WHAT a problem religious faith poses for learned men of empirical mind. How it baffles, angers, frightens them, prompts them to domesticate it or uproot it, leaf and bough. In a trio of new books, three scientists -- an English evolutionary theorist, a bestselling philosopher-turned-neuroscientist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist -- take Christianity to task. Their works comprise a new testament for atheists, in which science is the only acceptable gospel.
"I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented," Richard Dawkins writes in "The God Delusion," a sustained literary assault on what he considers the dangerous fallacies of revealed religion.
Dawkins -- author of eight previous books, including "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker," and the Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford -- is easily the most imaginative theorist of evolutionary biology alive today and also its most combative. There is no more staunch defender of the scientific method in the culture wars over creationist beliefs than this handsome, hawk-faced don; no more influential advocate of reason and rationality; certainly no 21st century raisonneur more openly scornful of his religious adversaries. Few scientists are so irredeemably reductionist.
As Dawkins sees it, there is no heaven, no hell, no spark of the divine, just the periodic table of elements, enduring physical laws and the rule of natural selection. Moreover, he holds that science is the only rightful arbiter of knowledge about the universe and human nature, laying claim not only to what can be known but also to the meaning of the unknowable. His atheism is a linear dogma as old as doubt.
It is his professed faith that the universe can be understood -- and solely through empirical human inquiry. In proposing this doctrine, Dawkins is himself a fundamentalist, rejecting any compromise or accommodation. He argues for his materialist worldview in an imperious manner, revealing more about the struggle for hierarchy and authority than about the failure of spirituality or the elusive nature of the divine. "What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured guest and science must respectfully slink away?" he asks. "What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?"
Scattering secular fatwas with abandon, Dawkins assumes the mantle of an ayatollah of atheism. "Faith is evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument," he writes. The God of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." As for the New, Jesus, as conventionally viewed, is a "milksop."
To Dawkins, a religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. Any scientist who sees traces of the divine in the inexplicable mysteries of cosmology or life's origins is guilty of "intellectual high treason." Mystical experience, he speculates, may be only a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.
In all this, Dawkins is just warming to the evangelical task he has set himself: to convert readers of a religious turn of mind to atheism. Yet much of his artful jeremiad is designed not to persuade those wavering on the verge of reason and rationality but rather to enrage believers of any sort, in order to bolster "atheist pride." He casts atheism in America as a civil rights issue -- something like gay rights, save that instead of tolerance and equality under the law, he seeks elimination of other beliefs. Although stoutly proclaiming his opposition to all religions, he spends little time on the perceived shortcomings of Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains or Muslims. He ridicules the Bible but not the Koran. Buddhism and Confucianism, he says, aren't worth his effort. Zen doesn't come up. He reserves his ire for the Christian religion -- most particularly Christianity as practiced by fundamentalist sects in parts of the United States. "The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified," he writes.
