Comfort My People

Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God (Isaiah 40:1)

***

A friend recently passed along a dialogue between Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous atheist (at least at the moment) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the world’ most famous former atheist and Christian convert (at least at the moment). I’ve written about her story a bit here and here. The interview provides a fascinating window into some of the dynamics that appear when someone “leaves the team.” Hirsi Ali was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Atheism back in the early part of the twenty-first century, but for a variety of reasons, from the political to the intensely personal, recently defected and joined “Team Christian.” Dawkins does his (cringily awkward, at times) best to be supportive of Hirsi Ali as a friend but remains utterly incredulous that she could have turned to such “nonsense.”

Much of the dialogue covers familiar terrain in atheist/theist debates. The God of the holy books is a moral monster, how could anyone believe in him? How can something come out of nothing? Who could possibly believe in some of the miracles Christianity sets forth? How do we explain the rise of consciousness? Dawkins seems mostly content to hang out in this territory, convinced as he (incredibly) remains that all religions are just rivals to science in the “who can rationally explain the most stuff” game. Hirsi Ali tries to steer the conversation in more helpful (or at least interesting) directions by talking about different planes of understanding, and how science alone leaves a rather vast portion of human experience unaccounted for. Dawkins is not having it. The answer to all our problems is simply to double down on rational, secular, humanism. The Enlightenment got it right. We just need to “press harder.” To the question of why the world downstream of the Enlightenment seems to be so despair-inducing, why it seems so utterly inadequate to meet the needs for meaning and purpose for so many, Dawkins professes to offer little besides befuddled (morally superior) incomprehension.

There was a moment in the dialogue that I found very interesting. The mediator asked Dawkins if he would have rather his friend have not converted to Christianity. This question came after Hirsi Ali had shared her quite moving story about being in a place of deep depression and darkness and encountering Jesus there. Dawkins mercifully answered in the negative. He was glad his friend was in a better place, obviously. But this was followed up by a passionate assertion that I have heard him repeat over and over and over through the years. But just because something provides comfort doesn’t mean that it’s true!

What do we make of this? On the one hand, he is course absolutely right. All kinds of people derive comfort from beliefs that I think are false. Some people obviously derive comfort from religious beliefs to which I do not adhere (Islam, Buddhism, etc.). Some people are comforted by believing that “the universe” wants good things for them. Some people are comforted by settling into all kinds of categories of imagined victimhood that confer social status and attention. Some are comforted by the belief that God loves their tribe and not others. Some people are comforted by all kinds of wildly speculative forms of Christianity that make me cringe. Dawkins is surely right to say that the fact that something makes us feel better does not—cannot possibly—mean that it is true.

And yet, two things struck me about Dawkins’ response to Hirsi Ali’s story of finding in Christianity a source of meaning and hope in a very dark place. The first is the category of “truth.” Dawkins is passionately committed to the truth of the matter. Nothing matters more to him than truth. Why? If the universe began and will end in cold, pitiless indifference to human beings or their concerns, then who cares what is true? We are all alone, yes? There is no God to save or spare us a thought, no God to judge or demand anything of us. So why not just believe what is useful? Why not believe whatever gets us through the day (or the cold, dark night)? “To hell with truth,” we could (quite rationally) say. “I just want to grind out my few decades on this chunk of indifferent rock with as much pleasure and as little pain as possible. If believing a few fantasies helps make the medicine go down, great!”

(Dawkins has never, at least to my knowledge, honestly wrestled with the question of where a passion for truth might come from or what it might say about the human animal.)

And second, of course, is the question of comfort. Why should this odd human animal be in need of a thing like comfort? Why should it ever occur to us that the universe should be meaningful or make moral sense? Why do human beings seem dissatisfied with cold, hard, reason alone? Dawkins, of course, claims that this is all he needs, but he does an awful lot of quite zealous moralizing for someone who claims only to believe in what science can prove (how would science ever prove a moral claim?). The fact that human beings are such wonderfully complex, multi-faceted creatures, with appetites for rational explanation, yes, but also for beauty and love and grace and mercy and kindness and meaning and hope and much more besides would seem to demand a willingness to consider far more than just scientific rationality in the attempts to make some sense out of what is true about the world and about the human predicament.

Dawkins is right, the fact that something is comforting does not make it true. But it also doesn’t make it false. And Dawkins might perhaps consider being a bit more curious about this human propensity to desire both truth and comfort. What might this say about us? Might it indeed point to the One who claimed to come full of grace and truth, love and light?

***

Something is afoot in the universe; Someone filled with transcendent brightness, wisdom, ingenuity, and power and goodness is about. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, somewhere deep down a Voice whispers, “All is well, and all will be well.”

— Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust