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British evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has regrets about describing himself as a “cultural Christian” last year in an interview. “I imprudently said I was a ‘cultural Christian,’ and I haven’t heard the end of it,” wrote Dawkins in a recent piece for The Spectator.
Though standing by his earlier comments—in which he expressed appreciation for certain cultural elements of the Christian tradition—he quickly added: “but none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.” Moreover, Dawkins labels the “God-shaped hole” thesis—which posits that absent organized religion, society will descend into moral chaos—“patronizing” and “insulting” to humanity.
In recent years, Dawkins has joined a cadre of other public intellectuals who are causes célèbres for their repudiation of various ideological expressions of the Left. Dawkins, for example, has called trans ideologies “a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence,” which “denies scientific reality,” “mercilessly persecutes heretics,” and “abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind.” Jordan Peterson made a name (and a career) for himself by criticizing a Canadian law that prohibited discrimination against gender identity and expression. Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying gained notoriety for resisting woke policies at Evergreen State College. Brown University economist Glenn Loury returned to the Right after decades away, attacking Black Lives Matter and other racial grievance movements.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Yet as much as conservatives (and Christians) may enjoy common cause with such prominent figures, Dawkins’ recent comments are a sobering reminder of the limits of making political alliances with those subscribing to worldviews antithetical to the Faith. Brilliant of a scientist as Dawkins may be, he is no friend to Christianity, calling religious faith “one of the world’s great evils.” And as such Christian thinkers as Ed Feser and David Hart have observed, his criticisms of Christianity are typically little more than puerile, bad-faith caricatures.
Dawkins is perhaps in a class of his own when it comes to his relationship with Christianity. Peterson, in contrast, though not exactly a person of faith, is at least sympathetic to the Bible and Christianity, as evidenced by his recent book applying his now-famous psychoanalytic approach to interpreting the Old Testament. Though his wife recently entered the Church, Peterson told EWTN he was “unlikely” to convert. And having read and reviewed Peterson’s book, I confess I’m not sure he even believes in God, at least not in the theistic sense.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m very grateful for Peterson leveraging his incredible rhetorical gifts to counter the madness of sexual and racial ideologues who, in their seemingly limitless desire to foster victim narratives and grievances, would remake the world into a dystopian nightmare far worse than the “white supremacist” and “patriarchal” Western civilization they aim to supplant. And as much as Dawkins desires to attack the trans movement for its errant attempts to refashion the very idea of male and female, irreparably damaging thousands if not millions of people in the process, more power to him. As much as Dawkins desires to attack the trans movement for its errant attempts to refashion the very idea of male and female, irreparably damaging thousands if not millions of people in the process, more power to him.Tweet This
But we should remember that many of our allies originating from the secular, liberal academy embrace principles and premises demonstrably wrong and irreconcilable with our Catholic Faith. Anyone subscribing to materialism (the rejection of any transcendent reality) or promoting freedom of speech or personal self-realization as the highest goods is inhabiting the same philosophical worldview as our shared political enemies. Thus, whatever assistance they may offer in the battle against the evils of transgenderism or racial grievance are of little help in the broader war to re-foreground the highest, most important natural goods (e.g., virtue, friendship) and supernatural goods (e.g., grace, communion with God).
For many such secular personalities, their alliance with us is ad hoc: for them, woke sexual and racial ideologies are bad not because they inhibit man from achieving his telos as one enjoying the imago Dei but because they obstruct the false individualistic and materialist promises of modernity. This is why we hear far less from many of them regarding other issues just as degrading or damaging to the human person, such as abortion, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, or contraception. All of these, even anti-woke secular intellectuals believe, are integral to the protection and promotion of individual rights and the freedom to live as we best see fit.
Moreover, as Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., argues in his recent book Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, scientism (the view that every truth claim must be subject to scientific validation), which is held by many of these same public intellectuals, is flatly incoherent. The reason why is because science is dependent on such things as logic, the principle of noncontradiction, and mathematics, none of which are falsifiable by observational data but must be presumed a priori. And, Fr. Spitzer also argues, the existence of God cannot be disproved because the classical understanding of God as “a unique, uncaused, unrestricted Creator” cannot be evaluated via the scientific method of observing data but only by rational, metaphysical inquiry.
This is why the best arguments for God’s existence remain those presented by St. Thomas Aquinas 750 years ago, reliant as they are on inductive and deductive reasoning available to all persons. That Dawkins’ and others’ ridiculing of these arguments miserably fail because of a basic misunderstanding of the logic and reasoning that underlies them only further demonstrates why we should be discerning regarding our allies. Because their common ground with us stems not from a classical or Catholic conception of reality but a thoroughly modern, Enlightenment-influenced one, their worldview and grasp of logic is inadequate and incoherent.
Richard Dawkins, and many others like him, believe that civilization can enjoy prosperity and progress without recourse to transcendent truths and a humble worship of the divine. They think the bizarre sexual and racial ideologies of our zeitgeist are emblematic of an errant religious impulse common to man, when in truth they are consequences of their very own individualistic, utilitarian philosophical paradigm that celebrates autonomy and fulfillment of our sensual appetites as the highest goods. They think dispassionate scientific inquiry and technological advances will secure our happiness apart from the superstitions of religious faith.
Yet the evidence is increasingly obvious that apart from a moral code that science is incapable of supplying, mankind is incapable of not fashioning an Orwellian future that will exploit and degrade us. It is one in which sex is anonymized and sterilized, children are products, and the unwanted are eliminated. Who is the one who is supposed to feel patronized and insulted?
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Truth.
Good warning article, thank you.
Being old enough to remember the Saneness and Christian virtue-based value standards of Truth, Justice, Order, Service, .. that men and women struggled to match in the early 1970’s – today unhinged Godless moral anchorless delusional psychopathy because from mind-damaged insane-accepting blind-chaos seems to be our Western and world societies’ rule.
The moral damage you article mentions related to legal birth-control and we all where no longer are we [Holy] dignified images of God but seeing selves and others as soulless meat-machines. Generations of father disposing no-fault divorce harming themselves and children, raising them with child mind-soul mutilating abuse – when father not around to protect and provide Love, real Love to them and her.
The answer about legal Birth Control and Abortion must be the following – even if no pregnancies exist or there is never an intent to Abort an unborn.
Assuming the State’s intent is the continued and maximized health and welfare of itself, and for all internal communities, families, persons, as well as for all industry, commerce, education, medical, judicial, law-making, executive, .., for every aspect where directors, operators, recipients, and the general society does benefit and depend on right, prudent, moral, just, and intelligent faculties of all persons, that each and all be undamaged by acting, accepting, and-or supporting amoral or insane possibilities and practices as normal, that all be undamaged by the abuse of the very young and all of any age to be forced to consider amoral insane possibilities to be allowed.
Assuming the State’s good intent then the State must always prohibit Abortion – to never terminate a pregnancy when the intent is to end the pregnancy, or to sell and use baby parts, or for Religious practices such as Sacrificing to Satan or other Forms, or for birth control, or similar.
But – of course – if a physical immediate life-saving procedure is needed for the mother and happens to terminate the pregnancy as a secondary cause, and if the unborn is viable with medical assistance, then normal life savings efforts must be performed and continued to save the life of the baby, if possible.
In this argument, the life or death of hypothetical unborn is not the primary reason to why the State must never allow for abortion. The healing, maintenance, and-or maximization of the moral, intellectual, judgmental, psychological, and intrapersonal health and best-practices within and between each person, family, community, State, and all institutions within, and between the State and other States.
Because our National and State’s laws allow for Abortion in different forms, with intent to kill life that was created in an act for which the natural end is the creation of life and loving expansion of family, community, State, and humanity, when the mother did not refrain when unwilling to cooperate to the natural end, when Pride, Lust, ruled virtue and self-control, and-or when intent for Power over that lover or perhaps many lovers, for Profit – marriage to the most desirable with Parental Fraud and lies, and with the premeditate killing of unborn and retry if not successful in deceiving the preferred lover or any of them.
The allowance of Abortion corrupts the medical system, and draws the sociopaths who accept the goal of killing and death as part of medical practice and profession, and the psychopathic who desires the killing act and the sensations of ripping limbs off, disembowelment, cutting and twisting of the silently screaming helpless unborn.
The awareness and acceptance of these immoral, unloving, life-killing, psychological Sickness spreading, and other damaged that causes disorder, dysfunction, damaged to State, society, institutions, family, and each person that promotes injustice, lies, isolation, division, conflicts, and other increasing instability, irrationality, harmful policies and actions, disassociation, self-loathing, disrespect of life, self, others, and more suffering, torment, failures, confusion, duality and internal distancing from reality, and expanding acceptance for greater and more immoral and insane policies and actions, ..
.. that conscious awareness and acceptance that is so wide spread in Western and worldwide societies with growing insanity or ‘clown world’ noticed to increase and spread more yearly, the withdraw, willful denial and crippling disassociation and other unhealthy and damaging psychological copping mechanisms suggests that after many generations of our entire population raised from birth to accept immoral and insane practices as normal – re-enforced and wrapped in mother love in early-life, followed by social and authoritarian pressure and punishment of different forms for objecting – it should be assumed that few in societies that accept Abortion to be fully sane with remaining ability of rational and judgmental clarity to consider aspects of Abortion, or any moral question with likelihood of Righteous ends.
The Answer to the Question is that the State and people act Rightly and Lovingly when never allowing Abortion, with the bonus answer that few in regions and societies that allow Abortion are fit to debate it, or much of anything requiring abstract though, clarity of judgment, and moral grounding.
Not Anything.
God Bless., Steven