Richard Dawkins and the Idolaters of Faith

I was reading the God Delusion yesterday and Richard Dawkins' view of faith is simply not well supported in Christian theology. The problem is that he divorces faith as a belief devoid of evidence (in the strictly scientific norm of the nature of evidence as externally verifiable) from any notion of trust. In Christian theology faith is a form of trust. It is trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This means that it is not rooted in the absence of evidence, although the evidence in which it is rooted is clearly not of the scientific sort. But one does not come to faith based on what one has been told in the past or through simple logical formulations. Parroting what one has been told is not faith even if one claims that it is.

Faith is the result of evidence that is satisfying to one's sense of trust in a relational logic to God. Clearly this evidence that leads one to faith is unsatisfying to many even as scientific evidence is unsatisfying to many regarding the meaning of life and what is best for one to do on ethical grounds. But I urge one to find a theological explication of faith that is even similar to that of Dawkins for I would take issue with any understanding of faith that is not coterminous with trust in terms of satisfying evidence and therefore satisfying knowledge of God. Saying faith is based in nothing as Dawkins says is not what faith is from especially from what I would roughly consider a Christian perspective. Now it is true that fundamentalists have a penchant for looking for ways to substantiate faith with externally verifiable evidence. I would submit this task bears no fruit and is itself misleading based on the above.

Second, Dawkins' issue with faith as a foundation of belief leads to another misleading statement about how the liberal view enables the more radical of fundamentalist actions which the liberals would like to separate themselves. The problem with Dawkins' assertion is that since faith is based in essentially nothing and since it is called faith, it is beyond reproach or criticism. Since it is beyond reproach or criticism as a foundation of belief the liberal view enables the fundamentalist view to act within the conditions of faith since faith is that which needs assent beyond reproach or criticism. The problem here is that again, faith in theological discourse is the object of criticism itself. While it is true that many do not criticize it, those who do not are also not acting within the bounds of good theological thinking.

Good theological thinking requires a critical analysis of faith in certain bounded conditions of human experience. Without this engagement, it is not theological thinking at all, but dogmatic assertion. The very history of the liberal-progressive strain in Christian religious history in the US, at least, is that it engages in this critical engagement and rejects blind dogmatic assertion. Theology is faith seeking understanding. Based on the understanding of faith as trust in God through satisfying evidence of such, the task of theology is to question these grounds in a clearly self-critical manner. This aspect of faith is one that Dawkins clearly does not account for in his volume and I was rather disappointed that he did not answer this issue.

Now it is true that many Christians (could be most) do not engage in this self-critical reflection on the very grounds on which their faith is built. That is to say, this kind of thinking is absent of theology, or has a misguided sense of theology as find support for assertions rather than critically engaging assertions in order to question the very grounds of faith itself. At best it is a-theology, at worst it is anti-theology holding to any assertion of faith as an object as clearly defined as a tennisball at the U.S. open (McEnroe’s challenges notwithstanding!). But faith works in probabilities – probabilities of God’s revelation as revealed in Jesus and from then to us through the Holy Spirit. Theology helps the believer to sharpen his or her apprehension and experience of these probabilities. But that some of a given group do not engage in good theology does not mean that it is evidence that faith itself is therefore somehow enabling bad theology – especially if one has any theological sense of what faith is. How one chooses to operate within the bounds of a structure does not logically mean that the structure is therefore bad. That is to say, because there are those who make false assumptions about faith and operate within those false assumptions does not therefore mean that faith itself as trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ is therefore contingent upon those false assumptions and is itself false.

As I have noted before, doctrine – our attempt to rationalize and make explicit the norms of faith through language – is sacramental. It is a vehicle for us to understand God and grow in that knowledge, but it is not to be equated with God literally. Now it must be noted that I do tend more towards the position of Ulrich Zwingli or a Baptist with respect to sacrament. It is a symbol and witness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and faith is not contingent upon the reception of a sacrament even if the ritual act of partaking a sacrament is nourishing to that faith in a faith community. But whatever tact you may take towards sacramentology, its nature as that which offers us a vehicle to experience the mystery of God’s presence is clear. The problem is when the symbol is confuse with the referent – the reality to which it points – and then reified to the degree that the sacrament is confused with its referent namely God. In terms of doctrine, when this occurs, the doctrine becomes co-exhaustive of the being of God and therefore replaces the presence of God with the ideas about God that people articulate by word, image, or deed. To claim otherwise is to assert that God is bound to our doctrinal statements and doing so causes God to be contingent upon what we say about God. This is idolatry, not theology.

What Dawkins does do is offer an argument of the consequences of this view of doctrine and faith as idolatry rather than a trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ that we critically engage in our theological thinking. One such consequence is the thought of Dawkins himself on religion along with those of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – all of whom atheists seem to revere as the torch bearers of their worldview. No doubt this perspective with further entrench the views of the doctrinal idolater into even clearer and more reified boundaries into which faith in God is unflinchingly inscribed. But perhaps the dwindling middle road of Christianity can find its identity in these discussions once more.

Related posts:

1. revised statement of faith