“Imagine a World with No Religion”: A Word on Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett

Abstract

Moving beyond the writings of Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we encounter some familiar themes in the works and statements of three other prominent New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. We begin with Dawkins, one of the most widely recognized New Atheists. Born in 1941 in British Kenya, he is a renowned English evolutionary biologist and longtime faculty member at the University of Oxford (currently an emeritus fellow). Beginning with his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene (which, among other things, gave us the term meme ), Dawkins has authored numerous books on science. Of course not all of his books are strictly scientific. For our purposes, his 2006 New York Times bestseller The God Delusion is most relevant. On the first page of the book, he sets the tone: “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades,… no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres…” Religion, we are encouraged to believe, is the best explanation for these horrors. Reflecting on 7/7, the July 7, 2005, London suicide bombings that we know now were at least loosely linked to al-Qaeda and that claimed the lives of more than fifty civilians, Dawkins proclaims, “Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.” The four bombers, Dawkins tells us, “were British citizens, cricket-loving, well-mannered, just the sort of young men whose company one might have enjoyed.” And unlike some other terrorists in other countries, these men had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs’ pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash.