Richard Dawkins and the God Delusion

Yesterday, I read part of Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. The idea of a transcendant God who is both all-powerful and all-loving often seems indefensible. Cruelty is inherent in nature, as even a child who watches nature programs realizes, and it is impossible not to wonder why an omnipotent God made a universe that is not only cruel but inherently and necessarily cruel--and of course, we humans far outstrip the lower animals in a capacity for cruelty. These considerations cause me to doubt the traditional, theistic concepts of God; nevertheless, there are many aspects of Dawkin's ideas that I find untenable.

The first, to which this post is devoted,  is his belief that evil done in the name of religion is in fact caused by religion. To bolster his point, he cites a study performed by an Israeli psychologist. In this study, he presented Israeli school children with the passage about Joshua capturing the town of Jericho. After conquering the town, the Bible records that Joshua slew all of the inhabitants, including women and children, and also killed the animals. This psychologist asked whether Joshua had acted correctly and gave the children a choice of three answers: that Joshua was entirely correct, that he was partially correct, and that he was totally incorrect. Around 60% of the children answered that Joshua's actions had been totally correct, while 6% responded that he had been partially correct.  The remaining third of the children answered that Joshua had been totally incorrect.

Children often cited religious justifications for their approval of Joshua's actions.  Fewer children who disapproved of the action cited religious justifications but among those who did, they tended to criticize Joshua for destroying animals and property that the Israelites could have used themselves.

When the psychologist gave children copies of a text that was identical to the first except that "Joshua" had been changed to "General Lin" and the "Israelites" had been changed to the Chinese, 75% of the children disapproved of slaughtering them. In other words, the rates of approval and disapproval were totally reversed. Dawkins cites this as proof that religious attitudes lead people to at least condone, if not promote, cruelty.

At this point, I confess to being astonished that a biologist of Dawkin's stature could have ignored a painfully obvious issue: this experiment has confounded religion and ethnicity.  In the first text, children are asked to evaluate the actions of someone who is a member both of their own ethnic group and of their own religion. In the second text, children are asked to evaluate the actions of someone who is a member of both a different ethnic group and a different religion.

If Dawkins had wanted to assess the effects of religion alone, he would not have cited this study.  Instead, he would have looked for research in which people were asked to judge the morality of actions committed against people of their own ethnic group but of a different religion or against their co-religionists who have a different ethnicity.

In the Israeli context, perhaps an experiment should have compared attitudes toward Israeli Jews who have abandoned Judaism to embrace Buddhism and, let's say, a group of African-America converts to Judaism. In this way, the effects of religion and ethnicity would be considered separately.


The American experience of slavery provides a case study of this point. The majority of American slaveholders were probably Protestant Christians, as were the majority of slaves. Yes, slaveholders often quoted the Bible to justify slavery, yet seemingly no one thought of permanently enslaving Catholics of English ancestry who lived in the U.S. Indeed, the idea seems incomprehensible. In other words, slaveholders preferred to enslave ethnically different co-religionists rather than enslave ethnically similar people who held a different religion--in spite of the fact that anti-Catholic feelings among Protestants was quite strong and remains strong among many Fundamentalist Christians to this day.

As an additional example, one need only look at the treatment of Jews in America. Yes, there has been real discrimination--think of all those "restricted clientele" hotels and the plethora of anti-Semitic websites today--but Jews have been far better treated in the U.S. than blacks, in spite of the fact that Jews by definition reject Jesus while blacks are among the most Christian people in the nation.

I propose a theory: that when given a choice of two or more groups to oppress, the powerful group will always choose to oppress the group that is the most genetically different from its own, regardless of what religion that genetically different group has. Furthermore, I suggest that enduring religious conflicts exist primarily when there are also ethnic differences. In Northern Ireland, the two warring groups possess not only different religions but different ethnicities: the Protestants are Scots-Irish and the Catholics are Irish. One might also point out that in the Republic of Ireland, Catholics and Protestants usually get along rather well and Protestants have played an important role in Irish political movements.


One need only recall the genocide in the Ukraine, led by self-proclaimed atheists who were of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups, to understand the point I am making.  When critics of Dawkins point out that tens of millions have been killed by atheistic systems of government, Dawkins claims that this proves his point: that blind obedience to an ideology is always evil.  In fact, this is not the point he has been making.  He has merely shifted his point in response to this very valid criticism and he knows it. Most of his arguments have not been about irrationality per se but about belief in a deity. If evil can occur in the absence of religion, it shows that belief in an external God is in fact NOT the essential cause. 


I cannot help but think of the Iraq war--a war that so far has resulted in over one million excess Iraqi deaths, in addition to all the previous deaths caused by more than a decade of sanctions. Yes, Bush is a fundamentalist Christian but many of the strongest proponents of the war are not noticably religious people. The Washington Post, a bastion of secularism, editorialized in favor of the war, as did the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the WSJ was so pro-war that critics nicknamed it the War Street Journal. The New York Times, a paper with a distinctly non-religious slant, published those disgraceful WMD stories. Both senators from New York at the time--Clinton and Schumer--and both senators from Connecticut--Dodd and Lieberman--voted for the war. Connecticut, of course, is one of the most liberal states in the nation and New England has one of the lowest rates of church attendance in the country. With the exception of Lieberman, none of the senators was considered over-devout.

On the other hand, senators in the Great Lakes States, a place far more traditional than NY or Connecticut--voted against the war. Remember that the major proponents of war in the Department of Defense--Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith--are apparently totally secular.

Comparing support for the war in various communities, one notes that according to a poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee shortly before the war started, 59% of the Jewish community--a largely secular, intellectual, and culturally sophisticated group--supported the war in the same proportion as Americans generally, while African-Americans, a deeply religious community--opposed the war by 80%.  (As an aside, let me note that Jews were no more likely to support the war than Americans in general. In this context, the dividing line was not religion but ethnicity, as white and African-Americans have similar theological views but vastly different social experiences. The war was also opposed by the US Council of Catholic Bishops and nearly all mainline, non-fundamentalist Protestant denominations. Taken as a whole, religiosity itself was not always connected to support for this war crime.

Still, in spite of the fact that I find Dawkins arguments about religion to be hopelessly muddled, I have to concede that he has a point. Many of the cruelest, most brutal activities in history are carried out by people who call themselves religious.  Church goers are more likely to support torture than the secular. Still,the fact that support for war and torture correlate with religious belief does not mean that religious belief causes these proclivities.

There is research showing that traditionalism--a belief in strict rules and harsh punishments for violators of them--is at least partly genetic.  These studies indicate that 50% of the difference among people on this measure is due to genetics. What remains to be seen is whether or not people who rank high on measures of traditionalism are the same people to be attracted to fundamentalist religions. If so, the evils linked to religion are not caused by religion itself but merely co-occur with it.  One can assume that tradionalists could be attracted to any sort of regimented system like communism as well.

Since there is no ethical research on human beings that could ever establish this point--or its contrary--we are left with conjecture.  Still, I believe that Dawkin's arguments about the evil of religion are less nuanced than they would have to be to adequately explain the very real link between religion and human cruelty.
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