Reposted from:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2267301,00.html

Simon Jenkins replies to John Gray's challenge to Dawkins et al

How does an atheist confront Easter in the post-Dawkins age? He has, let us say, granted religion its plea for respect. He lives and lets believe, and no longer rants from the pulpit in the style of the master, calling down the fire and brimstone of rationalism on the congregation below.

Most religions are smart enough to use spring as a metaphor for reincarnation. Birds sing, eggs hatch, buds burst into life and, if you like, God is love. Only a misanthrope would deny the stirring of springtime juices and not dream of resurrection. Can atheism and religion find some accommodation at Easter?

I am comfortable with the atheist stall set out by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and others. I find the intellectual chase exhilarating, but as the huntsmen run the stag to earth what Dawkins calls my "cultural hard-wiring" holds me back from the coup de grace. Christianity is a core component of my civilisation, as astrology has been to others. The demise of its specific beliefs among most clear-thinking people in no way lessens my admiration for the Sermon on the Mount or my respect for its "placebo" value for millions of people.

In such a generous spirit I read last week's assault on Dawkins and Co on these pages by John Gray. It made me realise just how bad-tempered the death-of-god debate has become. Gray's contribution to moral philosophy is rightly to assert that human history is too complicated to admit glib certainties. In Black Mass, his recent attack on liberal utopias, Gray calls for "a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above everything else". Hence his pessimistic realism, an acceptance that the world is and always will be awash in horror and superstition. Atheism, like the science on which it is based, is just another faith, another manifestation of his aversion to "catastrophic optimism".

Gray's attack on Dawkins is anything but disciplined. He constantly attacks "evangelical" atheism, "zealous" atheism and "fundamentalist" atheism without quite engaging with atheism. Indeed much of Gray's assault is on newly militant atheism's modus operandi, its shrill propagandising, rather than its content. This is Tony Blair's trick (in opposing a "naïve, outdated socialism") of using qualifiers to get inconvenient nouns off the hook.

Dawkins and Co are criticised for believing that "the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics". Gray points out that slavery has not yet been eradicated and that Nazism and communism were very bad, and many atheists "fail to mention" this fact. Even the Taliban are cited to prove that secularism is in retreat. Gray seems to regard human society as in a steady state of original sin, and thus any idea of "the advance of science is itself an article of faith".

Few would agree with Gray that humankind has not evolved - or "progressed" - from primitivism to relative civility over the aeons of life on earth. The fact that much science is bogus and has been abused by politics does not discredit the scientific method any more than it validates religion. All can play the history game.

This is just point scoring. I would leave both religion and atheism out of the evolutionary account, which Darwinism can handle on its own. But this is the essence of Dawkins's case. Gray says that religion is like sex in "the impossibility of its suppression". But I am not interested in suppression. It is perfectly reasonable to forecast that religion might be "evolved out" of human understanding, as science explains each new phenomenon pleaded in aid by religion or, at least, convinces people that such explanation might one day be possible.

The wilder shores of theology are already reductionist, dabbling in social anthropology and refining such terms as god, soul and immortality. Religion has itself evolved from blood sacrifice to the subtleties of the ontological "god". For increasing numbers of people this reductionism slithers into "agnosticism". Religion is a mental appendix, outdated but not yet extinct (and sometimes sorely inflamed).

Faith is to Gray one of the many complex ingredients in the chop suey of his cosmos, a manifestation of "the incomprehensibility of the divine". When he hears Dawkins ranting he duly lumps atheism into the same category as "an ersatz religion", in its case guilty of blind faith in the myth of progress.

I do not regard atheism as a faith, and Dawkins goes to some lengths in The God Delusion to rebut this "guilt by association". Atheism does not accept the existence of a supernatural god, but this is not an act of faith. It applies the normal tests of proof to the claims of others. Were religion merely "faith" it would indeed be incomprehensible. The trouble starts when it lays proprietary claim to normal words such as truth, goodness, beauty, virgin birth, resurrection and salvation, and redefines them to its own ends.

Words must carry agreed meanings if humans are to live happily together. Atheism need not be zealous, evangelical or fundamental. It need not even subscribe to Gray's derided belief in progress. It is sceptical in the proper sense, courteous, tolerant, questioning and deductive.

But the fact that we cannot explain everything about us - even the joys of spring - has absolutely no bearing on the existence of a god. I cannot argue with a man who "believes" the Earth to be flat. Most people regard the idea as absurd unless the word flat is redefined to mean round. I feel the same about Easter's "resurrection of the dead".

The most lively of Dawkins's critics is the former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, an apostle of what Dawkins would call the "much-needed gap" explanation of God - dismissed by Dawkins as "the mother of all burkas". In his writing on aesthetics Harries claims to find God in such concepts as beauty and artistic creativity. A sign of His handiwork is humanity's eternal assault on the mountains of the sublime.

I do not need God to help me wonder. I am patient and will, if need be, await the contribution of genetics and neurology to our understanding of art. If Harries claims to have found God in Michelangelo's studio I am happy for him. But I protest that any sensitive atheist can enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of what Christians call Eastertide. He can exult at Haydn's Creation and chase the painted egg across the lawn without the prop of an organised, or disorganised, religion.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html