Challenges to Religious Belief

Throughout history, religious belief has been challenged from philosophical, scientific, psychological, and sociological perspectives. The AQA specification requires you to understand the major challenges to religion, including the New Atheism, classical critiques from Marx, Freud, and Durkheim, and contemporary perspectives from cognitive science. You must also be able to evaluate these challenges and assess their effectiveness.

Key Definition: Atheism — the belief that God does not exist. This is distinct from agnosticism (the view that we cannot know whether God exists) and from secularism (which concerns the role of religion in public life, not the truth of religious beliefs).

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The New Atheism

The term "New Atheism" was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe a group of writers who mounted an aggressive, public challenge to religion in the early 21st century. The four most prominent New Atheists are sometimes called the "Four Horsemen":

Thinker	Key Work	Central Argument
Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)	The God Delusion (2006)	God almost certainly does not exist; religion is a "virus of the mind"
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)	God Is Not Great (2007)	Religion "poisons everything"; it is a source of oppression and violence
Sam Harris (b. 1967)	The End of Faith (2004)	Religious faith is inherently dangerous; science can determine moral values
Daniel Dennett (b. 1942)	Breaking the Spell (2006)	Religion should be studied as a natural phenomenon, not treated as sacred

Dawkins: The God Delusion

Dawkins argues that:

1. The argument from design is demolished by evolution — natural selection explains the appearance of design without a designer.
2. The argument from complexity actually undermines theism — if the universe is too complex to exist without a designer, then the designer must be even more complex and therefore even more in need of explanation ("Who designed the designer?").
3. Religion is a by-product of evolution — our brains evolved to detect agency and purpose in the natural world (an adaptation useful for survival), which makes us predisposed to believe in supernatural agents.
4. Religion is harmful — it promotes blind obedience, in-group/out-group hostility, and the rejection of scientific evidence.

Evaluation:

• Dawkins has been criticised by theologians such as Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion?, 2007) for attacking a simplistic "straw man" version of religion that few serious theologians would recognise.
• Terry Eagleton accused Dawkins of "theological illiteracy," arguing that Dawkins engages with popular religion but ignores centuries of sophisticated theological thought.
• Dawkins' argument about the "complexity" of God assumes that God is a physical entity subject to the same explanatory requirements as material objects — most theologians would deny this.

Hitchens: God Is Not Great

Hitchens' critique is more political and moral than scientific. He argues that religion is the source of much of the world's violence, oppression, and irrationality. Examples he cites include the Crusades, the Inquisition, religious wars, the suppression of women, and the obstruction of medical research (e.g., stem cell research).

Evaluation:

• Hitchens' critics point out that he attributes to religion many conflicts that had primarily political or economic causes.
• The 20th century's most destructive regimes (Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia) were explicitly atheist, raising questions about whether eliminating religion would reduce violence.
• Keith Ward (Is Religion Dangerous?, 2006) argues that religion has been a powerful force for good — inspiring art, education, hospitals, and social reform.

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Karl Marx: Religion as Opium

Karl Marx (1818-1883) argued that religion is a product of social and economic conditions. In a famous passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx wrote:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

For Marx, religion serves two functions:

1. Consolation — it offers comfort to the suffering and oppressed, promising justice and happiness in an afterlife.
2. Social control — it legitimises the existing social order, encouraging the exploited to accept their position rather than rebel against it. Religious concepts such as the "divine right of kings," the virtue of humility, and the promise of heavenly reward discourage revolutionary action.

Marx believed that religion would disappear once the conditions that created it — class exploitation and alienation — were abolished through communist revolution.