Richard Dawkins' Assertion that There Is 'Evil' in the World

It is an imperial war of conquest that happens to beunfolding in an oil rich environment.

by Richard L. Franklin - Oct 12, 2007

The following are words of Richard Dawkins that were sent to Richard Franklin by a reader of Franklin’s Focus. They are followed by Franklin’s response.

A Quotation from Richard Dawkins:

It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.

The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: 'With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'

Franklin Responds:

I was familiar with this Dawkins quote, and I'm sure the sender knew I would hate it because it is profoundly muddled and irrational. What on earth are 'evil deeds'? What are 'evil people'? What are the 'evils' on the alleged list offered by Steven Weinberg?

It just goes to show you that even brilliant people can become enmeshed in idiotic reifications. This fallacy has been with us since the ancient Greeks, and it is probably even more powerful and pervasive today.

There probably is little hope for humankind until we rid ourselves of this fallacy. We will always be facing 'evil empires' and 'evil dictators' and 'evil deeds' to be avenged until we get rid of the habit of doing battle over something that simply does not exist. The blood of millions and millions of human beings has soaked the earth since time immemorial, and it will continue soaking the earth until such time as humans recognize what is a simple logical fallacy.

So long as humans clutch that concept to their breasts, we will have wars and persecutions and massacres and unending violence. The crusades could never have been excused as mission of good against evil had people understood that the knights would not be jousting against about something called 'evil'. The crusades probably had more to do with simple conquest and plunder than battling 'evil'.

It seems at times monumentally crazy that so much blood has been shed over a tangled and senseless semantic confusion --- but it is so. At a personal level, I've sadly lost friends over my insistence on refuting this simple, albeit passionately held, superstition.

I sometimes empathize with Galileo, who was condemned to house arrest for saying the Earth circles the sun. Standing before the pope, he agreed to renounce his claim. Then, as he left the papal chambers , he reportedly muttered under his breath: "Eppur si muove." (But it does move.)

Not facing the wrath of inquisitorial authorities, and following Galileo's model, I feel that I must once again say of 'evil', 'But it does not exist'.

As a final thought, I must repeat that George Bush's 'war against evil' is not a war against a murky fantasy. It is an imperial war of conquest that happens to be unfolding in an oil rich environment. There is no 'axis of evil'. If that reality had not intruded upon the superstitious thinking of most Americans, we might have avoided the latest Gulf war and the endless, senseless spilling of blood over the past six years. Since Iran has been added to the 'axis of evil', we may now face an unleashing of violence against that state. And so on. Evil, it would seem, can be found just about anywhere whenever it suits Empire America.