The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  This jihadi ideology was not returning to the “fundamental” ideas of Islam, even though Qutb in particular based his revolutionary program on a distorted version of the life of Muhammad. He was preaching an Islamic liberation theology similar to that adopted by Catholics fighting brutal regimes in Latin America. Because God alone was sovereign, no Muslim was obliged to obey any ruler who contravened the Qur’anic demand for justice and equity. In rather the same way, when the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89) declared that only a faqih, a cleric versed in Islamic jurisprudence, should be head of state, he was breaking with centuries of Shiite tradition, which since the eighth century had separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle. It was as shocking to some Shiite sensibilities as if the pope should abolish the Mass. But after decades of secularism as interpreted by the shahs, Khomeini believed that this was the only possible way forward. Khomeini also preached a modern third-world theology of liberation. Islam, he declared, was “the religion of militant individuals who are committed to freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”14

  Many forms of what we call “fundamentalism” should be seen as essentially political discourse—a religiously articulated form of nationalism or ethnicity. This is clearly true of Zionist fundamentalism in Israel, where extremists have advocated the forcible deportation of Arabs and the illegal settlement of territories occupied during the 1967 war. On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, shot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; and on November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a religious Zionist, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords. Islamic fundamentalism is also politically motivated. The Palestinian party Hamas began as a resistance movement, and developed only after the secular policies of Yassir Arafat and his party, Fatah, appeared to have become both ineffective and corrupt. Hamas’s reprehensible killing of Israeli civilians is politically rather than religiously inspired, and its goals are limited. Hamas is not attempting to force the entire world to submit to Islam, has no global outreach, and targets only Israelis. Any military occupation is likely to breed resistance, and when an occupation has lasted for over forty years, this resistance is likely to take a violent form.

  Critics of Islam believe that the cult of murderous martyrdom is endemic in the religion itself. This is not the case. Apart from the brief incident of the so-called assassin movement at the time of the Crusades—for which the Ismaili sect responsible was universally reviled in the Muslim world—it has not been a feature of Islamic history until modern times. The American scholar Robert Pape has made a careful study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, including the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11, 2001, and concluded:

  Overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka, to Chechnya to Kashmir, to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—more than 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its major objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.15

  Osama Bin Laden, for example, cited the presence of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land high on his list of complaints against the West.

  Terrorism undoubtedly threatens our global security, but we need accurate intelligence that takes all the evidence into account. It will not help to utter sweeping and ill-founded condemnations of “Islam.” In a recent Gallup poll, only 7 percent of the Muslims interviewed in thirty-five countries believed that the 9/11 attacks were justified. They had no intention of committing such an atrocity themselves, but they believed that Western foreign policy had been largely responsible for these heinous actions. Their reasoning was entirely political: they cited such ongoing problems as Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Western interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. But the majority of Muslims who condemned the attacks all gave religious reasons, quoting, for example, the Qur’anic verse that states that the taking of a single life is equivalent to the destruction of the entire world.16

  Since 9/11, Western politicians have assumed that Muslims hate “our way of life, our democracy, freedom, and success.” But when asked what they most admired about the West, the politically radicalized and the moderates both listed Western technology; the Western ethic of hard work, personal responsibility, and the rule of law; as well as Western democracy, respect for human rights, freedom of speech, and gender equality. And, interestingly, a significantly higher percentage of the politically radicalized (50 percent versus 35 percent of moderates) replied that “moving toward greater governmental democracy would foster progress in the Arab/Muslim world.”17 Finally, when asked what they resented most about the West, its “disrespect for Islam” ranked high on the list of both the politically radicalized and the moderates. Most see the West as inherently intolerant: only 12 percent of radicals and 17 percent of moderates associated “respecting Islamic values” with Western nations. What could Muslims do to improve relations with the West? Again, among the top responses from both radicals and the moderates was “improve the presentation of Islam to the West, present Islamic values in a positive manner.”18 There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today; if the 7 percent (91 million) of the politically radicalized continue to feel politically dominated, occupied, and culturally and religiously disrespected, the West will have little chance of changing their hearts and minds.19 Blaming Islam is a simple but counterproductive answer; it is far less challenging than examining the political issues and grievances that resonate in so much of the Muslim world.

  A form of secular fundamentalism has recently developed in the Western world that in style and strategy is similar to the atheism of Vogt, Buchner, and Haeckel. While physicists have felt comfortable with the unknowing that seems to be an essential component of intellectual advance, some biologists, whose discipline has not yet experienced a major reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth and some, abandoning the agnostic restraint of Darwin and Huxley, have started to preach a militant form of atheism. In 1972, the French biochemist Jacques Monod (1910–76), Nobel Prize winner and professor of molecular biology at the College de France, published Chance and Necessity, which argued for the absolute incompatibility of theism and evolutionary theory. Change is the result of chance and is propagated by necessity. It is therefore impossible to speak of purpose and design in the universe: we must accept the fact that we humans have come into being by accident; that there is no benign Creator, no divine Friend that shapes our lives and values; and that we are alone in the immense and impersonal cosmos. Like Clifford, Monod maintained that it was not only intellectually but also morally wrong to accept any ideas that were not scientifically verifiable. But he admitted that there was no way of proving that this ideal of objectivity was in fact true: it was an ideal that was essentially arbitrary, a claim for which there was insufficient evidence.20 He thus tacitly admitted that even the scientific quest began with an act of faith.

  Monod’s ideas were not always accessible to those not steeped in French culture, and some of the first popular expositions of the implications of evolution in the English-speaking world were written, with great brilliance and clarity, by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he explained that while Paley’s argument for an Intelligent Designer had been perfectly acceptable in the early nineteenth century, Darwin had shown that the appearance of design occurred quite naturally in the process of evolutionary development. The “Blind Watchmaker” was natural selection, a blind, purposeless process that could not plan intelligently; nor could it deliberately produce the “contrivance” that Paley had found in nature. For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequenc
e of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a “misfiring of something useful”;21 it is a kind of virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

  Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists”—Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist—religion is the cause of all the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.”22 They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.

  But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could work only with natural explanations. Gould had no religious ax to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians— Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky—had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

  Gould also revived, in new form, the ancient distinction and complementarity of mythos and logos in what he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). A “magisterium,” he explained, was “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”23 Religion and science were separate magisteria and should not encroach on each other’s domain:

  The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)? The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry.24

  The idea of an inherent conflict between religion and science was false. They were two distinct magisteria that “hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life; and … remain logically distinct and fully separate in lines of inquiry.”25

  But the new atheists will have none of this, and in his somewhat immoderate way, Dawkins denounces Gould as a quisling. They adhere to a hard-line form of scientific naturalism that mirrors the fundamentalism on which they base their critique: atheism is always a rejection of and parasitically dependent on a particular form of theism. The work of the new atheists has been exhaustively criticized, notably by John F. Haught, Alister McGrath, and John Cornwell.26 Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of the Higher Criticism. Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually “written by God.”27 Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent upon a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falsity of Christianity: “Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that.”28 Like Protestant fundamentalists, Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with “role models,” which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate.29 He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins’s only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.

  It is not surprising that Dawkins is incensed with American creationists who are campaigning against the teaching of evolution, and the proponents of a new, quasi-scientific philosophy that has tried to revive the theory of intelligent design (ID). These include Philip E. Johnson, professor of law at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial (1991); the biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box (1996); and the philosopher William Dembski, author of The Design Inference (1998). These theists do not all posit God as the Designer, but they do argue that ID is a viable alternative to Darwinism and cite a supernatural agency in creation as if it were scientific evidence. But as Dennett points out, the ID theorists have not devised any experiments or made any empirical observations that challenge modern evolutionary thinking. ID, he concludes, is therefore not science.30 ID is also theologically incorrect to make scientific statements. Mythos and logos have different fields of competence, and, as we have seen, when they are confused you have bad science and inadequate religion. But while Dawkins’s irritation with creationists and ID theorists is understandable, he is not correct to assume that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical of either Christianity or religion as a whole.

  This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundamentalist mentality. It is also essential to the critique of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris to present fundamentalism as the focal core of the three monotheisms. They have an extremely literalist notion of God. For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.”31 Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term” God.32 He is also wrong to claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, that is, a conceptual framework for bringing intelligibility to a series of experiments and observations.33 It was only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept.

  The new atheists all equate faith with mindless credulity. Harris wrote The End of Faith immediately after 9/11, insisting that the only way to rid our world of terrorism was to abolish all faith. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as “Belief without Evidence,”34 an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse “faith” with “belief” (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness. But like other atheists and agnostics before him, Harris goes on to declare that faith is the root of all evil. A belief might seem innocent enough, but once you have blindly accepted the dogma that Jesus “can be eaten in the form of a cracker,”35 you have made a space in your mind for other monstrous fictions: that God desires the destruction of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or the 9/11 massacres. Everybody must stop believing in anything that cannot be verified by the empirical methods of science. It is not enough to get rid of extremists, fundamentalists, and terrorists. “Moderate” believers are equally guilty of the “inherently dangerous” crime of faith and must share responsibility for the terrorist atrocities.36

  Our civic toleration of faith must therefore be eliminated. “As long as we respect the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is real faith,” Dawkins insists, “it is hard to withhold respect for Usama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” The obvious and self-evident alternativ
e is to “abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith,” because “the teachings of ‘moderate religion,’ though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.”37 This rejection of the Enlightenment principle of toleration is new. It is, surely, itself extremist. “The very idea of religious tolerance,” Harris maintains, “is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”38 In this lack of tolerance, they are again at one with the religious fundamentalists, even though they must be aware that the absence of respect for difference has led to some of the worst atrocities in modern times. It is hard to hear talk of elimination without recalling the Nazi camp and the Gulag.

  As its critics have already pointed out, there is an inherent contradiction in the new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of “evidence” and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically. As Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins’s hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though it had not been definitively verified. Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth—a claim that Hume or Kant would have found questionable.