FAITH AND THE EVIDENCE:

THE ANSWER TO DAWKINS

BY TOM WOODMAN
 Published by Tom Woodman

Copyright © Tom Woodman

Front Cover Image Credits - Manuel Velasco

Purchased from - www.istockphoto.com
Reference Number - 4874373
Religion, Good and/or Bad

The practice of religion is in serious decline in Europe and

especially in the United Kingdom, but this is certainly not
the case in the rest of the world. Globally about 85% of the
population is estimated to be adherents of one form of religion
or another.1 Quite apart from the growth of militant Islam there
are huge numbers of Christians in Africa (up from 10 million
in the nineteenth century to 200 million now), South America,
the former Eastern bloc, and even in China, which now has a
large number of conversions. UK church attendance has been
declining for many years, however, and this accelerated very
fast from the 1960s on. Now only about 6% of the population
attends a place of worship regularly. Non-attendance at church
is not, of course, the same thing as lacking all religious feeling,
and Pope Benedict’s comments about the aggressive secularism
of Britain on his recent visit seem to have been modified by
the time he returned to Rome. What does seem to be the
case, however, is that a whole generation has grown up with
very little knowledge of conventional religion or of the Bible.
Our own unfamiliarity and insularity can sometimes give us
the impression that religion is dying or made up entirely of
fundamentalism, superstition and violence, but this is a very
skewed perception of what is going on in the world at large.

After September 11th attitudes to religion changed for the

worse. Thereafter the fear of Islamic terrorism became a huge
factor in the thinking of Western governments. Three days
later Professor Richard Dawkins wrote a piece in the Guardian
called ‘Religion’s Misguided Missiles’ claiming that the atrocity

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was the result of ‘religion’. Later, July 7th was to make the
British people very aware that support for the Iraq War had
made this country a specific target. At the same time the Neo-
conservative Bush regime, widely supported by American
‘born-again’ Christians, became very unpopular here, and there
was a growing consciousness of the unfortunate influence of
that strand of American Christianity. Dawkins’ book The God
Delusion became a remarkable best-seller in 2006, and he
became a cult celebrity, appearing as himself in Doctor Who,
for example. Facebook reveals a wide network of fans who call
him ‘better than Jesus’ or say that he would be their God if they
believed in God! His aggression and prestige have emboldened
other critics, and atheism in some circles has become militant
and evangelical, with the London bus campaign ‘There’s
probably no God’ (January 2009), and various controversies
about faith schools and religion in the public sphere.

Although such “aggressive secularism” only represents a

small minority there is no point in denying that it has also had
a real impact on the general public. At one point in recent years
a survey suggested that 42% of the British people regarded
religion as a source of harm (Sunday Times February 9th 2007),
and the figures are even higher when young people are surveyed.
Through no fault of their own Dawkins’ more youthful fans have
little experience of religion themselves, and they are not aware
that they have become the victims of a pre-emptive strike, a
very one-sided presentation by an ‘expert’ who has very limited
qualifications for speaking on the subject at all. Almost all those,
believers or not, who are well informed about religion do not
respect Professor Dawkins’ work on this subject, and it would

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be revealing to see how he would get on if he were quizzed on
purely factual matters such as the history of religion and what
the world religions actually teach.

This does not mean, of course, that there is no truth in

anything that he says on the subject. There is no point in denying
that religion can be dangerous. Since there have always been
such a large number of religious believers of one kind or another
in the world it is not hard to find examples of many who have
been bigoted, hypocritical, superstitious and nasty. Religious
fundamentalism can be intellectually bankrupt and even morally
harmful. Those who bolster their own egos and opinions with
the belief that God is on their side, as for example with those
Americans who somehow find the right to bear arms part of
the biblical revelation, can be a source of danger to themselves
and others. As everyone knows not only individual believers
but the Church itself has been responsible for many evils over
the centuries, and there has been considerable and very blatant
corruption in various forms. Religious motives have led people
to persecute those of other faiths and none, and have often
become intertwined with nationalism and other ideologies. There
have been special links with terrorism in the past few years, and
over the course of history religion has undeniably been a factor
in many wars. The great satirist Jonathan Swift, himself an
Anglican priest, pointed out long ago that:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of

lives; for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be
flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or
wine… Neither are any wars so furious and bloody,

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 or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by
difference in opinion, especially if it be in things
indifferent. (Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4, Chapter 5)

Those who have the interests of true religion at heart will

always have to try to acknowledge these things in sincerity
and humility. In fact it is believers who have always been the
most passionate critics of religious institutions and their abuses:
the Old Testament prophets, Jesus himself, and those such as
St Catherine of Siena (who firmly corrected Popes), Martin
Luther and John Wesley in the long history of the Church.
All that we can reasonably ask of Professor Dawkins and his
allies is that they try to grasp that there are different kinds of
religion and different kinds of belief and believers. They are
over-generalising wildly in lumping all ‘religion’ together and
painting only the very bleakest of pictures. It sometimes seems,
for example, that the Crusades are the only historical fact that
people now know about the Church, and Anne Widdicombe
was quite right to point out on BBC Question Time that they
happened a long time ago and that we should look at them in a
wider perspective now. People in other centuries had different
values to us and cannot always be judged completely by modern
standards. Times have changed anyway. The Spanish Inquisition,
to take another notorious example, was run by the state with the
assistance of the Church. No one would blame modern Spain for
it but they continue to blame the modern Church.

It would be helpful to adopt the elementary precaution

of learning to make certain distinctions. There are various
kinds of fundamentalism, for example. American Bible-belt

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fundamentalism is not exactly the same kind of phenomenon as
Islamic fundamentalism, although it has some things in common
with it. Most fundamentalism is not violent and dangerous, even
though we might well quarrel with it intellectually. Much of it
is the product of narrow education and cultural isolation, but to
condemn all religion on this basis is like condemning science on
the grounds of the general public’s grasp of scientific concepts.
The Amish in the United States are clearly fundamentalists and
they refuse to use modern technology. Yet they have a long
tradition of pacifism and conscientious objection and represent
no danger to anyone at all. Islamic fundamentalism itself is
much wider than terrorism and must not be identified with
it. Terrorism exploits and abuses religious fundamentalism,
but is not in any simple sense caused by it. An MI5 survey in
this country identified actual religious practice as a contra-
indication to terrorism (7th October 2007, Daily Telegraph). As
the political thinker John Gray has pointed out, most terrorism
actually has secular roots such as Marxist-Leninism.2

To see religion as the main cause of war will not survive

a look at the historical facts either, although any war that has
religion as its pretext is a terrible scandal. Yet the overall picture
is a much more complicated one than the enemies of religion
suggest. As Swift once again said: ‘We have just enough
religion to make us hate our neighbours but not enough to make
us love them’ (‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’). The solution
would seem then to be true religion, not the abolition of religion.
Religion has been able to transcend its links with sectarianism
and nationalism and to be a great source of peace-making as
well. Everyone knows that Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi and

7
Martin Luther King were religiously-inspired men of peace. If
we take the notorious example of Northern Ireland we see that
religion became intertwined with nationalism and a sense of
oppression but that religious people were also in the forefront
of the peace movement. Can we have any doubt which impulse
most truly represents the spirit of religion? It is a terrible slander
on many believers in the world not to recognise that they
live peaceable lives and want to continue to do so, and this is
because of their religion not in spite of it.

History shows that all institutions are flawed, especially

vast worldwide ones with a long and complicated record,
and individual believers who make up the members of
religious institutions or even become leaders of them are often
hypocritical, sinful or deluded. The fact that there have been
multiple failures in living up to the best (or any) standards of
faith is hardly an argument against faith itself. The recent sex
abuse scandals have been a terrible blot on the Church, and still
more perhaps the attempted cover-ups. To say anything to try
to mitigate this would seem to be defending the indefensible.
Yet the fact remains that the widespread exaggeration of the
numbers involved or the attempt to defame the whole Church as
a result are not justified. If a school teacher is caught up in such
a scandal no one speaks as if all school teachers are involved
or schools themselves are a bad idea, and yet this is the view
the media seems to have succeeded in encouraging about the
Church.

G. K. Chesterton was right in a way when he said that

‘Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been

8
found difficult and left untried’.3 Or to put it less extremely, there
is a real distinction to be made between ‘faith’ and ‘religion’: the
former a living and personal encounter; the latter the necessary
but often very imperfect institutional forms to which many
believers adhere with what may be very limited understanding
and very conventional practice.

Intellectually as well as culturally Professor Dawkins and

his allies, as has often been said, share with their most extreme
religious opponents a desire to sideline more thoughtful
believers. We must be careful not to let the creationists, for
example, set the agenda but we must equally refuse to let the
enemies of religion get away with the idea that most believers
are fundamentalists. Only a small minority of people in this
country believe in creationism, for example, and it is by no
means the case that the majority of Protestants in the world do.
Pope Benedict XVI has reaffirmed that Roman Catholics do
not believe in creationism and he has also refused the request
to endorse the theory of intelligent design. The great medieval
theologian St Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274) was very clear that
God worked through secondary causes and was to be seen as the
ultimate cause or reason behind the physical causes of creation
rather than the physical cause Himself. Today theologians speak
of the universe’s dependence on God as the space in which He
will finally work out His purposes. These are not easy matters
to conceptualise, but it is disappointing that a scientist of the
eminence of Stephen Hawking did not investigate theological
ways of thinking before announcing that the universe has no
need of God. The brains of highly intelligent non-believers
desert them on these subjects just as much as the brains of

9
simplistic believers do (and with much less excuse).

To sum up this whole section it can be said that the claim

that all religion is bad is simply untenable. To lump together St
Francis of Assisi and suicide bombers; the Inquisition and the
Salvation Army is absurd. Looking from a purely secular and
objective point of view the scientist Freeman Dyson makes the
point in a way that ought to be definitive:

We all know that religion has been historically, and

still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great
good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars
and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of
religion. We have also seen large numbers of people
inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing
education and medical care to the poor, helping to
abolish slavery and spread peace among nations...4

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Where is the Evidence?

At the core of the Dawkins case is the assertion that religion is

irrational. This is actually no more than an assertion, but it has
been repeated so often and so loudly in recent years that many
people in this country have come to take it as an established
fact, including intellectuals who ought to know better. But
where is the evidence for this assertion, or more accurately,
what possible kind of evidence could there be that would prove
it to be true? Looking at the universe around them and in the
light of their own experience as well as their traditions many
people have concluded that there is an ultimate spiritual power
that they call ‘God’. Theologians of the major world faiths have
attempted to argue their case logically and carefully (theology
as an academic discipline has to use the methods of reason
and documentation of evidence). At a completely different
level the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, to take one very
impressive example, has found time and again in the very
immediate details of practical experience that invoking what
they call a person’s ‘Higher Power’ has extraordinary effects in
rescuing people from addictions. These and many other such
experiences and convictions may be founded on a genuine
mistake. It is difficult to see, however, how they can simply be
described as ‘irrational’.

Of course, as already said, many believers may have

simple views of their faith, and their religion may be mixed
with superstition or at the very least they may be unable to
articulate it in mature terms to themselves or others. (This does
not necessarily mean that their actual relationship with God is

11
inadequate.) Yet Pope Benedict was very insistent in his recent
Westminster Hall address that religion needs reason to guard it
against various errors and dangers of the kind already discussed
here.

What it comes down to in the end is that Professor Dawkins

and his allies adopt a lowest common denominator approach,
presenting a travesty of religious concepts. Dawkins himself
is remarkably honest about his refusal to read theology, and
this creates a very convenient situation for him. It is all
irrational rubbish anyway, so he therefore doesn’t have to read
the arguments of those throughout the ages who have tried to
present their case in reasonable terms. The consequence is that
he assumes he knows what Christian faith teaches and instead
of finding out knocks down the scarecrows he has set up himself
whilst attacking believers for their credulity in believing his own
distorted version.

It is Dawkins’ scientific background that leads him to ask

‘Where’s the evidence?’ and this is an entirely legitimate
question; only he has refused to listen to the answers. Believers
are not expected to believe without reasons and as a leap in the
dark, as is sometimes supposed. How could we be expected to
believe anything under those circumstances? As one theologian
puts it very clearly, ‘Belief in God, if it arises at all, arises out of
observed facts, and belief in the Christian God arises out of the
observed facts concerning Jesus’.5

We must be careful, however, not to allow ourselves to be

boxed into a narrowly conceived purely physical definition of

12
what ‘evidence’ is. That is not how we conduct our lives in
other respects. In a well known article about religious language
Ian Ramsey refers to its validity in terms of a comparison with
the experience of trustworthiness in personal relationships
of friendship and love.6 Can we scientifically prove the
trustworthiness of our mother, our spouse, our friend? No, but
we empirically experience it if we are fortunate by a series of
repeated events that in the end convince us beyond reasonable
doubt.

‘Evidence’ is not a scientific word but a legal one, and

we find in the legal system not only forensic science but also
circumstantial evidence, testimony from witnesses, character
evidence, and an intuitive sense that has to sum up the relative
weight of all these factors to reach a verdict. Interestingly
enough ‘witness’ and ‘testimony’ are both religious words too,
words used to indicate trustworthy reports about matters of faith.

What we need to understand is that religious discourse comes

not from philosophical speculation but from human experience,
reflected on in its deepest meanings. Just as in some aspects
of physics, we can only understand spiritual realities by a kind
of echo-chamber effect of their reverberations in the world of
matter. As the greatest psychologist of religion William James
(never even mentioned in The God Delusion), writes in The
Varieties of Religious Experience,‘spiritual energy flows in and
produces … effects within the phenomenal world’.7 Professor
Dawkins has a very short section on religious experience in The
God Delusion, and he takes such experience entirely in the sense
of extraordinary phenomena: visions, the hearing of supernatural

13
voices and so on. Naturally enough from his perspective he
regards them as hallucinations and illusions. He does not seem
to realise that all mainstream religions and all the best known
mystics caution against placing trust in them. Even, for example,
the dramatic events at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal, which
Dawkins discusses, are not so much affirmed directly by the
Catholic Church as allowed by it, said not to be in conflict with
it.

Religious experience as a whole is not about the world of

ostentatious miracles but about human experience seen in its
spiritual and religious dimension. Ian Ramsey in the article
referred to above presents various contexts and usages in which
the word ‘God’ may be held to have an experiential and even
empirical context. All human beings, whether they know it
or not (although a remarkable number of people who are not
specific believers testify to it), have some evidence of God, and
this comes to them through their human experience (of which
reason is a part): their sense of life as a gift or as a blessing or
as a mystery or as making an unconditional moral demand on
them. Theologies and arguments for God have been built up on
these grounds, and it is true that they are especially helpful in
opening up possibilities for dialogue with non-believers.

For believers, however, the crucial evidence is much more

specific. The scientist A. R. Peacocke goes so far as to insist on
using the language not only of experience but even, by analogy,
of experiment in talking about God. He says that we gradually
come to compare religious doctrines with the historical accounts
about Jesus and with our own experiences in life in our present-

14
day communities of belief. This process of checking one against
another amounts to an ‘empirical testing of the worthwhileness
…of the public formulations which summarize past Christian
experience and events’.8

General theoretical and abstract arguments about the

existence of God or God as original creator are thus not really
the point. The great French Christian and scientist Pascal
famously proclaimed, ‘The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
the God of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers’ (‘Memorial’
found sewn in his clothing after his death). The author of the
popular religious novel The Shack puts it quite nicely by saying
‘God is a verb not a noun’.9 God is known in his action, in
encounter in the world of history. He is the one experienced as
liberator and law-giver by the community of Israel in the Old
Testament, who did not ‘arrive at their faith …by conjuring
up or inventing a deity’ but came to realise his action in what
happened to them.10 This is the God who is the agent and the
subject of the Kingdom in the New Testament. For Christians,
of course, God is above all the one encountered and experienced
in and through Jesus Christ. Professor Dawkins patronisingly
mocks Christians as having an ‘imaginary friend’. He has
a genuine respect for Jesus himself, and once proposed an
‘atheists for Jesus’ movement, but he does not seem to realise
that Christians believe Jesus, a real human being, whose
historical existence no reputable scholar doubts, to be the
mediator and revealer of God. As one theologian says, ‘it is
not possible to doubt the reality of God, once we have known
One in whom God is recognisably present, drawing us into
fellowship with Himself’.11

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Faith in the Community

The Bible is a central record and report of religious

experience, and it also has the evident capacity of passing that
experience on to us. The biblical communities of Israel carry
forward into the life of the early church, since Christianity
would not have come into existence without the religion of
Israel. The life of that early church in turn leads on to the life of
the post-New Testament church, and continues up to the present
time. Through reading the original documents as passed on
by the early communities it is possible to some extent to share
their reported experience. It is very much the claim to evidence,
witness and testimony that is made there:

That which was from the beginning, which we have

heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we
have looked at and our hands have touched—this
we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life
appeared; we have seen it and testify to it….We
proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that
you also may have fellowship with us. (1 John 1:1-3)

From these very earliest times in the history of the Christian

community believers recognised that they experienced not
just the memory and meaning of Jesus but also something
very much more profound—they realised that in a mysterious
way they were able to share in his continued life, activity and
presence. They also came to understand that they were able
to be the presence of Jesus for each other and for the world
at large—that as a group, as modern English might say, they

16
embodied his presence. A famous statement attributed to St.
Theresa of Avila (1512-1582) says that ‘Christ has no body
now but yours’. In and through the community of today we
are able to encounter Jesus, as energy flows from the original
source through the historical communities and into each of us
in the present. Another well known spiritual guide, the French
Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), writes: ‘Jesus Christ
has lived in the past and still lives in the present; he began in
himself and continues in his saints a life that will never finish…
O life which is initiating new operations at every moment!’12
Or in the strikingly contemporary terms in which I heard a
missionary nun put it, ‘it is still possible to access Christ today’.
At the same time we also realise that such an encounter is not a
purely subjective experience, any more than our experience of
any other person is. It is validated by the other members of the
current community and by comparing the reported experience of
the original foundational community with our own.

To use the same bodily metaphor in an alternative

sense, these early communities experienced that they were
incorporated into Christ, given a new identity that was shared
with others who also became part of him. This is the traditional
doctrine of the church as ‘the Body of Christ’, and although it is
not a way of thinking that is very familiar in the modern world
it can come to be a very deep and rich reality. Certainly in the
Bible these ideas are far from just being metaphors. Israel in the
Old Testament is seen as one entity, a kind of collective person
which draws its sense of identity from the whole community
in which the individual members share. The New Testament
goes further: not only is the Church the Body of Christ, the way

17
in which he now lives in the world, but Jesus is seen as the
new Adam, the new representative human being. It is because
of this that his life, death and resurrection affects everyone,
whether they are believers or not. For believers, however, it is
by our experience in the community that we can approach this
belief of the early Church’s in the special, representative and
central quality of Jesus. We come to grasp a whole new sense of
meaning, even a new sense of identity, in recognising in him all
the fullness of what it means to be human, an experience which
‘extends the whole range of meaning and understanding of each
other we had before and modifies it pervasively’. 13

As an American professor of Religious Studies Will Deming

points out, there is a sense in which such religious assertions
cannot be contradicted. There is a radical personal choice
involved in deciding what is of ultimate significance for human
beings: ‘No scientist, using the methods and data of science, can
claim that the Buddha did not achieve enlightenment, that Jesus
is not the Son of God, or that Mohammed is not the prophet
of Allah’.14 On the other hand any genuine commitment to a
belief in the fullness to be found in Jesus is bound to involve
claims of his significance for the whole of humanity as already
suggested. We also find that part of our experience of choosing
Jesus is that we have not so much chosen him as been chosen
ourselves. We can choose to devote our whole lives to football,
for example, but we cannot of ourselves make the choice to
become a great professional player. In that case the gift chooses
the player or at least invites them, in that they would not have
the choice without it, and not to respond would be a pity. We
cannot simply decide to believe of our own free decision; it is a

18
gift. So we come to find it necessary to maintain that in Jesus,
fullness and significance, ultimate meaning, seeks us in grace
and revelation. God is the one who validates Jesus Christ and
perpetuates his life in the life of the community. God is the one
who takes the initiative. We find ultimate meaning. Those who
properly undergo the experience of that meaning could only
fail to affirm it by denying their own integrity. In one way they
have a choice, but not if they wish to be true to themselves and
to what they have experienced.

Furthermore, the decision about ultimate meaning can

be evaluated, even in some senses verified. It has empirical
implications. The person who chooses food or train-spotting as
his or her deepest interest and commitment and who finds the
real point of life in that can be compared, for example, with
the person who chooses Christ. The New Testament claims
that this new life in and with Christ is a ‘life…to the full’ (John
10:10). There are certain tests and criteria that can be applied:
for example, does this commitment seem entirely self-centred
or does it have relevance to the recognition that other people
have the right to make claims on us? Does it have implications
for the fact that we are bound up with the whole human species
and for that matter with the future of the planet? Does it seem
to have transforming effects, making the person more joyful
and more open to life or does it make them narrower? Does it
have anything to say in the face of death? The Catholic spiritual
writer Henri Nouwen writes of his conviction ‘that our few
years on this earth are part of a much larger event that stretches
out far beyond the boundaries of our birth and death’.15 Can
the commitment of which we speak suggest, in other words, a

19
significance that lasts in some way that is humanly recognisable
to us, an ‘inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade’ (I
Peter 1:4) rather than being simply made meaningless in the
annihilation of death?

These are some of the questions which the figure of Jesus and
the Christian community’s experience of him lead us to. They
are certainly not irrational ones, and there is an abundance of
evidence of various kinds that can help to provide answers to
them.

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Footnotes

1. This estimate is for 2009 and is taken from the website www.
adherents.com./Religions_By_Adherents. It is confirmed in a
variety of other sources both online and in print although very
precise figures are not likely to be possible. For the view that
the demographic evidence points to the global future belonging
with Christianity and Islam see Philip Jenkins, The Next
Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, New York,
2007.

2. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopias,

London, 2007.

3.What’s Wrong with the World? London, 1910, Chapter 5.

4. Address in Washington, 16 May, 2000, cited Alister McGrath,

The Reenchantment of Nature, London, 2003, p.155.

5. P.R. Baelz, ‘Is God Real?’ Faith, Fact and Fantasy edited
C.F.D. Moule, London, 1964, p.77.

6. Reprinted in his Religious Language, London, 1957.

7. 1902; reprint London, 1963, p.477.

8. Science and the Christian Experiment, London, 1971, pp.22-

23.

9. William P. Young, London, 2008, p.204.

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10. William K. Mcelvaney, The Saving Possibility, Nashville
and New York, 1971, p.15.

11. H.R. Mackintosh, The Divine Initiative, London, 1934, p.54.

12. Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence reprint London,

1959, p.26.

13. Cornelius Ernst, The Theology of Grace, Cork, 1974, p.60.

14. Rethinking Religion, New York, 2004, p.137.

15. Life of the Beloved, London, 1993, p.110.

All bible references are taken from the New International

Version (revised 1983).

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Further Reading:

In addition to books mentioned above I recommend Alister

McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion (London, 2007) and his other
works, and Keith Ward, Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford,
1997) and What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for
Fundamentalists (London, 2004).

Other good rejoinders to the new atheists continue to appear,

including the works of Karen Armstrong, who does not write
from a traditional theist perspective.

The best analysis of the ways in which Jesus is still present in

the world is in Part One of Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus,
New York, 1999.

23
Many people, especially young people, have been impressed
by the arguments of Professor Richard Dawkins and
Christopher Hitchens against religion. More generally
there is a fear of links between religion and violence. This
pamphlet provides a brief and balanced survey of these
controversies. It goes on to offer a contemporary answer
to the frequently-asked question, where is the evidence
for faith?

About the Author

Dr Tom Woodman is a former Senior Lecturer in English

at the University of Reading. He has published extensively
on the topic of literature and theology.

ISBN is 978--0--9568645--0--5