One of the central theses of Richard Dawkins and his “new atheist” confreres is that God is a delusional projection of the human psyche. This is no new argument, but is an especially pervasive one that carries a lot of weight in our psychological age. To a vaguely curious and interested listener, it offers a certain plausibility. To be clear, this is by no means Dawkins’ only or even most important argument. In his preface to The Blind Watchmaker he claims that human beings are conditioned to see elegance as premeditated design. He goes on: “This is probably the most powerful reason for the belief, held by the vast majority of people that have ever lived, in some kind of supernatural deity.” There is a connection, however, between the “no design in nature” argument and the “God delusion” argument. Both are based on an illusion fabricated by the human brain. “God” comes from an ancient desire to see purpose working in our world. According to River Out of Eden, man looked around himself and saw many artifacts and then “projected” the same kind of purpose onto nature.
In The God Delusion it works a little differently. Dawkins uses the example of a moth – along with his Feuerbachian mirror book cover – to drive home his point. A moth navigates its way by means of the parallel beams of the moon’s light in order to fly a straight line. It is wired to use these beams as a navigational guide. Along with the creation of artificial light, however, the moth, continuing to use its nature given navigational device, now ends up flying straight into an artificial light. Without going into too many details of how this happens, the moth, whose eyesight formerly worked perfectly fine for what it was needed, now is the cause of its own suicide. The initial question was: Why does a moth commit suicide? Now however scientists have discovered that the apparent ‘suicide’ of moths is simply the byproduct of a perfectly adequate eyesight and navigational system that has not adapted to the advent of artificial light. Similarly, the argument goes, the built in tendency to listen to authority figures, which usually proves advantageous has, in the case of religion, given rise to the ridiculous notion of a God.
What Dawkins fails to explain in this case, however, is the why and the how of this. In the analogy, who is the moon? Can it be God? In which case the moth has only been sidetracked from the true light by which it is supposed to navigate. The defect proves the rule and Heidegger is proven right: the god of ontotheology is no God at all. Or as Marion argues, we must move beyond the god of “beings,” another thing like every other thing in our world, and rediscover who God is. The artificial light is an idol, a projection of our own faces, while the moon is an icon, simply reflecting borrowed light, redirecting us toward the true light source. But to say that the artificial light is not God is no surprise. It is simply to say that any light that is of human creation will always be a projection.
Dawkins makes a similar mistaken analogy in River Out of Eden. Human beings are hardwired, so it seems, to see purpose everywhere. Prehistoric man looked around himself and saw artifacts, utensils. He then projected onto nature what he saw in artifacts, i.e., that it had a designer and a purpose as well. Dawkins’ logical problem remains. How can the illusion of purpose come from artifacts if man created those artifacts? The originary source of the desire for purpose – or God – in the human brain has yet to be identified.
Jacques Derrida articulates the question of the true light source as a problem of exemplarism. The basic dilemma here for Derrida is whether certain universal structures have their origins in religion or prior to religion and only come to light through the medium of religious faith. For example, Marx opted for the concept of “messianism” as more primordial and original than the “messianic.” The concept of messianism, of a future hope for which a people can live, is more original than any claim to the actual historical coming of a messiah. Derrida continues: “is revealability more originary than revelation, and hence independent of all religion? Independent in the structure of its experience and in the analytics relating to them?” The Enlightenment made precisely this claim, arguing for a modernist epistemology that admits of no “archaeology” of knowledge whatsoever. And there is here a certain fundamentalism of knowledge. No knowledge has a pedigree to which it is irrevocably tied. Once the universal concept – of the person, messianism, revealabilty, for example – has been abstracted, the origins of “person” in Trinitarian theology, of messianism in Jewish hope, and of revealability in Revelation, can then be happily discarded as merely historical shells. Now that “revealability” has been grasped, a Revealer who is the condition for the possibility of all that is revealed, that Light by which all things shimmer out from the gloom, can be discarded. He is no longer needed. Even worse, he gets in the way of further progress.
And so cracks begin to surface in the thesis. To divorce Derrida’s universal structures of experience from their roots is to hurtle towards Nietzsche’s abyss. It is precisely here that Dawkins’ analogy of the moth actually becomes helpful. Or was not Marx’s example enough, of a messianism without a messiah and any true transcendent hope? If there truly is no moon, no light, no Revealer by which all “revealability” is grasped, then the inner orientation of all human beings has no goal. And if this is the case, then Dawkins, rather than Derrida is right. Let us listen to Derrida’s conclusion:
At issue there is a “general structure of experience.” This messianic dimension does not depend upon any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly to no Abrahamic religion…. An invincible desire for justice is linked to this expectation…. This justice, which I distinguish from right, alone allows the hope, beyond all “messianisms,” of a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced. This justice inscribes itself in advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.
Derrida’s hope becomes that of Marx’s. And at least it is a hope. But notice the danger: Derrida is asking for a projection, an artificial light, built by all humans so that a globalized world has something for which to live. But here Dawkins is accurate. If we build Derrida’s light, like moths, we will all end up flying into it, thereby destroying ourselves. We will destroy the world. As Henri de Lubac argues convincingly:
Spirit, reason, liberty, truth, brotherhood, justice: these great things, without which there is no true humanity, which ancient paganism had half perceived and Christianity had instituted, quickly become unreal when no longer seen as a radiation from God, when faith in the living God no longer provides their vital substance. Then they become empty forms.
But Dawkins’ answer is no better. Or maybe we actually can take his analogy at his word, and hope that, moving beyond all false conceptions of God – all artificial light – we can once again find the moon. Without finding the moon, we relapse into Dawkins’ cold world of selfish genes and DNA survival. Fortunately for us, his logic is weak, and rather than settling for his Feuerbachian version of projection, we can continue to kill false projections of god in order to find the true Father. But at least in our times, atheists are faced with a choice: Either the projected messianism and justice of Derrida’s future, or the logical fallacy of Dawkins’ past. As for us Christians, we will continue to navigate by the moon.
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