Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion tells us that he is often asked about Hitler and Stalin. Weren’t they atheists? This is a tough question for him and, as he often does with tough questions, he approaches it by going on the offensive. The question, he tells us he, is put into
“a gruesome, indignantly charged form with two assumptions: not only (1) Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but (2) they committed their terrible deeds because they were atheists.”
In fact, the question is perfectly legitimate and deserves to be taken seriously. However, before we consider it, let’s take a brief look at how Dawkins approaches it.
His strategy is to question the same two assumptions. He tells us that assumption (1) is irrelevant because assumption (2) is false. Regarding assumption (2), the question to be asked is:
“if atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the slightest amount of evidence that it does.”
Having stated his argument in this way, Dawkins turns most of this section to an irrelevant assumption (1), with particular emphasis on Hitler’s views on religion. We are treated to a long treatise on Hitler’s religiosity or feigned religiosity: Dawkins hesitates, not knowing whether he wants to blame Hitler’s religion or that of the German people for the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime. Having devoted five pages to Hitler, Dawkins reaches an inconclusive conclusion. Yet even he cannot find anything remotely religious to say about Stalin. He simply says:
“Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t; but even if he was, the starting point of the Stalin/Hitler debate is very simple. Individual atheists can do bad things, but they don’t do them in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler they did extremely bad things, in the name of dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, respectively, and insane, unscientific eugenics theory tinged with Subwagnerian ravings. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been terribly frequent in history. No I can think of no war that has been fought in the name of atheism.”
There are a number of points that emerge from Dawkins’s argument. Let’s deal with them in turn:
First, despite Dawkins’s obvious wish that it be otherwise, Hitler was not a Christian, and his policies were not religiously based either. The planned extermination of the Jews was a political act of genocide carried out against a nation, not against a religion. Hitler instigated similar persecutions against the Slavs of Eastern Europe. Sure, he was an evil racist, but he clearly had no religious motives. This is supported by the lack of religious involvement in the rest of Nazi politics. Furthermore, the attitudes of racial inequality assumed by the Nazis were born out of the 19th century Godforsakenness that followed the publication of The Origin of Species, and the increasing adoption of the principles of scientific racism. Kenan Malik in Man, Beast and Zombie tells us:
“When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they proceeded to put into practice many of the theories of scientific racism. They enacted eugenics legislation based on American eugenicist Harry Laughlin’s ‘Model Eugenics Sterilization Act’. This model law called for the sterilization of ‘socially inadequate classes’, including the ‘feeble-minded’, the ‘crazy’, the ‘criminalists’, the ‘epileptic’, the ‘drunk’, the ‘sick’, the ‘blind’, the ‘deaf ‘ and the ‘dependents,’ a category that included ‘orphans, destitute, homeless, vagrant, and poor.’ Two million people were determined to be dysgenic and were sterilized.”
It is evident that Hitler was not a Christian. He also did not wage war on behalf of the Christian or any other God. Surely he was an evil racist (namely his attitude towards Jews and Slavs), which is a philosophy far removed from Christianity. It is strange, but Dawkins is not the only anti-religious writer determined to represent Hitler as a Christian. Sam Harris does the same thing in End of Faith.
Devoting so much of his argument to this ill-conceived weak point simply demonstrates the shallowness of Dawkins’s main argument.
Second, it is false of Dawkins to claim that he cannot think of a war waged in the name of atheism. And let’s clarify what we mean by atheism. We are not referring to agnosticism, the state of not knowing. We refer to a positive belief in the non-existence of God. And when we frame it in such terms, we can see that atheism is in fact another form of belief and is therefore as much a ‘religion’ as any theistic religion.
Let’s consider the historical perspective. Unsurprisingly, the success and popularity of atheism in Europe over the last two hundred years has been inversely correlated with that of other religions. In fact, its success during that time has been due less to its inherent appeal and more to its radical nature (radical at the time, of course), capitalizing, as it did, on the democratization of Europe. By the 19th century, traditional religion had been lost and corrupted and had become little more than an organ of state. Resistance to the Church broke out, and with this resistance came a resurgence of atheism. Seeing atheism in this historical context allows us a different perspective on its merits. And there were many, of course, who recognized the evils of established religion but made the distinction between such religion and God. In 1759, Voltaire published the satire Candide, a powerful attack on the French Catholic Church. In this work, Voltaire described atheism as an overreaction to religious corruption. Remove that corruption and atheism would lose its appeal. However, the speed of change in the world hit the established church hard. The change was accelerating in all aspects; social, political, economic and technological, and people turned to this alternative ‘new’ religion for a worldview that would explain this brave new world. (By the way, this contrasts with the United States, where the constitution mandates separation of church and state, and, as a result, where atheism was far less successful.) French Revolution in 1789. It says:
“A brave new world was coming, firmly rooted in nature and reason. And equally committed to freeing humanity from ‘tyranny’ and ‘superstition’. The wisdom of the day was as simple as it was powerful: eliminate God, and a new future would dawn.”
So what happened to the ‘ideals’ of the Revolution? Within a couple of years, the Revolution itself had been replaced by the Terror, a term that became synonymous with unspeakable cruelty and persecution. To what extent can we say that Dawkins’ claim that these atrocities were not carried out in the name of atheism is valid? Even a cursory examination of the file reveals the holes in Dawkins’s argument. In fact, the Terror was founded on atheism, one of its main objectives being the elimination of God. At its core was the forced annihilation of theism and the implementation of atheism. Armees Revolutionaires, for example, were commissioned to forcibly de-Christianize areas of France. Dawkins’ claim that there is “not the slightest amount of evidence” that atheism influences people to do bad things rings hollow when you examine the evidence.
Consider another example; The Soviet state of the 20th century. This state was built on the principles of Marxism, whose roots were in the philosophy of materialism. This holds that the world consists solely of matter and that every aspect of human life and thought is determined by social and economic factors. That is, ideas and values are determined by the material realities of life. The idea of God is nothing more than an attempt to cope with the harshness of this material life. In his theory of historical materialism, Karl Marx described God as an opiate and argued that the origins of religion are socioeconomic, not intellectual, and therefore do not need to be argued intellectually. Religion is a product of social and economic alienation. Get rid of economic alienation and you will get rid of religion. Therefore, atheism is the natural ideology of a communist society.
Alister McGrath, in The Twilight of Atheism, describes the Russian Revolution of 1917 as:
“one of the most important historical events in the history of the world.”
It is significant because it gave the stage to atheism. For the first time, atheism (regardless of whether it is described as an ideology, a worldview, or a religion) had a chance to establish a moral high ground. Of course, now we know that it failed. Stalin, in the name of communism, (for which we have seen that only atheism would fit as a natural ideology), turned out to be, possibly, the most evil man in the history of the world.
And what about other evils committed in this most civilized of centuries. How far had the moral zeitgeist moved when we were unnecessarily bombing Dresden and the other German cities in cold-blooded revenge? Likewise, what factors were at play when we dropped the second atomic bomb on the Japanese, maiming and dispossessing a generation? I’m not saying I can’t understand why people did these things. May l. I’m simply saying they were the product of the man’s imperfections, not any label he might be throwing around. Evil men take advantage of religious differences as well as differences in political ideology, race, color, tribe, etc. Man will always find a label to disguise his greed and corruption.
Finally, we come to Dawkins’ final statement;
“Why would someone go to war for the absence of belief?”
As we have seen. further examination of the evidence has revealed this for what it is, a silly comment. It merely serves to emphasize Dawkins’ one-eyed view when it comes to his own religion in particular.
