The War on God

Do we have to choose between religion and science? If evolution is correct, does this mean that there is no God, no afterlife, no immortality? Are we tiny, forgotten insects on a fragile small planet in a corner of an infinite universe? "Why There Almost Certainly is no God" Richard Dawkins titles the 4th chapter of The God Delusion (2006). Is it so certain? Has science indeed reached this inevitable conclusion, and are we fooling ourselves when we speak of Christian love, God, abstinence, a specific way of life that is holy? Should we dismiss all feelings of guilt and wrongdoing, and make pleasure our single goal in life? The questions above plague us all, and I would like to explore them in this book, in the hope of bringing the argument closer to a satisfactory conclusion. Born in a country--Lebanon--that is (or was) half-Christian and half-Muslim and which experienced a 15-year-long religious war, I definitely have first-hand experience of religious intolerance, fanaticism, and the simple desire to survive without abandoning one's faith or political beliefs. My father was Greek Orthodox, my mother Presbyterian Protestant, in a country whose Christian community is predominantly Maronite Catholic, a happy coincidence which allowed me to experience all three main branches of Christianity. A Ph.D. in English literature, I spent much of my adult life researching Victorian literature and publishing on Oscar Wilde and related figures, while teaching literature and Cultural Studies at the American University of Beirut. The Cultural Studies Program exposed me to Freud, Darwin, Hawking, Monod, Gould and modern atheism in general, which is a main theme that stretches as far back as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius. Thus, I feel qualified to tackle the thorny question of religious faith from a perspective that is neither atheistic nor blindly religious. In my view, the university mind is best qualified to explore this issue, since it is well-rounded, intelligent, and does not have an axe to grind, unlike the clergy, for instance. Ever since I read Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), Harris's The End of Faith (2004) and Hitchens's God is Not Great (2007)--in that order--I have felt a strong desire to respond. Such responses as I did read struck me as weak. What delayed my response was a feeling of inadequacy. Richard Dawkins is the greatest living biologist, and the reputations of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens are not much less. Who am I to cast doubt on their work? In the end, I put aside such negative thoughts. When my countryman Nassim Taleb went to the United States, he worked as a trader, then took the world by storm with his Fooled by Randomness (2001) and The Black Swan (2007). I have no illusions about achieving anything similar, but as a professor of Victorian literature and Cultural Studies, I have spent my whole life teaching and researching the clash between religion and science, and I have experienced the entire field from atheism to born-again Christianity to religious doubt. Moreover, I co-exist with an Islamic world that seems to have no religious doubt at all but is being swept with wave after wave of religious fervor. By contrast, whenever I visit London or Paris or Rome, I am struck by how anemic Christianity is in these former capitals of Christian faith. Even the Vatican has become partly a tourist attraction. I find Islamic certainty strange, but so are the capitals of Europe, with their largely hedonistic, absurdist or existential populations. The United States is not very different from Europe, except that it has a large evangelical population parts of which can only be classified as fundamentalist. In the end, I am one of those educated readers towards whom the flood of atheistic books is directed. Some of my students, Christian and Muslim, are reading those books and becoming atheists. (And yes, in Beirut most university classes have an almost equal number of Christian and Muslim students. And also yes, Muslims have more immunity than Christians in this area). They then come to me and ask my opinion. Until now, my position has been embarrassed and non-committal. In the present book, I would like to put my ideas forward, in the hope of finally facing intelligently the questions of my students, which are also the questions of the large educated public of this world.