George C. Cunningham, MD, MPH, 2009, Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 142268-2119. ISBN-978-1-59102-766-9, 269 pp, ppb, $18, reviewed by
WILLIAM HARWOOD
Decoding the Language of God is George Cunningham’s personal response to the claims of Francis Collins and Collins’s most-cited precursor, C. S. Lewis. That makes it understandable that the author does not include a bibliography, since even Richard Dawkins did not rebut Collins’s specific arguments. It is nonetheless unfortunate that Ronald Aronson’s Living Without God was not consulted, since it would have disabused Cunningham of the blatantly falsified statistics that he quotes as accurate, that the number of nontheists (a term that includes all who do not believe in the god of religion that intervenes in human affairs) is as low as 14.2 percent of the American population.
“I do not think most believers have evil intentions. For the most part they are unaware of just how their belief in the primary importance of a possible supernatural world contributes to the harm done to real people in this real material world” (p.23). I could have made that same statement myself—and so could Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, whom Cunningham denigrates as “militant atheists.” At least he has the integrity to put “militant atheists” in quotation marks.
Chapter six, “The Bible,” can be described as trivial. Ninety percent of it is accurate and comprehensible, but it adds nothing to the findings of Michael Arnheim, Bart Ehrman, Richard Friedman, William Harwood, Randall Helms, Joseph Hoffman, Martin Larson, Gerald Larue, Robert Price, and others. Of course those are all biblical historians who would be equally out of their depth if they ventured into the field of medicine or public health.
Cunningham reports (p. 228) that, according to Collins, the “launching pad” for his transition from nontheism to theism was C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. That confession alone raises doubts about Collins’s capacity for rational human thought even before Cunningham examines it in detail. I wrote of Lewis’s masturbation fantasy, “None of the god delusion’s debunkers proves the insanity of religion and the brain atrophy of its apologists as effectively as the apologists themselves, most notably the poster boy for fairy-tale-think, C. S. Lewis.” Cunningham’s evaluation of Lewis (p. 229) is not different from mine, merely politer.
It should surprise no one that, with C. S. Lewis as a role model, Francis Collins likewise expressed indefensible opinions that led Cunningham to report (p. 230) that, “Collins has cited no scientific evidence that would support the concept of God as a person.” Collins did, however, believe he was offering supporting evidence. Cunningham’s demolition of Collins’s arguments were greatly simplified by the circumstance that Collins’s whole case was a “god of the gaps” rationalization—if science cannot fully explain something down to the minutest detail, then, “God did it.”
Cunningham argues (p. 242) that, “Scientists who defend their nonreligious worldview need to avoid elitist tactics such as denigrating the intelligence of their religious opponents.” Pardon me if I disagree. I do not see him pulling his punches when he says of his opponent (p.65), “Collins finally gives up any claim of being a reasonable scientist when he says, ‘we may never fully understand the reasons’ for suffering as part of God’s plan. What kind of God expects us to live according to a plan that makes no sense to us and is beyond our comprehension? What kind of God would give us a brain that can reason and follow logic then expect us to believe in and worship an irrational, unintelligible, or evil God?”
In spelling out the oxymoronic quality of the belief of some Christian sects (p. 186) that, “It is only because of God’s love and mercy that a few are spared from the torments of hell,” Cunningham comments, “I cannot reconcile this view with the concept of a loving God,” and adds (p. 62), “It is impossible to conceive of or imagine any remotely plausible reason for any all-powerful, all-loving, all-good God to be compelled to cause suffering.” He asks (p. 184), “If humans can do good without evil, cannot God do likewise? If God’s Moral Law prohibits humans from using evil means to accomplish good ends, why does God have to violate the prohibition?”
To the self-evident delusion of Collins, Lewis, and their fellow fantasizers that morality needs a metaphysical author, Cunningham responds (p. 54) by citing “books by Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, among others. The fact that these authors express such moral outrage at religion’s harmful effects does establish that atheists have a set of moral values based on humanistic reason, and they refute the charge that there can be no basis for morality without God.”
Collins postulated that a god of the gaps who hardwired a Moral Law into the human mind could only have been the god Jesus. Cunningham’s rebuttal is many-pronged, starting (p. 48) with, “Collins assumes facts not in evidence, namely, the truth and accuracy of the Bible.” He then proceeds to show that (a) there is no such innate instinct, or there would be no psychopaths; (b) such moral imperatives as do exist can be explained by cultural evolution; and (c) failure to prove an evolutionary basis for altruistic behavior does not prove that “God did it.”
Cunningham asks (p. 78), “If moral standards are such an essential part of human nature, wouldn’t these standards be self-evident and universally accepted?” He continues (p. 79), “Collins’s response is that Moral Law, instilled in us all by God, requires that we kill witches if we really believe they do horrible things and are servants of the devil. I’m sure this argument would be accepted by the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, who sincerely believed we Westerners are servants of the devil and should be killed for the horrible things we do.”
He writes (p. 91), “The Moral Law is violated constantly, so much so that the violations could also be described as intrinsic to human nature …. In fact, Collins prejudices his argument when he names the phenomena the ‘Moral Law’ because he assumes, without independent evidence, that there is a lawmaker, which is the very claim that he is trying to establish.” In summary (p. 93), “If instead of God, Collins proposed that the Moral Law was due to an undetectable altruistic virus implanted in human brains by extraterrestrials, would we, by rejecting the natural explanation proposed, have to accept this explanation as valid? This is why I find Collins’s proposition that the Moral Law is a signpost pointing to divine intervention irrational and not intellectually satisfying.”
Commenting on the claim that the Bible’s myriad of OT death penalties was composed to conform to a divinely-mandated Moral Law, Cunningham asks (p. 147), “Are these parts of the Bible just wrong? Were they right before Jesus was born and wrong now?” And on page 235, “The overwhelming scientific evidence that material things have direct influence in creating the Moral Law makes it clear that there is nothing supernatural about it.”
Cunningham responds to Collins’s citing of other scientists who agree with him (p. 19), “The respect for the power of scientific knowledge explains why people who wish to defend their belief in God always cite the very small number of scientists who are believers … The believers reason that if scientists can share their beliefs, then those beliefs must be rational and scientifically sound.” As for the silent majority (p. 190), “The fact that most scientists avoid any involvement with religion is because it is in their self-interest to do so. Too many scientists are quiet atheists because they feel they would risk loss of public support and private funding.” That reason why the educated are unwilling to come out of the closet also explains why pollsters, by the implied threat of social and economic harm that a truthful answer would trigger, are able to solicit answers that support the pretence that the number of nontheists in the general population is less than half of the true figure of 36 percent.
In direct response to Collins’s claim to speak for a large number of scientists, Cunningham states that (p. 233-234, 236), “Contrary to Collins’s claim that many scientists share his view, such scientists are rarities …. His arguments are more reflective of the needs of Collins’s unique human personality than his scientific intelligence …. In fact, he arrives at his conclusion that the Moral Law is the instillation of a glimpse of divinity only by denying the evidence for the causal role of genes and custom. This leaves the unproved, default explanation that ‘Jesus did it.’ You don’t prove your explanation by proving that some other explanation is false or incomplete.”
Collins rejected Richard Dawkins’ definition of religious faith as, “blind trust in the absence of evidence even in the teeth of evidence.” As Cunningham points out (p. 173), “This is an apt description of Collins’s faith despite his claims of rationality.”
Cunningham also challenges Collins’s claims that religion is basically a force for good; that “Aha!” insights are messages from a source outside of the human brain; that “God”, unlike all the other emotionally-satisfying dreams, is not simply a wish fulfillment; and that the existence of miracles proves the existence of God.
Cunningham agrees with Collins’s contention (p. 48) that, “Wishing for something has no bearing on whether or not that something exists.” He calls the argument that, “all human desires can ultimately be fulfilled, and therefore God must exist to satisfy them” (p. 51), “flawed logic.” He asserts (p. 53-54) that “No scientist or rational person would deny that while god or God might exist elsewhere, god or God also has to exist as a mental state in the brain. But this is where unicorns, fairies, and dragons also reside, and we find no evidence of their existence elsewhere …. While this is only a partial explanation for the persistence of religion, the desire for a loving father and for immortality is based on wish fulfillment.”
Collins recounts various incidents during which he felt a ’special kind of joy associated with flashes of insight.’ … This is not, as Collins claims, ‘an experience that defies a completely naturalistic explanation.’ Collins denies scientific fact when he claims it cannot be explained in term of ’some combination of neurotransmitters landing on precisely the right receptors’” (p. 50).
On miracles (p. 72), “The Jews and Romans of [Jesus'] times witnessed his miracles and still treated him as a troublesome man, or a blasphemer, or a false prophet. They were people with limited scientific knowledge who readily accepted the supernatural. If all the supposed eyewitnesses … were not convinced … why should anyone … accept miracles on the basis of thirdhand biblical stories today?” Furthermore (p. 202), “If Collins and other Christian believers accept biblical reports of miracles and are convinced that miraculous cures at Christian sites are true, don’t they also have to accept the possibility that the miracles of Islam and Hindu gurus are also genuine miracles unexplainable by natural means?”
Collins invoked the last resort of many apologists for their god’s inconsistency, that what seems evil to us is really the deity’s incomprehensible ways. Cunningham probably makes him wish he had left that issue alone. He cites Lewis’s contention that God’s love does not include kindness, and responds (p. 172), “God could be kind to someone God did not love, but God could not be unkind to someone God loved perfectly. Lewis’s attempt to redefine the nature of love as it might apply to God is an unintelligible distortion and describes a God undeserving of worship.”
“Does any religion provide satisfying answers to all the interesting questions about the origin of the universe? The recurring answer that an incomprehensible God did it is an answer that explains nothing. It is like saying, ‘It’s magic’” (p. 117). “My question is, if this perfect being exists, how could he have created in such a slow, wasteful manner such an imperfect universe? … The existence of an imperfect universe is incompatible with the claim that a perfect creator God exists.”
Collins is far from a biblical literalist, and rejects Intelligent Design as “a ‘God of the gaps’ theory, inserting a supposition of the need for supernatural intervention in places that its proponents claim science cannot explain.” As Cunningham points out (p. 170), “This is exactly what Collins does to explain the big bang, the anthropic coincidences, and the Moral Law.”
As for religion doing more good than harm, Cunningham writes (p. 174) that, “Collins cites examples of the ‘wonderful things done in the name of religion: Moses freeing the Jews from Egyptian-imposed slavery (for which there is no historical evidence);’ … If the Bible is historically accurate, Moses and the Jews used their freedom to commit genocide against the inhabitants of Palestine and established their own slaves.”
Cunningham got a few things wrong. He got far more right. And if his pretence that religion is not a contagious form of insanity leads to his book being read by curable believers who would not expose themselves to the findings of the authors he denigrates as “militant atheists,” that makes it as useful a contribution to the promotion of reality as theirs.