Can an atheist be a thinker?

This question inevitably pops up every time Richard Dawkins makes the news. My answer remains the same: probably not. Dawkins certainly isn’t.

An atheist may be a clever chap, but a thinker picks up where a clever chap leaves off. He makes that critical next step from particular to universal thought, from analysis to synthesis, from empirical facts to the underlying causes.

Dawkins can’t think logically, thereby failing to qualify even for cleverness. Compile a list of logical fallacies, then read any chapter of any of his books and you’ll find illustrations of every fallacy on that list.

All Dawkins does is provide pseudoscientific non-arguments for strident atheism, which has proved to be quite lucrative. Our dumbed-down masses have replaced ideas with ideologies, of which strident atheism is either the sum total or a big part. Dawkins’s animadversions thus play back to them what they themselves feel, but can’t express for lack of the requisite jargon.

A recent article in The Times says that “Dawkins is, of course, one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals”. It goes on to commend “his clear thinking” and concludes that “he values the truth above false consolations. He is intellectually rigorous to a fault.”

As proof of that rigour, the article cites Dawkins’s maxim “evidence is the only reason to believe anything.” In other words, doubting Thomas was right when refusing to believe anything he couldn’t touch.

This is feeble for someone “intellectually rigorous to a fault”. Empiricism in general is the lowest form of cognition. Great thinkers from Aristotle onwards regarded empirical evidence as at best the first step of an intellectual quest, not its entirety.

Dawkins’s statement dismisses in one fell swoop things like inspiration, intuition, revelation and ratiocination, discarding in the process not only faith but also philosophy. In reality, faith is an indispensable form of knowledge. Even most scientific discoveries start from an act of faith, otherwise known as hypothesis. Einstein, for example, had been sure his theory was true years before it was supported by experimental evidence.

Empiricists, even those who are much cleverer than Dawkins (and I know a few), suffer from a singular lack of imagination, which is leavened with conceit. Their mental faculties don’t stretch to visualising the existence of things they haven’t touched, seen or heard.

Therefore, and this is where conceit comes in, they’re ready to deny the existence of such things a priori. It doesn’t occur to them that minds superior to their own may not suffer from the same limitations.

Our rigorous public intellectual blithely breaks an immutable law to which there are no known exceptions: Atheists must never, under any circumstances and whatever the provocation, talk about God, and especially argue against Him.

Even if their names are Dave (as in Hume) or Manny (as in Kant), whenever they broach this subject they sound as dumb as any old Tom, Dick or Harry. And not even Dawkins’s greatest admirers would, one hopes, put him into the same bracket as Hume and Kant.

His ignorance of this subject starts with the very concept of God, that is, to quote Pascal, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants.” If he had even cursory understanding of this concept, he wouldn’t be uttering vulgarities along the lines of “Who created God?”

That’s like asking “Why do eagles fly and pigs don’t?” God is by definition the uncreated creator. The moment the word God is uttered, that definition comes into play. Anyone is entitled to disbelieve, but no one is entitled to pervert the definition of God to suit some nefarious purpose.

When Dawkins thinks he’s arguing against God, he’s actually talking about the pagan demiurge who gives order to the universe – not the infinite, self-differentiating, self-sufficient fountain of being that gives existence to everything else ex nihilo. That God doesn’t exist, Dawkins is right about that. It’s because of real God that everything else exists.

In common with many ignoramuses, Dawkins, who knows next to nothing of theology and philosophy, doesn’t hesitate to take on those who know next to everything. Thus he attacks Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ without understanding a single one of them.

For example, it’s possible to take issue with St Thomas’s arguments from causality, and some serious thinkers have done so. Aquinas argued that, since every motion and thing has a cause, then, going back in time step by step, we must logically arrive at an entity that is itself caused by nothing, a “first cause” (“and this we understand to be God”).

But Dawkins doesn’t argue, he perverts. Unaware of the difference between primary and secondary causality, he seems to think that by a ‘first cause’ Aquinas meant some kind of a domino that pushed a series of other dominoes into motion. This even though throughout his Summa St Thomas explicitly states that the first, primary cause is qualitatively different from all subsequent, secondary causes.

In general, the great mind seems to favour as his debating technique the ‘straw man’ fallacy, distortion of the opponent’s real position. Thus he repeatedly accuses Christianity of demanding mindless belief and discouraging science: “Religious faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation… because it discourages questioning, by its very nature”.

This is ignorant gibberish. In fact, natural science in any modern sense could only have appeared within Christendom.

It was thanks to Christian philosophy that mediaeval scientists realised something the Greeks hadn’t: nature obeyed universal laws because it was created by a universal law-giver. Moreover, those laws and indeed the world itself existed objectively, outside man’s senses.

Since God was rational, his laws were rationally knowable. The scientists’ job was understood as finding out what those laws were, and this understanding lies at the heart of every presupposition of modern research. (This regardless of whether the scientist has lost or preserved the original faith.)

That’s why science eventually became incomparably greater in the West than in any other civilisation – only Christendom possessed and cultivated the essential prerequisites. Why, even Dawkins’s own science, genetics, was founded by an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel.

But we must be grateful to Dawkins. He provides a clear, negative, answer to the question in the title.