so good on mine” (p. 281). More on this shortly.

Dawkins tries to answer the charge that he is an atheistic fundamentalist because of his obvious belligerence. He is part of a new “militant atheism” that has a clear take no prisoners approach. Is this not a fundamentalist mindset? Dawkins says no.

This comment is strange on two counts. First, on the question of hemispheres, consider an illustration in favor of “consciousness raising” that Dawkins used earlier in the book.

Arbitrary polarity. Exactly so. And this applies to more than north and south. This is what all the T’s and F’s in a truth tree are, given atheism — arbitrary polarities. Dawkins keeps trying to raise his consciousness, but he keeps bumping his head on the ceiling. He wants objective truth when it suits him, and he wants consciousness-raising relativism when it suits him. If this seems like a contradiction, that’s okay. He’s raising his consciousness.

This brings us to the second point. Dawkins says that evolution would be abandoned overnight if “evidence” were brought forward that disproved it. But how can we know if the evidence is any good? You know, like solid evidence? Well, anything that would bring about the rejection of evolution is, you know, bogus on the face of it. How can we be “truth at all costs” scientists and hedge our bets at the same time?

One word in there cracks me up, and gives the whole game away. Authentically found. This is a great challenge and sounds very bold — until you realize that Precambrian rock is defined as being rabbitless. No such evidence has ever been authentically found. What my net don’t catch ain’t fish. “That can’t be a Precambrian rock. Got a rabbit in it, for Pete’s sake.”

This goes back to the refusal to debate creationists mentioned earlier. Exctly how open to hearing alternative evidence might Dawkins be? As it turns out, not at all. He won’t debate creationists, even though in this chapter he mentions one creationist scientist (Kurt Wise), whose scientific craft competence is undisputed. But he is mentioned as a pathetic casulty of religion because he continues to believe the Bible, despite having been trained under Stephen Jay Gould. “I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise” (p. 286). Why not debate Kurt Wise? The snarky comment CVs wouldn’t apply here, now would it?

Another reason that Dawkins is on the warpath is because of the nutcases in the Muslim world and in “the incipient American theocracy” (p. 286).

The farther the reader goes in this book, the more one suspects that Dawkins has been relying on Google way more than a scholar should. It really doesn’t take much to google up the hyperventilations of hysterical liberals, and a outside Brit like Dawkins might easily come to believe that men like Randall Terry and Paul Hill are representative leaders of conservative Christians in America. And that in fact is what he does (pp. 292-296). This is great for whipping up the moonbats, but it has little to do with what is actually occurring here.

Another reason for Dawkins’ stridency is the fact that conservative believers have been fighting for a respect for human life, born and unborn. But Dawkins complains that pro-lifers frequently support the death penalty.

Take me, for instance. I support the death penalty for convicted murderers, and I oppose the death penalty for unborn children. “Ha! Caught you! Wiggle out of that one!” If someone has forfeited their right to life through an outrageous crime on another, and that person is given a fair and complete trial, then executing them is an act of justice. If someone has not done such an act, and they are given no trial or hearing whatever, then executing them is an act of injustice. This is a real puzzler for Dawkins. Trial? Justice? Innocence? Guilt? Injustice? These are strange concepts. I must hear more about this religion of yours.

Dawkins is not opposed to abortion because a small cluster of human cells, however human they might be, do not have a nervous system. “An early embryo has the sentience, as well as the semblance, of a tadpole” (p. 297). And for some arbitrary reason, the ability to suffer pain is the ethical measuring rod Dawkins has decided to use. In an attempt to be consistent, he calls for more humane treatment of animals in slaughterhouses, who can suffer more pain than an early embryo does. But if this is how we run the calculus, then can we not achieve consistency in the other direction as well? What would Dawkins say about the murder of a heroin addict with no family, one who would never be missed, provided that murder were conducted painlessly? The future pain that the addict would no doubt experience is all avoided, and no pain is experienced in the experience of death itself. If the do-gooder sneaks up on him while asleep, he doesn’t even have the pain of fearful anticipation. The action would certainly cause an overall reduction of pain in one nervous system, and no additional pain in any others. And that’s what counts, right? All about nervous systems, right?

The next chapter in Dawkins is called “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” and it is one of the strangest bits of business I have encountered in some time.

The first part of the chapter is dedicated to proving how the Bible exhibits “sheer strangeness” and is “just plain weird” (p. 237). To establish this, he tells a number of Bible stories — Abraham passing Sarah off as his sister, Jepthah’s daughter, the Levite’s concubine, Lot sleeping with his daughters, and so on. He does this in order to prove that no one, not even the most conservative Christian, gets his morality from the Bible. Getting your morality “from the Bible,” for Dawkins, apparently consists of justifying any action provided it can be shown to have occurred somewhere in the pages of Scripture. And since no one, not even the most rigorous follower of the courtship model, sets a bride price for his daughter at 100 Philistine foreskins, we must all of us be really inconsistent. “You say you believe the Bible . . .”

Dawkins’ knowledge of scriptural hermeneutics and the nature of unfolding revelation is frankly sophomoric, and that actually constitutes a gratuitous insult to sophomores. The only alternative that he can imagine to slavish imitation of anything done by any given Bible character is to relegate the Bible to the world of “symbolism.” But if you do that, he argues, the Bible becomes a nose of wax, and anybody can make it say anything he wants. Those are the two alternatives presented by Dawkins in this chapter — wooden imitation or up-for-grabs symbolism.

But there are plenty of people who take Judges as literal history who do not believe that carving a dead concubine into pieces as a summons to war is righteous. We believe in this way, not because the incident offends our modern moral sensibilities (which it does), but because the text itself leads us to this conclusion. The text is the basis for our modern moral sensibilities. This was a time in Israel’s history when every man did what was right “in his own eyes,” and the results were frequently appalling.

Dawkins clearly does not know how to read a literary collection of texts like the Bible, and it is equally clear that there is an entire world of literary and biblical scholarship out there from which, if it had a deadly contagious disease, Dawkikns would be quite safe.

Suppose that Macbeth were a sacred text. According to Dawkins, either you would have to go out to find yourself a Duncan to kill (in order to “get your morality” from Shakespeare), or you would have to interpret the whole thing as a series of nebulous symbols. “Nope. No other options.” Good grief.

Having set up this wobbly foundation, Dawkins proceeds to get even wobblier. Where do we get our morality? Since he has shown (!) that nobody gets his morality “from the Bible,” where do we get our morality? At this point I have to do what Dave Barry frequently does and assure my readers that I am not making this up. We get our morality from the contemporary zeitgeist, or spirit of the age. Everybody, more or less, has the same basic morality, the one notable exception (kind of) being the conservative Christians in the U.S. who are busy makin up the American Taliban. But we all have a basic sense of what constitutes good and what constitutes bad. Dawkins cites a list of commandments he got off the Internet that illustrates this, called the “New Ten Commandments.” It would be exceeding tedious to cite them all, but I will quote some of them, along with one I made up. See if you can tell which one that is.

2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.

5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

6. Always seek to be learning something new.

10. Question everything.

11. Love pina coladas, and walking in the rain.

Okay, so I added the last one. But I think you could only tell because it was supposed to be ten commandments, and that had an eleven by it. And what is it with that number ten? Question everything, except for stupid, arbitrary lists like this one. Whenever I see that bumpersticker that says “Question Authority,” I want to get a marker pen and write on it, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

But Dawkins celebrates the zeitgeist. He points to the suffrage of women as an example of this zeitgest, with women gaining the right to vote in New Zealand in 1893, Britain in 1928, Switzerland in 1971, and in Kuwait in 2006. See? Look at us go.

Dawkins is jubilant because “the Zeitgeist moves on” (p. 267).

Dawkins is driving the car, and I am in the backseat trying to figure out what I thought were mapquest directions, but the night was foggy and really dark. Later I discovered that the mapquest directions were actually grease stains from a piece of pizza left on one of Dawkins’ scientific papers.

“How are we doing?” say I, somewhat worried.

“Great, great,” he cheerfully replies.

“Where are we going again?” I want to know.

“We are making excellent time!” he answers. “Never better!”

“How do you know that?” I want to know.

“Look at all the other cars zipping along right beside us,” he says. “Zeitgesting down the road like crazy.”

In other words, we don’t know where we are, where we are going, who made the car, or who gave us the keys, but we are making excellent time nonetheless. I don’t have a copy of it with me, but it reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ wonderful hymn to evolution. “Lead us, evolution, lead us/Up the future’s endless stair/Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us/Lead us, goodness, who knows where.”

Most of us, hey? Or is that just most of the smart ones? And does that make it an improvement? Can “most of us” be wrong? If not, doesn’t that open the door to all manner of hellish dystopias? And if so, by what standard? Is a majority vote an all-purpose disinfectant?

Begging the question like a champion, Dawkins simply assumes what he needs to prove. The Zeitgeist is doing good things as long as it is moving in a “progressive” direction. But how on earth are we supposed to define progress?

Appalling reversals? By what standard? A generally progressive direction? By what standard? Improvement? By what standard? The standard for how fast and in what direction the car should go cannot be how fast and in what direction the car is currently going. A car is not a map. An internal combustion engine is not a map. But Dawkins dismisses all this with a facile, “Look at us go.”

And the interesting thing is that, in the first part of the chapter, when he was arguing against Christians who pick and choose from their Bibles (which would be bad, I agree, if we were doing it), he denomstrated plainly that he understands this principle. When he was talking about what parts of the Bible we should follow and what parts not, he laid down a principle that is quite good. I am glad that he did this because he shows that he understands the principle clearly. Now all he has to do is apply it to himself. But, son of a gun, he doesn’t get around to that.

According to Dawkins, there are competing moral claims in the Bible. There aren’t, but let’s give it to him for a moment. He says that in order to make a choice, we must have a criterion of choosing. That’s right, we do need that. Now, there are also competing moral claims out there in Zeitgeist-land, and Dawkins knows it. I mean, Dawkins just cannot get over the lunatic theocracy that Americans are busy building under that renowned theocrat George W. Bush. That, surely, is a contrary wind to the prevailing winds of progressivism.

So let us change our metaphor from driving a car aimlessly to windsurfing aimlessly, because the zeitgeist is more like a stiff wind than it is like a road just lying there. Dawkins wants us to windsurf in a particular direction, in front of what he thinks ought to be the prevailing winds. But why should we care what he thinks the prevailing winds ought to be? What matters is what they are, right?

But then Dawkins gives the game away. It all boils down to personal choice.

I agree that if they are both flying by the seat of their pants, then they both are. But if Christians are following a sure word from God, a light in a dark place, that does not change what Dawkins is doing. Dawkins here acknowledges that, whatever else is the case, he is flying by the seat of his pants. How does one answer any perplexing ethical questions? Personal choice trumps all.

Should I believe in science? Personal choice. Should I accept the theory of evolution? Personal choice. Should I adopt a progressive political agenda? Personal choice. Should I participate in hate crimes against homosexuals? Personal choice. Should I support apartheid? Personal choice. Should I support the expansion of the American empire? Personal choice. Should I accept the authority of reason and evidence? Personal choice. Should I ditch my wife for some new babe I thought I found? Personal choice. Should I find Intelligent Design compelling? Personal choice. Should I help the old lady across the street? Personal choice. Push her into the traffic? Personal choice. Should I vote for the presidential candidate most likely to outlaw abortion? Personal choice. Should I give my selfish genes more of a shot at immortality by becoming a serial rapist? Personal choice. Should I respect the personal choices of others? Personal choice. Should I have nothing but contempt for the personal choices of others? Personal choice.

Dawkins has written enough in this chapter to reveal that he knows what he is doing. But at the same time, it is also clear that he is still half ashamed of it.

In the next chapter, Richard Dawkins undertakes the question of morality, seeking to ground that morality on the unshakeable foundation of evolution. What kind of foundation might that be? Well, let’s go down into the basement and have ourselves a little check.

But before getting to this important issue, Dawkins gives us some samples of the hate mail he and other atheists receive. In order to really engage with your religious adversaries, it is important to understand them, and quote representative spokesmen accurately and fairly. You really want to pick the most able adversaries so that no one can accuse you of cherry-picking your opponents. That is no doubt the principle behind Dawkins’ selection of fellow Oxfordian Alistair McGrath to represent the opposition. Just kidding.

Apparently Christian apologetics has three schools of thought: evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and scurrilous antinomian abuse.

Dawkins wants us to realize that religious believers think that belief in God is really, really important and essential and non-negotiable when it comes to grounding morality in something other than humanistic brain fog. But Dawkins is ready for us, and seeks to show us that we have a scientific (read, evolutionary) basis that accounts for our feelings of moral sentiments.

Dawkins compares the altruistic urges we have to our sexual impulses. The fact that the original reasons for their formation may be missing now does not keep us from feeling them. He points out (obviously) that the sexual urges were programmed into us (back in our babooon-like stage) in order to further the propagation of childresn, or as the mother baboon might say affectionately, yard apes. He then points out that a modern couple can know that the woman is infertile (because she is on the pill, say) and yet this does not make the sexual desire go away (p. 221).

In other words, back when we lived in villages, just down from the trees, the promotion of our own genetic offspring, the rules of reciprocity, reputation issues, and ways of showing dominance were all crucial to survival, and so natural selection favored them all. Today, it might be the case that none of these things apply to some anonymous resident of some big city, but that doesn’t keep him from feeling empathy when he sees a fitting object of compassion. Just as a man might lust after a woman he knows to be infertile, so another man might feel compassion toward someone with no connection to his genes at all.

So, okay, I follow all this. But this simply accounts for the existence of my moral sentiments. It gives me no reason at all to obey them. Just as a man might know that sexual desire was evolution’s way of propagating those critical and irreplaceable genes of his, and yet decide to live in a way that thwarts this intent (getting a vasectomy, for example), so another man might know that his feelings of compassion are, at the end of the day, just feelings. If he goes with them, fine, if not, equally fine. What authority does the genetic residue of ancient village life actually have? It may have explanatory power with regard to my moral feelings, but it can have no imperatival authority. If one man wants to go with his feelings, and show compassion and kindness, then why not? Scratch what itches. But if he doesn’t want to drift with his feelings, and wants to discipline himself contrary to the known evolutionary reasons for having the feelings, why shouldn’t he?

Dawkins says that our moral sentiments are just like our sexual desires. We can know that the reasons for having the desires are obsolete, and yet we still have them. This misses two crucial points. The first is that the existence of sexual desire brings with it no moral imperative to have a sexual desire, or to have it directed in fruitful directions. So if a man desires to redirect his sexual desire, or if he castrates himself in order to pursue some other end, there is no reason (located in the sexual desire itself) that can provide any direction in making such choices. Evolution provides the is, it has nothing whatever to say about the ought. But if our feelings of altruism and compassion are exactly the same kind of thing, than this means that if the vast bulk of the human species, when feeling this way, decides to be nice, that is just fine. And if others, deciding to go the sociopathic route, well then, equally fine. Of course, we might decide to hang all the sociopaths on utilitarian grounds, but that is just a matter of keeping order — keeping the sewers working, the electrical grid up, and the homicidal lunatics off the street. Not really a question of morality.

But this leads to the second question. We want to be careful about killing too many of the sociopaths because we must never forget the next big jump in evolution. Natural selection is still on-going, and so we want to be wary about killing the mutants. Might be a tad uncomfortable for us moral dinosaurs for a time, but hey, progress is always like that. In other words, if speciation is still occuring, then why shouldn’t big city anonymity have its crack at programming the future, just like small village closeness had its shot? But Dawkins is way too much of a sentimentalist to swallow any of these reductios. No, he wants to settle in permanently with his nice, cozy morality, the fruit of those “blessed, previous mistakes,” and just keep things the way they are, with everybody being nice to each other.

But the question won’t go away. Why? What do you say to the person who disputes all this, and wants to do whatever he wants to do, milk of human kindness be damned? And when you say it to him, why should he listen to you? Hume posited a chasm between is and ought, and Dawkins has not only not engineered a bridge across the chasm, but his attempts appear to consist almost entirely of, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a bridge here?”

At first Dawkins says that the notion that we “need God to be good” is just plain crass — as though Christians are only capable of being good as long as the celestial surveillance camera is pointed in our direction. And of course, if that is what we were doing, this would be crass. But then Dawkins really surprised me, for the first time in this book. He stepped away from the caricatures, and actually represented the views of a hypothetical (and capable) Christian apologist. The point is not that we will only be good if someone is watching, but rather that, in the absence of a transcendental moral abolute, we have no way of telling whether we are being good or not. He indulged in the caricature for several pages, but then he gave an effective answer to all that. At first we were all in a room with the rules clearly posted, and then the sky camera is taken away, and there was no way to tell who has kept the rules or not. In this setting, the Christians wee clearly “eyepleasers,” to use the language of the apostle Paul. But then a real response from Christinas was anticipated. Suppose that not only the camera is taken away, but so are the posted rules. No one is told to do anything, one way or the other, no one is watching, and we are all trying to cheer ourselves up with nebulous notions of altruism while milling around confusedly in the room with no name. Now what?

To his credit, Dawkins actually raises this potent objection to his argument. But then, in a lame way, he doesn’t answer it at all. He brings up Kant’s categorical imperative, says that it seems to work for some things like truth-telling, but not for other stuff, and then tells us that “moral philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong” (p. 232). And it turns out that they divide into two camps — the deontologists, who think that morality consists of doing one’s duty, and the consequentialists, who think that actions should be evaluated for their morality on the basis of their consequences. Oh. So what does natural selection have to say about deontology and consequentialism? And most importantly, why? Nothing at all apparently. Dawkins then lamely concludes the chapter by pointing out that patriotism can generate a close approximation of moral absolutism. Okay, not to the mention the last refuge of the scoundrel. But we still have been given no information about what constitutes a moral choice or action. Which option does Dawkins take and why? He can’t just wave his hands over the ethical conundrum and move on to the next chapter. But that is what he does.