Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.
As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million dead), the Nazi holocaust (6 million dead), the rape of Nanking (300,000 dead) the war in Korea (2.8 million dead), the cultural revolution in China (40 million dead), post-war Vietnam (430,000 dead), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million dead), the Rwandan genocide (750,000 dead).
These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with theistic religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs any of the murders committed in the name of God.
Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be laid to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.
Even the Spanish Inquisition, a church-sponsored attempt to eradicate heresy in the 15th through the early 19th centuries, was only responsible for the deaths of the relatively small number of about 3000 people or roughly 11 people per year.
Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.
Because, he argues, there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm.
To each of these, however, the question needs to be put: "Why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.
Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist (i.e. the spirit of the age) is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.
He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women."
What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which may certainly be seen as a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.
"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God?
This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us.
The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and survival of the fittest and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God. Nothing else has the moral authority to impose moral duties or the power to hold us accountable to them.
Certainly, a long chain of blind, impersonal, purposeless accidental mutations in our genes has no authority to impose duties nor the power to hold us accountable.
A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not really influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, he avers, their deeds were another.
This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview.
The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did as they slaughtered millions in the 20th century was morally wrong. Tragic? Yes. Unfortunate? Yes. Evil? No, for on atheism there is no such thing as moral evil.
Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of a belief?" he asks.
But this question is a diversion. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay hundreds of thousands of Christian clergy and laypersons and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century.
If atheism is merely the absence of a belief, as Dawkins insists, why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because for the Marxists atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system, and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.
Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles, but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion became a best-seller and made him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle thus far in this century.