A Response to Richard Dawkins
Dennis Prager | Oct 01, 2013
This past Friday CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the
British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on
behalf of atheism.
Asked “whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral
compass,” Dawkins responded: “The very idea that we get a moral compass from
religion is horrible.”
This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists
— that not only do we not need religion or God for morality, but we would
have a considerably more moral world without them.
This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically – that its
appeal can only be explained by a) a desire to believe it and b) an
ignorance of history.
First, the rational argument.
If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They
are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not
objective realities.
Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this. For example,
at Oxford University I debated Professor Jonathan Glover, the British
philosopher and ethicist, who said: “Dennis started by saying that I hadn’t
denied his central contention that if there isn’t a God, there is only
subjective morality. And that’s absolutely true.”
And the eminent Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty admitted that for
secular liberals such as himself, “there is no answer to the question, ‘Why
not be cruel?'”
Atheists like Dawkins who refuse to acknowledge that without God there are
only opinions about good and evil are not being intellectually honest.
None of this means that only believers in God can be good or that atheists
cannot be good. There are bad believers and there are good atheists. But
this fact is irrelevant to whether good and evil are real.
To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, “Do not
murder,” murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is
wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses.
If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was
right; the history of slavery throughout the world was right; and
clitoridectomies and honor killings are right in various Muslims societies.
So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?
Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?
My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins’s reason does. But, again,
so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church’s
teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing
innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do
whatever they wanted.
In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral
behavior. When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses.
That’s why we have the word “rationalize” — to use reason to argue for what
is wrong.
What would reason argue to a non-Jew asked by Jews to hide them when the
penalty for hiding a Jew was death? It would argue not to hide those Jews.
In that regard, let’s go to the empirical argument.
Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology
at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the
most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book
was the product of the Oliners’ lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of
Jews during the Holocaust.
The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had
no religious agenda.
I asked Samuel Oliner, “Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews
during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could
knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you,
would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish
artist or a Polish priest?”
Without hesitation, he said, “a Polish priest.” And his wife immediately
added, “I would prefer a Polish nun.”
That alone should be enough to negate the pernicious nonsense that God is
not only unnecessary for a moral world, but is detrimental to one.
But if that isn’t enough, how about the record of the godless 20th century,
the cruelest, bloodiest, most murderous century on record? Every genocide of
the last century — except for the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians and
the Pakistani mass murder of Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was
committed by a secular anti-Jewish and anti-Christian regime. And as the two
exceptions were Muslim, they are not relevant to my argument. I am arguing
for the God and Bible of Judeo-Christian religions.
Perhaps the most powerful proof of the moral decay that follows the death of
God is the Western university and its secular intellectuals. Their moral
record has been loathsome. Nowhere were Stalin and Mao as venerated as they
were at the most anti-religious and secular institutions in Western society,
the universities. Nowhere in the West today is anti-Americanism and
Israel-hatred as widespread as it is at universities. And Princeton
University awarded its first tenured professorship in bioethics to Peter
Singer, an atheist who has argued, among other things, that that “the life
of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee”
and that bestiality is not immoral.
Dawkins and his supporters have a right to their atheism. They do not have a
right to intellectual dishonesty about atheism.
I have debated the best known atheists, including the late Christopher
Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss (“A Universe from Nothing”) and Daniel
Dennett. Only Richard Dawkins has refused to come on my radio show.
Dennis Prager’s latest book, “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs
American Values to Triumph,” was published April 24 by HarperCollins. He is
a nationally syndicated radio show host and creator of PragerUniversity.Com.
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