Richard Dawkins on the Preferability of Christianity
“If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time”
Every human commitment includes some fragment of truth, goodness, or beauty. These crumbs of truth, goodness, or beauty—no matter how fragmentary they may be—will cohere with Christianity in some small way, but they will do more than cohere with some aspect of Christian faith. They will also introduce internal contradictions in any commitment that stands against Christian faith.
That pattern is on full display in a recent interview with atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. In this conversation, he admits he prefers to live in a world founded on Christian values, even as he refuses to “believe a single word of the Christian faith.” Neither other religious commitments nor Dawkins’ own secular commitments have produced “fundamentally decent religion.” It is Christianity that has formed such a world with its ethical values, stunning cathedrals, and stately parish churches. In Dawkins’ own words,
I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.… I would not be happy, if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals, and our beautiful parish churches…. I think it would matter, if we—certainly—substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful…. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time. I mean, to me, it seems to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not…. I like to live in a culturally Christian country… even though I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.
Richard Dawkins, like so many other secularists, is attempting to withdraw funds from a bank—the rich lode of the Christian tradition—while simultaneously refusing to admit that the bank is real. He is living in a contradiction, denying the truth of Christianity while admitting the better world that Christian faith creates.