One of a series of five-minute interviews on the BBC website conducted by Matthew Stadlen. Dawkins gives quick summary answers to a number of quick-fire questions about his atheism. As in his debate with John Lennox in Oxford, he doesn’t entirely dismiss the possibility of God, but clearly doesn’t think there is any evidence worth paying attention to. Dawkins is rightly insistent on the importance of evidence. He says, ‘there’s no reason to believe anything for which there isn’t any evidence.’ Absolutely. The problem is what kinds of evidence Dawkins considers to be legitimate. In A Devil’s Chaplain (p. 248) he writes:

Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

I agree with this completely. My quibble is with his underlying assumptions that the only valid evidence is empirical and that only scientific knowledge is valid. The trouble with these assumptions is that they are self-defeating. You cannot scientifically prove, or have empirical evidence for, the idea that only scientific knowledge is valid and that you need empirical evidence for everything.

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Roger Ebert is the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and one of the most respected critics in the world. He has often commented on spiritual issues in a way which suggests he has a real interest in them, but no convictions about there being any spiritual reality. He’s not alone in this, of course. He has recently posted on his blog an explanation of where he’s come from, in a religious sense, and where he is now. He had a Catholic upbringing which he views very positively, in terms of the morality it instilled in him, but which didn’t apparently help him to develop any confidence in the existence of God himself:

Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them. Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God continued to lessen. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a non-practicing Lutheran, until a death bed conversion which rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake.

Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category for people to apply to me. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. Chaz, who has a firm faith, leaves me to my beliefs. “But you know you’re one or the other,” she says. “I have never told you that,” I say. “Maybe not in so many words, but you are,” she says.

But I persist in believing I am not. During in all the endless discussions on several threads of this blog about evolution, intelligent design, God and the afterworld, now numbering altogether around 3,500 comments, I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist – which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.

I understand why Roger Ebert wants to avoid being labelled as an atheist, but I’m not sure he can avoid the agnostic label quite so easily. It just means he doesn’t know, but it doesn’t, as he suggests, carry the connotation that he could or even should know, but cannot or will not. But it is just a label, and we all too easily use labels to pigeon hole people and even attack them without actually listening and understanding them. Later in his post, Ebert says:

If there was a First Cause, was there a First Causer? Or did Big Bangs just happen to happen? Can we name the First Causer “God?” We can name it anything we want. I can name it after myself. It is utterly insignificant what it is called, because we would be giving a name to something that falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge. So it is a futile enterprise.

Ebert raises important questions. Why do Big Bangs happen? Why is there something rather than nothing? As Stephen Hawking once remarked,

. . . Even if there is only one unique set of possible laws, it is only a set of equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern? Is the ultimate unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that. (Black Holes and Baby Universes, (London, Bantam Press, 1993) p. 99)

Given that everything we know about the universe and everything we experience points to the existence of causes for effects, there must be a first cause for the universe. Yes we can name that First Cause anything at one level, but it is only insignificant what we choose to call it if that first cause is impersonal. But what if the Christian understanding that the first cause is a personal God is right? Then it matters enoromously. Roger Ebert would not think it utterly insignificant if I decided to call him whatever I liked. The difference between the two, he would say, is that Ebert is knowable and falls well within various categories of thought, while ‘God’ or ‘First Cause’ ‘falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge.’ This is an extraordinary claim. At a stroke he dismisses all of theology, all Christian experience and all Christian history. It is true that any God is intrinsically beyond my ability to understand completely, because God is infinite and I am decidely finite. But that does not mean I cannot know some things about God. Why must any God be unknowable? Inaccessible to scientific exploration, yes, because God is a spiritual being and science is only able to deal with the physical dimensions. It is reasonable to assume that God is unknowable if it all starts with, and depends on us. But what if God chooses to communicate? What if he chooses to reveal himself to human beings down through history, particularly through divinely inspired writings? What if he chooses to take on properties of the physical creation and step into it as a human being, revealing in his words and actions God himself? What if he did this in order to rescue us from our rebellion, or our ignoring him, in order to develop a relationship with us? What if he even wants to live in us, transforming us more into his likeness? The simple answer is that it would change everything. No longer would God be remote, inaccessible, unknowable, unfathomable. No longer would God be irrelevant. The Christian claim is that all my ‘What ifs’ are answered in the affirmative: this is precisely what the Bible claims has happened. If it’s true, it makes the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the central event of history. It is not only a question of what the Bible says, either. Jesus’s life and death, even his resurrection, are events for which there is very strong historical evidence. And the testimony of millions of Christians down through history is that have personally experienced the inward transformation which a relationship with God brings. Isn’t Roger Ebert missing something vital here by defining God as unknowable and irrelevant? As Francis Schaeffer said of God many years ago, ‘He is there and he is not silent.’

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