Fr Sean Fernandez: The flawed strategy of atheism

I have been diverted from the article I was going to write by the visit to Australia of the congenitally arrogant Richard Dawkins. He is a darling of the media, of course. We do like to hear our bigoted ideas dressed up as science; it is so reassuring. Richard Dawkins’s utterances rely on the ignorant prejudice of his hearers.

This is all very ad hominem, but Dawkins made some egregious remark about ‘Pope Nazi’ when he was speaking at the Church of atheism of which he is high priest.
This is a cheap slander as it is well known that the Ratzinger family was strongly opposed to National Socialism.
Having got that off my chest, let me turn briefly to his latest contribution to the ‘religion debate’. He demonstrates that Noah’s Ark could not have existed. OMG! My goodness! My faith is shattered!
This is Dawkins at his intellectual best – he sets up straw men to knock down.
But if one were to scan his pronouncements on religion one would find that his bête noire is a fundamentalist brand of faith.
There are libraries full of books exploring biblical archaeology, history, interpretation and the religious myths of the peoples of the Ancient Near East.
Mr Dawkins appears to be in blissful ignorance of the existence of these.
He has posited that sophistication with regard to biblical interpretation is a new phenomenon. If he had bothered to pick up an undergraduate text on the study of the Fathers of the Church he would know how nonsensical that is.
In the fourth century, one can quote Victorinus of Poetovio who wrote that it was more important to understand the order of logic of words rather than the strict ordering on the page. And earlier the great Origen (185-254) wrote of the priority of the spiritual sense (Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, Kannengiesser, ed.167).
Writing on St Augustine, Kenneth Hagan says that he had a “complicated … and multinuanced view of Scripture” (Bible in the Churches: How Various Christians Interpret the Scriptures, 5). This approach to Scripture continued into the Mediaveal period.
Early and mediaeval Christians were very sophisticated in their use of Scripture. It is a pity that Mr Dawkins is unable to show such sophistication.
As I said, Dawkins’ quarrel is with a certain fundamentalist Christianity. This fundamentalism is a new phenomenon and has its roots in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the early 20th century a series of volumes entitled The Fundamentals were published upholding what the authors considered ‘traditional views’ of the Bible; these volumes and the movement behind them were the midwives of fundamentalism in Biblical interpretation.
Let me turn briefly to the account of the flood. The Bible is not the only text which speaks of a flood; other texts from the Ancient Near East speak of such an event.
There does appear to be some archaeological evidence of a flood which may have had a dramatic impact on the region and so on peoples’ collective memories.
This is not to argue for the existence of an ark. The interesting aspect of the Biblical narrative is the manner in which the story is given its particular shape by the people’s faith in Yahweh.
But one cannot expect Dawkins to notice such nuance. Please note that I write as a theologian and not as a Scripture scholar and am open to discussion with my colleagues.
Dawkins is a biologist whose contribution to thought, according to all accounts, is the theory of memes – ‘a cultural replicator’.
But as Professor Alister McGrath (the eminent molecular biophysicist and theologian) points out, there is no “direct evidence for the existence of memes” and the argument for the existence of memes is based on questionable assumptions.
Is there even a need for memes as explanatory function? Nous n’avons pas besoin de cette hypothèse – we have no need for that hypothesis (with apologies to Laplace). McGrath quotes the palaeontologist, Simon Conway Morris, who wrote of Dawkins’ pet theorem – “Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic.
To conjure up memes not only reveals a strange imprecision of thought but, as Anthony O’Hear has remarked, if memes really existed they would ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought.” (Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life)
Perhaps Richard Dawkins should devote his energy to salvaging his own pet hypothesis instead of commenting on topics about which he is embarrassingly ignorant.