God Without Religion
An Alternative View Of Life,
The Universe And Everything
by Dr Michael Arnheim
Sometime Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge Barrister at Law
God Without Religion
An Alternative View Of Life, The Universe And Everything
by Dr Michael Arnheim
Copyright © 2016 Michael Arnheim
Dr Michael Arnheim has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this work.
1st Edition published by Imprint Academic
This 2nd Edition published by
Black House Publishing Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
Black House Publishing Ltd
Kemp House, 152 City Road, London
UNITED KINGDOM
EC1V 2NX
www.blackhousepublishing.com
Email: [email protected]
Table of Contents
God Without Religion
Preface
What Is This Book About?
Chapter One
Let the Games Begin!
Some Leading Atheist Views
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins
Stages in the Development of the Universe
The Origin of Life
Stephen Hawking
Some Leading Religious Views
Intelligent Design
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Review of Chapter One
Chapter Two
A Fistful of Fallacies
A. Some Atheist Fallacies
The Fallacy of the Kalahari Polar Bear
The Best Butter Fallacy
The Bophocles Fallacy
B. Some Pro-Religion Fallacies
Argument from False Premise
Shaving with Occam’s Razor
Moving the Goalposts
Review of Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Two Types of Gods
Comparison of Theism, Deism and Atheism
Other Mechanisms of Evolution
Review Of Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Two Types of Religion
Creed Religions
Communal Religions
Alternative Classifications of Religions
Communal and Creed Religions — A Comparison
Case Study 1 — Hinduism
Case Study 2 — The Roman State Religion
Case Study 3 — Christianity
A Quick Glance at Some Other Religions
Conclusion
Review of Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Judaism: A Religion at the Crossroads
Judaism as a Communal Religion
Review of Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Is Christianity True?
Jesus as “the Christ”
Jesus’s Teachings
The Birth of a Myth
Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?
Conclusions
Notes To Chapter Six
Review Of Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Crescent Moon and Rising Sun
Classification
Name
Numbers
God(s)
Beliefs
Practices
Leading Figure(s)
Denominations
Violence
Origins
Conversion
Toleration
Community
Sacred Book(s)
Claim of “Truth”
Ethics
Reflections
Review Of Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Conclusion
Summary Of Conclusions
About the Author
Select Bibliography
Further Reading
Endnotes
PREFACE
This book is a revised version of The God Book, published in 2015.
The book has had a long gestation period – thirty years to be precise. It is in a sense a sequel to Is Christianity True? originally published in 1984, which was translated into a number of languages and created something of a stir.
Atheists reject religion, and with it a belief in any kind of God. In so doing, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This book reveals the weaknesses of both atheism and of conventional organised religion without rejecting belief in God altogether. Hence the title God Without Religion. As far as I am aware, this is the first and only book to adopt that position.
Having studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew from an early age, I have been able to read the relevant sources written in those languages in the original. I have regrettably not been able to read the Qur’an (Koran) in its original Arabic, but there fortunately are internet sites containing a number of comparative translations of the Qur’an.
I am only sorry that my beloved mentor and colleague, Professor John Crook of St John’s College, Cambridge, has not lived to see this day. He was one of the most tolerant minds I have ever come across, but he never made the mistake of equating toleration with acceptance of all views as equally valid.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Jack Ward, without whose constant badgering this book would probably still not be finished. Special thanks too to my portrait-painter friend Tony Oakshett for the photograph on the dustjacket of the hardback edition; and, for her painstaking proofreading, to my friend Rosie Craig.
As I don’t have a cat, I can’t blame it for clambering over the keyboard. The sole responsibility for any mistakes rests on me.
For biographical information on myself, see my Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arnheim.
3 August 2016
Dr Michael Arnheim,
London
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
Which is right, atheism or organised religion? Answer: Neither.
What’s wrong with atheism? The intolerant radical “New Atheists” of today champion the theory of evolution by natural selection, which may help to explain small changes and variations in living things but can’t explain the origin of the universe or the origin of life — because natural selection needs life to kick-start it into action. No life, no natural selection!
Does organised religion do any better? Not at all. It simply has too much baggage. Why does evil exist in the world? And why are the good not rewarded and the wicked punished? Organised religion has no answer except to kick these problems upstairs into the afterlife, of which there is no evidence whatsoever.
What then of the claims of religious truth? Most of the claims made for Jesus are demonstrably false. Creed religions like Christianity and Islam believe that they alone hold the key to truth and salvation. But communal religions like Hinduism, Japanese Shinto and the religions of the ancient world tend to be more tolerant. Orthodox Judaism, starting out as a communal religion, has now adopted certain features of a creed religion and become more intolerant.
But more tolerant than either radical atheism or any organised religion is deism. Unlike conventional religions, which are based on belief in a personal god, deism believes in an impersonal God who does not get involved in the day-to-day affairs of the world.
CHAPTER ONE
Let the Games Begin!
Debates about God and religion are nothing new. But the current conflict between the “New Atheists” or “Militant Atheists” and organised religion certainly gives the impression of
being more acrimonious than any similar disputes in the past. The rancour is less surprising than the generally unimpressive and unpersuasive arguments on both sides.
In this chapter I will critically trawl through some of the views of protagonists on both sides.
Some Leading Atheist Views
Christopher Hitchens
One of the most militant of the New Atheists was the late Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011. Not content to rant against religious belief — largely on the basis of self-aggrandising anecdotes masquerading as humour — Hitchens went so far as to blame religion for all the ills of the world. One of the chapters of his book God is Not Great is titled simply “Religion Kills”, and a typical remark of his is that there is nothing in the Ten Commandments about genocide — conveniently ignoring the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which obviously covers mass murder as well as individual killings.
Hitchens’s all too familiar litany of likes and hates is essentially a naïve “politically correct” version of the 19th century worship of “Progress” used as a stick with which to beat religion. Hitchens does not seem to have realised that his views were just as intolerant (and often also as intolerable) as those that he was attacking. He took it for granted that his values were more “enlightened” than those with which he disagreed, and he was as ready to impose them on his supposedly benighted targets as any Victorian missionary to “darkest Africa”.
Hitchens’s Misunderstanding of Northern Ireland
So virulent was Hitchens’s hatred of religion that the rationality of which he boasted was cast to the winds. A good example is his insistence on blaming the Northern Ireland conflict purely on religion, without bothering to try to understand the origin of that conflict.
Hitchens even managed to miss the point of the old Belfast joke about the man at the barricade during the Northern Ireland “troubles”. On approaching the barricade the man is asked whether he’s a Catholic or a Protestant. “Oh no,” he replies, “I’m an atheist.” “For sure, for sure,” comes the retort, “but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” Hitchens’s prissy comment is, “I think this shows how the obsession has rotted even the legendary local sense of humor.”1 Quite the reverse, I would suggest. The joke is an example of wry Irish humour, making the point that the Northern Ireland “sectarian” conflict was not essentially religious at all and that nobody in Northern Ireland could remain neutral, regardless of their religious affiliation. The joke uses the hypothetical example of an atheist, but it could easily have been a true story, and in fact Jews in Northern Ireland were always automatically classified as Protestants, simply because they tended to regard themselves as British rather than Irish and would therefore have been Unionists rather than Irish Republican Nationalists.
Hitchens blamed the Northern Ireland “mayhem” squarely on religion, dismissing its attribution to rival nationalisms as merely “the ostensible pretext”. Had he bothered to look into the origins of the Northern Ireland conflict he would have found that, though often expressed in religious terms, it was essentially a colonial conflict over power and land between settlers from mainland Britain (the “planters” or the “ascendancy”), who happened to be Protestant, and the original Irish inhabitants, who remained true to their ancestral Roman Catholic faith.
The fact that the conflict came to be expressed in religious terms only increased the rancour, but it was not caused by religious differences. The so-called “Good Friday Agreement” of 1998 largely put an end to the conflict by providing a political solution to this essentially political problem. Before long we were treated to the remarkable spectacle of the Rev Dr Ian Paisley, a Protestant clergyman, as First Minister of Northern Ireland, laughing and joking with his Deputy, the Catholic Irish Nationalist leader and former IRA member Martin McGuinness. So well did the pair get along that they earned the nickname the “Chuckle Brothers”. Yet in 1988, while Pope John Paul II was addressing the European Parliament (of which Dr Paisley was a member), Dr Paisley had loudly denounced him as “the Antichrist” and was hastily hustled out of the Parliament chamber.2
Hitchens’s insistence on blaming the conflict on religion is not only a good example of his vehement irrational hostility against religion in general but is also a serious logical error, which I call “The Fallacy of the Kalahari Polar Bear”, discussed in the next chapter.
Richard Dawkins
If the cult of the New Atheism has a high priest it must surely be Professor Richard Dawkins. The “Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science” has as its slogan “Reason, Science, Progress” (presumably modelled on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”!) and boldly proclaims as its “mission” — a good religious term — “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.”3
Religious Faith and the Smallpox Virus
Dawkins’s opposition to intolerance evidently does not include his own intolerance of religion. He describes religious faith as “one of the world’s worst great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”4
After supporting Christopher Hitchens’s call for Pope Benedict XVI to be arrested for “crimes against humanity”, Dawkins labelled the Pope “an enemy of humanity” at the “Protest the Pope” rally opposing the Pope’s visit to Britain in 2010.5
Dawkins is not interested in any attempt to reconcile science and religion. “Certainly,” he is reported to have said in a 1995 interview, “I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it.”6 And: “Are science and religion converging? No… To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.”7
Religion and Conflict
Does Dawkins agree with Hitchens that “religion kills”? In A Devil’s Chaplain, Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love, published in 2003, Dawkins wrote:
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a ‘they’ as opposed to a ‘we’ can be identified at all. I am not even claiming that religion is the only label by which we identify the victims of our prejudice. There’s also skin colour, language and social class. But often, as in Northern Ireland, these don’t apply and religion is the only divisive label around.8
This is a slightly less extreme position than that taken by Christopher Hitchens, who, as we have seen, blamed religion squarely for the Northern Ireland “troubles”. However, in The God Delusion, published in 2006, Dawkins moves to a position closer to that of Hitchens:
In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to ‘Nationalists’ and ‘Loyalists’ respectively. The very word ‘religions’ is bowdlerized to ‘communities’, as in ‘inter-community warfare’.9
Later on in the same book Richard Dawkins adopts a slightly different angle , but no less hostile to religion in the end: “Yes, yes, of course the troubles in Northern Ireland are political… There really are genuine grievances and injustices, and these seem to have little to do with religion; except that — and this is important and widely overlooked — without religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge.”10 No labels? Really? In fact, first of all, there was no shortage of labels. The labels such as “Unionists” or “Loyalists” for the one side and “Nationalists” or “Republicans” for the other were not euphemisms. Secondly, names — surnames or last names — are a pretty good indication of which group a person belongs to: Nationalists are likely to have Irish names, while Scottish names point to a Unionist background. Thirdly, Northern Ireland was a highly segregated society. So, though the two sides shared the same colour skin, they certainly did not share the same streets or neighbourhoods. In Belfast, Loyalists would be unlikely to venture into
let alone live on the Falls Road, a Republican neighbourhood, while the Shankill Road was a Loyalist stronghold, and there were graffiti and sometimes barricades to remind one of this.
A look back at earlier history only confirms the point that the Irish conflict was not essentially a religious conflict but a political conflict expressed in religious terms. It is also noteworthy, for example, that at least one of the leading protagonists in this conflict belonged to the “wrong” religion — Charles Parnell (1846–1891), the Irish Nationalist politician who led the Irish Parliamentary Party and was a Member of Parliament from 1875 until his death in 1891. Not only was Parnell a Protestant: he was also a wealthy landlord who was educated at English educational establishments, including Magdalene College, Cambridge. Parnell vigorously pursued Irish Home Rule and indeed even looked forward to full Irish independence from Britain. In a speech given during his triumphal tour of America in 1880 he is reported to have said:
When we have undermined English misgovernment we have paved the way for Ireland to take her place amongst the nations of the earth. And let us not forget that that is the ultimate goal at which we Irishmen aim. None of us whether we be in America or in Ireland… will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.11
The use of religious labels undoubtedly intensifies the hostility inherent in conflicts, whether “inter-community” or international. But it is always necessary to look behind the labels to determine the true origin and basis of the conflict concerned. Ireland is by no means the only place where religious labels have masked a more deep-seated social or political conflict. Even where a conflict is essentially religious it is necessary to ask why the opposing sides have the religious identities that they have.
Dawkins suggests that the term “ethnic cleansing” applied to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is “arguably a euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians”.12 In fact, however, the religious differences here are expressions of national and cultural identities which go back centuries.
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