[Dialogue] 10/13/11, Spong: Richard Dawkins and His Challenge to Christianity

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Richard Dawkins and His Challenge to Christianity
Recently, the New York Times ran a major interview with Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University under the banner headline of “A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy.”  This world famous professor is now better known for his attacks on what he believes is the religious expression he calls Christianity than he is for his obviously brilliant work as a biologist.  His book, The God Delusion, was for many months at or near the top of the best seller list in non-fiction not only in the New York Times, but in every other book-measuring list around the world.  There is obviously enormous interest in religion that is abroad today, including an interest in religion’s demise that is the vein that Dawkins mines so well.
In 1991 I was a “scholar in residence” at Magdalen College of Oxford University while researching material for my book Born of a Woman: A Bishop rethinks the Birth of Jesus and the place of Women in a Male-Dominated Church.  Some people at New College, Oxford, heard that I was at the university and invited me to give a lecture.  Accompanying that invitation was a second one inviting Christine and me to dine that evening at the “High Table” at New College with that college’s “Fellows.”.  For those not familiar with English practice, “The Fellows,” another name for the tenured faculty, eat three meals a day in their respective colleges at “High Table,” which is usually at an extended table with comfortable and sometimes well padded chairs and on an elevated stage, hence its name.  Each course of this elegantly prepared formal dinner served at “High Table” is accompanied by the proper wine, poured by a host of attendants who seek to meet any need a faculty member might have.  Prior to the meal, the “Fellows” meet in a faculty lounge for sherry and an interdisciplinary conversation and, following the meal, they adjourn to the same room for coffee, brandy and more conversation.  Meanwhile, the students sit on benches around a table in a great hall, but distinctly on a lower level than the faculty.  No wine is served to them and the menu for their meal is not only different, but quite inferior to that served to the faculty.  Protocol requires that the students not begin to eat until the senior “fellow” present speaks the words of the blessing, usually in Latin, and they cannot leave until they are dismissed again by the same senior “fellow” when the faculty adjourns for coffee.  The ancient English class system is clearly still operative.
We accepted this invitation and, properly attired, we joined a faculty line to process to our seats.  I had spent that day in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, one of the two or three great libraries of the world, reading a series of recommended books.  One of then was a small book with a catchy title, The Selfish Gene, by a professor named Richard Dawkins in which he looked at evolution from the perspective of a single gene and its struggle to survive.  It was a fascinating piece of work and it helped me to begin to develop a new understanding of the nature of life itself and even a new way to understand the human reality that theologians of the past have called “Original Sin” and “The Fall.”  At that moment, I did not know who Richard Dawkins was or where he taught.
When we sat down at the table, my wife was on my right and a member of the faculty of New College was on my left.  I turned to this person with my hand outstretched and said, “I am Jack Spong, who are you?”  His response was instant and his smile was warm, “I’m Richard Dawkins,” he said.  The coincidence was almost more than I could embrace.  I told him that I had just that day read The Selfish Gene.  When he discovered I was an Anglican bishop, he was surprised that I had enjoyed the book as much as I had.  It was distinctly anti-religious he asserted.
That conversation stuck in my mind as the years passed and Richard Dawkins became more and more of a public figure and even a television regular. His popularity was easy to understand. He is photogenic, personable, warm and articulate.  He also takes what he calls an anti-religious stance.  Not only does he assert his atheism, but he also delights in ridiculing his understanding of religion, regarding it as childlike, ignorant, superstitious and, to use what seems to be his favorite word, “incurious.”
Figures in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church of England have risen periodically to challenge him in public debate.  One was John Hapgood, the former Archbishop of York, and a man of recognizable academic achievements.  Another was Keith Ward, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford, but these church-led attacks accomplished little.  Each of these “defenders of the faith” suggested that Dawkins was reacting to a caricature of Christianity that would make a first year theology student wince at its naiveté.  They even suggested that he study theology, suggesting that unless he did so, he would inevitably be dismissed in theological circles as “uneducated.”  What none of them realized was that Dawkins was making contact with the public with his one liners and his penetrating insights, while these theologians, were seeking to make sense out of the convoluted theological explanations of the past that had been developed primarily to undergird  and sustain ecclesiastical power.  Before they had reach their point their audiences had turned glassy-eyed and were wearing “who gives a damn” faces.
When Dawkin’s book The God Delusion came out in 2006, it was popularly received.  I read it with interest and enthusiasm.  What amazed me was that the God Dawkins criticized is the God that I too criticize.  My primary problem with him was that he assumed that the God I worshiped was the same deity that he was so cleverly rejecting.  I do not see God as an external being, supernatural in power, living above the sky and always prepared to intervene in human history to right a wrong, to do a miracle or to answer prayers.  I do not see God as either a heavenly parent or a heavenly judge dispensing rewards and punishments to obedient or disobedient children according to their deserving.  This rather juvenile God died centuries ago, the victim of a revolution in thought that produced the modern consciousness.  This revolution was ignited by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, who together shattered God’s dwelling place above the sky and rendered the primitive God of the childhood of our religion to be “homeless.”  Next came Isaac Newton, whose development of what later came to be called “natural law,” destroyed the idea of God as a supernatural figure, able to intervene in history by setting aside the physical laws by which this universe operated.  In turn Newton rendered God “unemployed.”  This God no longer had any work to do.  This God did not bring victory in warfare, cure sicknesses, rescue people from peril or guarantee that God would prevail against evil.
Newton was followed by Charles Darwin, who destroyed the primary myth by which Christians had traditionally told their faith story.  How could there be a “fall” from an original, created perfection, Darwin asked, if evolution had moved from a single cell to cellular complexity? Without the foundational concept of a fall from perfection into “original sin” the sacred symbols of our popular faith story began to fall like bowling pins.  If there was no fall, the idea that Jesus was God’s rescue operation, designed to overcome that fall, became absurd.  The idea that God required the death of Jesus to pay the price of that sin became weird and seemed to define God as the ultimate child abuser, who required the death of the son before forgiveness could be extended.  The off-stated Christian concept that “Jesus died for my sins” in fact filled worshipers with nothing other than debilitating guilt and the suggestion that we should be “washed in the blood of Jesus” in order to receive salvation or that we should drink the blood of Jesus in the Eucharist to be cleansed internally became grotesque images.   Yet those are the things that Richard Dawkins was attacking in 2006!
I can conceive of God apart from supernaturalism. I can deny the theistic definition of God without being an atheist, since the theistic definition of God is a human creation not a divine revelation.  I believe I can experience a transcendent presence in the life of Jesus, which is my understanding of “divinity,” without buying the late first century explanation of the Virgin Birth and without affirming miracles as literally true. I believe that I can assert and enter the reality of eternal life while simultaneously dismissing the traditional definitions of heaven and hell.
Those are, of course, not popular ideas in traditional modern religion, as we see it lived out in churches, on television and through the eyes of politicians, who use primitive religious concepts to create fear and to enhance electoral prospects.  It is this popular religion to which Richard Dawkins reacts so relentlessly.  Indeed in this interview he said that he wrote The God Delusion after enduring “four years of the public religion of the Bush administration.”
In his Times interview, Dawkins said, “I have had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops and I rather suspect if you ask them in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe in the Virgin Birth.  But for every one of them, four others would tell a child she’ll rot in hell for doubting.”
My friend Richard, it was not in a “candid moment,” but in a best-selling book written 20 years ago that I dismissed the birth stories of Matthew and Luke as anything more than mythological tales.  Because medicine men in the past used voodoo and doctors in the 18th century bled their patients to release the evil spirits, does not mean that modern medicine still embraces these ideas.  Because uneducated people and even some educated, but fragile people still cling to a fundamentalist literalism, does not mean that this is what Christianity means.
Someone once asked me who I would choose if I could have dinner and conversation with anyone in the world?  My answer was Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.  Someday perhaps that dream will come true.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Jim from Anniston, Alabama, writes:
Question:
Since giving up the theistic God that I had for most of my life (I'm 71+) and its attendant dualism, it is as though I have had all the pieces, but they never fit together before.  Frankly, it was so easy to change that I wonder why I never arrived there before.  The paradox and ambiguity that so troubled me before no longer seem to be of concern. 

I am finding that another result of this new relationship is that I am also experiencing a much greater sense of responsibility for reaching out to those around me, friends and otherwise.  Is this a response that I am correctly perceiving?  Second, I wonder if there is now continuing reason to believe in the efficacy of intercessory prayer.  If so, would you speculate about how it might work?
Answer:
Dear Jim, 

The witness in the first two paragraphs of your letter is a powerful one. Thank you for sharing it with me and my readers. 

Your third paragraph poses the question which keeps many people in their ancient theistic mindset.  Intercessory prayer assumes a theistic deity beyond life who acts on life in response to prayer.  I do not believe that this God can, will or should survive. God is surely more than this image will ever give us. What we may discover, however, is that behind our concept of intercessory prayer, there is a deep and profound human connectedness and that our words, our thoughts and even our emotions do impact one another.  God may be part of this inter-connection, but the old prayer patterns will never get to that understanding.  New ones will be developed by people like you, so get about the task! My attempt to address this issue was in my book Eternal Life: A New Vision Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism Beyond Heaven and Hell. 

~John Shelby Spong





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