So Richard Dawkins, the bete noir of so many religious thinkers, has hit the Twittershere again. Apparently anyone who is religious is of compromised intellectual acuity because of their faith. The BBC screened a ‘Big Questions’ show under the title “Is it time all religions accepted evolution as fact?” A good question and one I’d happily debate with them, but here is how Dawkins dismissed the entire discussion:
Dawkins’ tweet
Now that’s a sweeping statement which, in a single tweet, calls into question the findings of psychology, theology and sociology – and what is more, accuses religion of down-grading the intellectual capacity of the nation. It’s all very well for Kark Marx to claim that ‘religion is the opium of the masses” (although that was actually a paraphrase of what he said in the original German). With this statement Dawkins takes it a whole galaxy further. It is religion, he says, that causes stupidity. Not poverty of information, not background, not adverse environment, it’s religion that poisons thought.
My issue with statements like this, for which Dawkins has become famous, is summed up in one word. In fact it’s a word he bangs on about quite often: Evidence.
Is he seriously asking me to believe that Christians are less intelligent than their atheistic counterparts? Where is the evidence? What about the great thinkers of the world who openly followed Christ, worshipped him and attributed their success, in some measure, to the work of God in their lives. Am I being asked to believe that Newton was stupid? Would ‘Principia Mathematica’ have been more profound if Newton hadn’t been a committed Christian. Or what about the astronomer Johann Kepler? Would he have found more stars if he had not felt he was “thinking God’s thoughts after him”? Was William Wilberforce stupid? Is Rowan Williams an imbecile? Is he asking me to believe that I am intellectually limited because of my faith?
What is even more astonishing, from someone who claims the whole universe is simply a consequence of cause and effect, is that he is claiming a causal link between stupidity (however one defines it) and religion. The more religion, the more stupidity. More faith produces more dunces. And yet the very science he uses to assert his aggressive atheism was, to a considerable extent, given to him as a consequence of thinking Christians trying to understand the world as God made it. To morph their expressions of exploring, scientific faith into an accusation of stupidity is unbelievable.
If this were true, I would have a lower IQ because I am a Christian. If this were true I would have progressed further, thought more clearly and possibly even become an Oxford don (the Professor for Public Understanding of Science maybe!) if I had never been exposed to this ‘poisonous’ stuff called faith.
But true faith has exactly the opposite effect. It challenges the mind, it fires the heart and it stimulates the imagination and it connects with the divine.
Or am I … stupid?
