Screwtape Chronicles

9 August 2007

Counterpoints: The God Delusion - Preface

Posted by Ryan

And so it begins, the great experiment in which my brother-in-law, Charles Jones of pos51.org, and I set forth on what is sure to be a months long inquiry into Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Creator, and Alister McGrath & Joanna Collicutt McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? (a book that seeks to specifically refute the Dawkins text). Will we make it to the finish line? Who knows. I’m working and writing three or four screenplays, and Charles is working and, oh, by the way, is married and has a newborn child, so demands on our time might intervene every now and then. And we might get so fed up with each other that we abandon the whole endeavor. But I hope not. I hope we reach the finish line. Because, to me, this is an important topic, maybe the most important topic that there really is. Does God exist?

Charles and I have come up with a schedule that we will do our damnedest to stick to. He and I are going to read each book, starting with The God Delusion, a chapter at a time. We will then write a response to each chapter, and post those responses on each of our respective sites every Thursday and Sunday. So, for God Delusion, that means that the preface is being addressed today, Chapter One on Sunday, Chapter Two next Thursday, and so on. Each Wednesday, we will post a podcast that will discuss the previous two posts. If all goes to plan, we’ll have a podcast up next Wednesday that discusses the preface and Chapter One. If it proves to be too much work, we’ll scale back to one chapter a week; but, for now, that is the plan.

And now, to The God Delusion…

Dawkins spends the majority of the preface stating his intentions for the book and summarizing what the reader will find during his or her journey through reading it. He states his position (atheist, duh) and lays out his hopes for where the reader will be philosophically when he or she concludes the book (atheist, again… duh).

As I said, the preface is mostly a summary of what is to come. One interesting point should be highlighted, though. And I quote:

As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

As kids, we are told so much about what not to do. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t have sex until you’re married. I remember my childhood as a successive series of warnings about what not to do. It got to the point that whenever I would do something that was remotely outside of my perceived moral perimeters, and then nothing bad would happen to me, I would be surprised. I started to swear a lot when I started to lose my faith. I still do, in certain circles. I’m convinced that swearing was my form of rebellion at the time. Yeah, I’m a good kid, but I do say “fuck” a lot, so whaddya think of that, huh? I remember the first few times that I swore. Afterwards, I remember thinking to myself “I don’t feel any different. I didn’t know I could do that.” It was about that time that I really started to distrust the notion that everything I had been told was correct.

Mucho shocking, I know. Most people go through that, and swearing is not a huge form of rebellion. Anyhow, the point is, I can very much relate to the idea of “I didn’t know I could do that.” I think it’s the first step in the loss of faith, and I don’t think that it’s a bad thing. I’m just frustrated that I had to have the thought in the first place, that I wasn’t made aware of the fact that I could (and should) be able to choose my beliefs for myself, and not have them ingrained inside of me from birth.

Dawkins makes one mistake in the preface. In his discussion of religious people, he states that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design).” The problem with this statement is that Dawkins assumes that all faithful people were indoctrinated at birth. Certainly my brother-in-law is proof positive that not all deeply religious people are indoctrinated as a child. Dawkins should have noted that he was generalizing, and that, while most people are probably “indoctrinated,” certainly not all people are.

Dawkins makes other points in the preface, but I don’t feel the need to address them right now, because they will all pop up, in more detail, throughout the book. However, I feel it is necessary to educate you, Constant Reader, about me, so that you can better understand the lens with which I will be reading all three of the books in this little odyssey of mind and soul. So, without further ado, I present to you….

MY VERY OWN PREFACE

I was born in Texas and raised in a suburb of Houston called Friendswood. Friendswood is a nice place to grow up, I guess. It’s boring, but there’s something to be said for a boring little town. If I had to choose between a nice, sleepy town and a crappy, drive-by infested place, well, I’d go with nice and sleepy. The problem with Friendswood, though, is that it’s basically an all-white bubble town. I feel like a lot of people I grew up with, myself included, were given a very limited perspective on the ways of the world because of this. Using myself as an example, it wasn’t really until college that I got a full understanding of the race problems that still plague this nation. I blame Friendswood’s lack of diversity for my lack of understanding. That is what I mean by bubble town: Friendswood exists in bubble that doesn’t reflect worldwide reality.

I was raised in the Episcopal Church. For the longest time, I didn’t question the idea of church. As far back as I can remember, my family went to church every Sunday, doing so was just one of those things that was normal. I felt no need to question it, nor any need to question the existence of God or any of the main tenets of the church that I went to. I believed God existed, and, not only that, I believed a Christian God existed, and I believed that He did everything that I was told that He did. But what the hell does a little kid know? Not really anything. As Dawkins will point out later in his book, kids believe what their parents tell them. My parents told me God existed, so, hey, God existed. It wasn’t until about seventh or eighth grade that stuff stopped making sense to me and it wasn’t until about ninth grade that things started to really baffle me. Just what the hell were we doing in church every Sunday? What was the deal with communion? Why is the Bible the Word of God? Why, when I pray, do I never get a response? How can God talk through people, if people have free will? How can God be both omnipotent and omniscient (a variation of the unstoppable force and an unmovable rock scenario)? I had so many questions, questions that no one could satisfactorily answer, and, because of this, I stopped understanding. This was a big deal to me, because up until that point, I was very dyed-in-the-wool about everything God related. I wore a huge cross and a Jesus fish around my neck, and I accessorized those things with one of those WWJD bracelets. I listened to Christian rock bands, and went to Christian rock concerts (dcTalk and Newsboys, anyone?). So my loss of faith was something that really sucked for me. I was severely depressed for at least a year, probably two. At the time, I saw no connection between my depression and my ongoing loss of faith in God. Looking back, I realize that my loss of faith had a lot to do with, and may have even caused, the depressed feelings.

I still went to church all through high school. I even played guitar for the youth group, leading others in the singing of all those Christian songs. Hell, I even wrote one (and South Park is right, it ain’t hard to do at all). In the Episcopal Church, we have a thing called the Nicene Creed. I don’t know if other churches have this exact creed, but I imagine every church has a variation on it. It’s a statement of faith. It spells out all the things that you supposedly believe as a member of the church. About halfway through high school, when it came to the time of the service to say the Creed, I wouldn’t. I would pretend that I was, I would mumble about half the words; but the important stuff, the big tenants of the faith… I didn’t say that stuff. I put my head down and mouthed nothing, just in case anybody was watching. Because, to me, saying you believe something when you don’t is lying. And I’m not a liar.

I can still remember the moment that God, if he exists, lost me. This story is kind of long and it may seem personal, but I believe it’s important to know if you want to understand my lack of relationship with God. I was at Camp Allen, which is a summer camp that is run by the Diocese of Texas (I spent one week a summer there for many years, I even counseled there one summer). I was at a special weekend called Happening. Happening is a pretty intense experience. My sister can tell you all about it; she was in charge of one of them. I never told her this, but I was pretty proud of her for doing it, even though it did nothing for me. They wouldn’t have 80 or 90 Happenings if they were a complete waste of time, and leading one is a lot of responsibility and, in general, is a big deal. At any rate, there’s a lot of ritual and religiosity involved at a Happening and, if you are so inclined, it can be a great experience (I guess). I went sometime in high school, ninth or tenth grade (can’t remember which). On the Saturday night of the Happening weekend, we had a big prayer meeting. Lots of candles, a few priests there, everyone in a big room. This is after a dinner of silence, a very ritualistic type dinner, so everyone is already “on fire for God” before the prayer meeting even starts (which I still remember vividly). The prayer meeting was really more than a meeting, it seemed like it was meant to be culmination of a weekend that is designed to invigorate the hell out of your faith in God. Music played the entire time, and, in general, it felt very religious. We were told that if we wanted to pray about anything, well, all we had to do was walk up to one of the prayer stations and have a priest pray with us. So I think to myself, “Everyone here is feeling something, but I’m not. I’m not feeling God, and my faith is literally slipping away, and I’m with a specific group of people and at a specific place where God, if he existed, would surely be. I mean, if God is gonna show up anywhere, it’s gonna be at a Happening at Camp Allen. So if He’s here, I want to feel it. Because I sure as hell feel nothing right now, and that’s getting old.” With that thought in mind, I went to the prayer station, sat down across from a priest, and told the priest (a super cool guy, as I remember) that I didn’t feel the presence of God, never had really, and I really wanted to. The priest listened, and then we grasped hands across the table and he prayed. He asked God to come into my life. He asked for God’s presence to fill me. He said some other stuff that I don’t remember. And then he was done.

I walked back to my place within the group, still feeling nothing. What the hell? So I went outside, into the woods, frustrated. I got down on my knees, put my hands into the air, and cried out to God. Where are you? I want to feel your presence. I want to feel something, fucking anything. I think I even said that out loud, “please, God, at this point, fucking anything will do.” I asked God, right here, right now, please give me something. And I know all about “not testing the Lord your God,” believe me, I read that stuff, but still, I felt it was not a lot to ask in return for eternal devotion, so I asked. And, big drum roll here… guess what I felt? Nothing. I mean, the wind blew or something, randomly. And maybe some pine needles somewhere in the forest fell out of tree. And a squirrel ate something. Oh, and somewhere on planet Earth, it was raining. But I didn’t feel anything.

That was at least seven years ago. In the intervening years, I’ve become even more skeptical of God and of religion in general. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but I can finally say out loud, in the presence of others, that I do not believe in a Christian God. It still feels weird to say that, though. In fact, I’ve only said “I don’t believe in Jesus” out loud a couple of times, total. It feels weird to deny something that was ingrained into you, it feels sacrilegious. Which, I suppose it is. But, as I said, I am not a liar, and so I probably shouldn’t lie to myself, right? I don’t believe. And I should be able to think that thought to myself, and I should be able to tell people who ask. I don’t believe in a Christian God.

That’s not the whole story. I hesitate, at this point, to declare myself an atheist. I am not proud of where I am. Because, unlike Dawkins, I don’t want to be where I am. I’d much rather be happy in the belief that there is an afterlife, that there is a God. Dawkins would probably say that I still have a little ways to go, that I still have some stuff to work out before I can fully “come out” as an atheist. And maybe that’s true. But, for now, I desperately want to believe. I just can’t. Because it makes no sense to me.

So that’s where I’m at. And that’s the lens with which I will be reading all three of these books: as a person who had faith, lost it, and hopes, but does not expect, to have faith again.

Sunday will bring our first serious discussion of The God Delusion. Chapter One is called “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer.” According to Dawkins, Chapter One will explain “how a proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically – and inadequately – usurped.” We’ll see. For now, thanks for reading this far, and please stay with us.

Read Charles’s first post here.

Until then…