On Dawkin's militant atheism.

The inescapable conclusion is that Dawkins and materialists of his sort do not in fact “stand up full-face into the keen wind of understanding.” They don’t face the implications of their ideas. If they did, they would have to dismiss all talk of morality, rebellion against nature, and intellectual freedom as so much sentimentality.

The same failure to think things through is evident in Dawkins’ views on religion. There is nothing in Darwinism, even in its most naturalistic form, that must lead one to despise religion as Dawkins does. There is every indication that religion is natural to man and conducive, on the whole, to his survival. It can give him hope in adversity, strengthen family bonds, and motivate sacrifice for the common good. Dawkins calls it a virus; but if it is, it is one that, according to the latest research, makes us healthier. “Faith sufferers,” as Dawkins calls them, seem to suffer less from a wide array of ills. Among other things, they are less given to depression, anxiety, addiction, criminality, suicide, and divorce. To state these facts is not to preach the prosperity gospel, but to see the weakness of Dawkins’ position even on its own naturalistic terms.

Without religion, says Dawkins, we would not have wars of religion or religious persecution. True. And without sex, fathers, families, material possessions, and governments, we would not have sex crimes, abusive fathers, dysfunctional families, greed for material possessions, and oppressive governments. Every natural and necessary thing can be perverted, even reason. Religion has led to hateful ideas, but has any Christian writer ever published ideas as hateful as the social Darwinism of H. G. Wells? Religion has led to persecutions, but none even nearly as massive as those produced by militant irreligion. More people were killed by the “scientific atheism” of communism on an average day than the Spanish Inquisition killed in an average decade. And largely responsible for this fact was a teaching of contempt for religion of exactly the kind that Dawkins propagates.

Dawkins gave an interview to Belief.net recently. He was asked whether he could think of anything, just “one positive, if minor, thing” that religion has done for the good. No, he replied, he really couldn’t. What about great religious art? “That’s not religion,” said Dawkins, “it is just because the Church had the money. Great artists like . . . Bach . . . would have done whatever they were told to do.” So Johann Sebastian Bach was just in it for the money. What this sordid remark reveals, apart from amazing ignorance and philistinism, is the mind of a true fanatic. It is not enough for Dawkins to say that religion is bad on the whole; it must be wholly bad.

- Stephen M. Barr,"The Devil's Chaplain". First Things (2004)

Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware. He is the author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press).

Read the rest of the article. It's an interesting one.