The Trouble With Richard: A Common Man’s POV of Richard Dawkins

Author’s Note: I have taken the liberty of referring to God as “He,” the most preposterous assumption in human history. 

One might not think so, given all the cerebral works on the subject, but there are no experts on atheism. For many, its adoption is largely instinctive, or arrived at with a modicum of common sense. Atheism is after all but a form of denial and the common man can be as emphatic about that as the eggheads. He may not be as clever as they, but his freedom from intellectual baggage renders him more likely to stick to the point.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins debunks the church as though it had something to do with whether or not God exists. It doesn’t. The church, being a human creation, is a classic red herring in all this. One sees Dawkins’ dilemma, of course. Without the church to devour, what meat is left for the atheist? Barely enough to fill an essay, let alone a book. Thus The God Delusion is a collection of scholarly digressions that contains passages of such abstruseness as fly over the head of the common man.

He talks, for example, of “the anthropic principle” and “non-overlapping magisteria.” Come again? Surely the advocacy of atheism has no need of this gobbledygook. But that is too harsh. While the common man scratches his head, finer minds will enjoy these convolutions as meat and drink, and doubtless find reason therein. But for me they are no substitute for tight argument.

I believe too that the assault on the church by Dawkins and other leading atheists has been woefully off-target. It has also been over-assertive, given that no one can be certain of the truth. In any case, atheists should be thinking on a higher plane, unfettered by earthly distractions. They should be examining God Himself, head-on, and what He has done for us, if anything.

For myself, I am loath to see our places of worship further diminished through failing support, for they have brought, and continue to bring, solace and companionship to millions. Organized religion serves a natural need for so many. Long live the church, I say, notwithstanding its questionable raison d’être.

Yes, one wishes Dawkins had tackled the concept of God rather than needlessly denigrating churches. His invocation of natural selection is hardly relevant either. Though he rightly observes that evolution has no need of God, it is no argument against God’s existence. Why should natural selection and God be incompatible? It may not be the way our biblical God would have handled matters, but a less authoritarian god might well have been happy with the evolutionary process, and even claimed credit for its design (greater achievements have been claimed for Him).

To be convincing, atheism should have roots in some kind of evidence, albeit circumstantial. Easier said than done, of course, given His failure to reveal Himself. Our only evidence is in human experience and a plausible interpretation of that experience, i.e., what has been our relationship with God in practical terms? Has His love of humanity shone through despite its continual suffering?

Marking God’s performance isn’t easy, for tragic events leave a deeper impression than the good. But the fact of human suffering over the millennia is beyond dispute, with its near-constant war, poverty, and disease. These do not point definitively to a godless world, but they do make it highly improbable.

Surprisingly, the evidence of human and animal suffering is not central to Richard Dawkins’s atheism, though when he speaks of it, he is admirably inclusive of animals and the daily perils they face.

Let’s take an example of God’s apparent indifference to human suffering. The Battle of Passchendaele, a major World War I campaign, was fought in an era when probably most people prayed. The hundreds of thousands of soldiers who perished there would have prayed at some stage of the battle, as would their families back home. Did God nonetheless allow those soldiers to die by the thousands in the most miserable circumstances imaginable? Being ubiquitous, He would have watched them die as the slaughter continued unabated. So much for a caring God.

Just today I read of genocide in the Sudan, where millions have been displaced and thousands slaughtered on racial grounds. How has this omniscient and omnipotent being responded? With silence and cold neglect.

Individual cases of His laissez-faire attitude toward our misfortunes are numberless. Children are struck down by incurable illnesses, requiring constant care for the rest of their lives. Good people suffer life-changing accidents. But, you might ask, might not even a kindly God permit a degree of suffering? After all, the vicissitudes of life give it substance and meaning. Perhaps, but surely not the plagues, the massacres, the religious and political persecutions, the death of innocents. We cannot dismiss these as unfortunate interludes in an essentially good world. They cause too much pain to too many people. How many times must these horrors come round again, and they will, before He softens the blow? His consistent failure to do so is, in my view, the only clue we have to His non- existence. If He really is there, He is guilty of cruel neglect.

There is another intuitive reason to suspect that God is a human invention: His convenient elusiveness. Why would He choose to remain silent and hidden? There seems no reason, based in love at least, why He shouldn’t manifest Himself in some way. Is He too grand to give some public sign of his existence? No message has ever been received that was unequivocally from God; nor is there likely to be. God needs to be imagined, with the result that faith in Him relies on His being unseen and unheard.

A feat attributed to God is his creation of the universe. It is an absurd notion. There is something of the mad professor about it. How long did He deliberate over His plan? Did He make a decision one day, such as we humans make? And what was the purpose of creating trillions of planets that seem to serve no purpose? Was it done for the hell of it? Did even He not know how it would turn out? Did He care? Clearly the creation of life wasn’t a factor, and certainly not human life. That was eons away. And where did this God come from at a time when nothing else existed? And if He had indeed created the universe, on an incomprehensible scale remember, is it likely he would set Himself up as a father figure for us on our insignificant planet? The imagination and hubris of men explain so much of how the fiction of God came into being.

Neither the religious nor the scientific version of creation adds up. But isn’t the Big Bang theory a credible explanation of creation for atheists? That theory is too complex for this common man to comprehend, but at the same time seemingly simplistic. How can it possibly explain the existence of trillions of planets? Some singularity! I can only suggest that there were a number of lesser bangs and that the bang in our neck of the woods misled scientists into overstating their significance. I know it is impertinent of the common man to question scientific theory, but common sense sometimes refuses to be trampled on.

There is one mystery we shall never solve. If there is no God, and no creation, what is behind the existence of the universe? How and why is anything here? It is difficult for an atheist to accept any kind of supreme being, but even an eternal universe, with no creation, must have some sort of supernatural background.

Perhaps we should leave it at that, a mystery that transcends science— indeed, transcends everything. It is a subject for speculation that Dr. Dawkins, as a biologist, rightly considers out of his orbit. But it is an enigma that will always perplex enquiring minds. Unfortunately, if they ever do come up with an explanation, it is unlikely to be intelligible to the common man, who’s happy anyway with “The universe just is.”

Atheists have a good deal of circumstantial evidence on their side that would probably persuade a jury, beyond all reasonable doubt, that God, a caring God at least, does not exist. I would love to be proved wrong by some magnanimous act that is manifestly His. In that event, I would pass the rest of the day, nay, the rest of my life, in servile prayer, in common with billions all over the world. But with the best will in the world I must accept that if He is there, He cares nothing for us. If goodness is an essential attribute of God, we live in a godless world. Though I respect, even envy, those of faith, for at least they feel sure about something, I am sure they are mistaken. For me, the path of reason leads only to non-belief.