The failure of atheism

We need models to guide us in just about every social encounter. A problem with atheism starts in the atheist denial of the historical impulse of all peoples to trust one another, trust based on the imagination of social models of trusting. We need laws. We need a reference to an authority. Where are they to be found if not first in someone's imagination? The authors of the code of Hammurabi, the Mosaic Commandments, the Greek Polis, the Roman Senate, the Qu'ran, the Bhagavad Gita, Divine Monarchy, Papal Bulls, Luther's Theses, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence,first imagine the language that appeals to them. They and others apply the terms to real observations, real needs. Societies are based on trust in the meaning of the terms of communication between its members.

Trust is the basis of faith, and we cannot find another source of organized society based in anything but faith in a Surpreme Authority, the dimensions and qualities of which are imaginary. So this is a problem for "militant atheists" like Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion, 2009). There is no escaping either faith or the imagination for the rational materialist exponent, the atheist.

Dawkins rails against religion because all religions promote their beliefs, some of them violently, as his publisher explains in " the irrationallity of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society from the Crusades to 9/11. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

"Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East-- or Middle America.-- From publisher description of The God Delusion."

But Dawkins plays an intellectual shell game with his readers. Attacking religious institutions and beliefs, he artfully deflects us from the ubiquity of the irrational beliefs underlying other human organizations besides religion: he claims, for instance, to oppose class distinctions and the monarchy under which he professes to be a loyal subject. The contradiction between his life and his politics, in his professed antipathy to anything unscientific in human culture, appears to escape him. Laws, ethical concepts, financial instruments of exchange in trade, artistic innovations, specific cultural ideas applied to social organizations such as the family----all have an irrational unscientific material basis. We can neither prove or disprove in any laboratory experiment that monogamy historically trumps polygamy. Marriage institutions express a culturally arbitrary choice, irrational,an imaginative creation, much like religions.

The question that Dawkins and other atheists need to ask: Why must we arbitrarily create social institutions based on trust among people, a trust that cannot either be proved or disproved until the trust is broken?

We all were once children with a delighted belief in fictions, such as Santa Claus, the Devil, and the Easter Bunny. Children seem to need irrational beliefs. And people who revere their childhood, who delight in children, promote that irrational belief because of the marketing rule that the best sales persons are those who believe in their products.

Dawkins believes in atheism in the same way that a spirtualist believes in spirits. Neither he nor the spiritualist can escape an arbitrary point of origin in history. Each starts somewhere that no one can replicate in history. Dawkins may well be able to prove when he stopped attending a church. But when did Dawkins first doubt the existence or the meaning of God? Is he sure? Can he prove when? Whatever he claims is arbitrary, the zero point which he can count years and day to the present. And what is zero but an imaginary start anywhere. We accept the starting point as real, for practical purposes of measuring everything. But all zero points are based in faith that it actually means what it means: where nothing comes before it.

The other problem of atheists arises from the fact that most people are much like Dawkins, living in hypocrisy. For most people ignore most of the tenets of religious injunctions when it suits them to do so. In that respect, they resemble Dawkins who have only faith to guide him when he makes a purchase for an automobile using a plastic card, or a briefcase full of pounds or euros. Faith makes possible all civilizations. The source of faith that we apply to financial transactions, treaties, communication of any kind to others, law, marriage and politics originates in historical expressions of religious institutions. Destroy those institutions and we have no yardstick by which to measure the quality of our social behavior, or the direction of our lives. Religions, like the very intelligence we have that separates us from other animals, like atheism, can be a tool or a weapon used for good or wrong. And we are bound to believe in something based on faith that others understand us in the same way that we understand ourselves.