It's a Bad Bad Bad Bad World

     Mr. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, believes that the world is a bad job.  So bad is it, that people who still believe in an objective and ultimate Goodness must be brought to heel by the power of the state and by something called "education."  So ugly is it, that people who still believe in an objective and ultimate Beauty must recant.  Then, when the whole "unscientific" question of goodness or beauty is out of the way, all may indulge themselves in deeds that are neither good nor bad nor beautiful nor ugly.  And that would be a good and beautiful thing.

     Mr. Dawkins' principal reasons for believing that the world is a bad job can be expressed simply enough: animals eat other animals, and people die.  That these things are not news to peasant Christians seems not to occur to him.  If I live in Monday and have to die on Tuesday, that fact alone seems sufficient to pronounce the world bad.  One might as well ask whether, though I should have to die on Tuesday, my getting to live on Monday is not sufficient to pronounce the world good.  I rather like my Monday, and I suspect Mr. Dawkins likes his, too.  But people die: therefore it is absurd to hope in a God who promises a conquest of death.  He might as logically have argued, people live: therefore it is natural to hope in a God who promises life, and that in abundance.

     Such people as Mr. Dawkins pretend to be terribly sensitive to the bad -- but I wish they were more sensitive.  A man who gapes at pornography is not therefore sensitive to sex; he is probably well on his way to making himself insensible to it.  If Maureen O'Hara were to walk into his living room, in ordinary dress, such a man might hardly raise an eyebrow.  His pulse would keep on at its dead rate.  He would not notice her sex, speaking through the lilt in the voice, the slenderness of her arms, her teasing manners, her light step, her attention-commanding womanhood.  If Mr. Dawkins really believed that the world was a bad job, rather than just being angry with those who don't agree with him, he might eventually get around to wondering whether that badness included the part of the world known as Mr. Dawkins.  That is, he might conclude that he himself is a bad job.  Then he might do as Job did, and curse the world -- not God -- from his knees.  I'll take seriously someone who says the world is bad -- if he says it from that posture.

     The same kind of insensibility is to be found in Christopher Hitchens, who used to say that Mother Teresa was a selfish woman.  She only fed and cleaned and nursed the untouchables of Calcutta because it brought her pleasure to do so.  Now that it turns out that she suffered worse than her patients did, he says that she was brought to despair because she supposed that God might not exist.  Here Hitchens sets himself up as a skeptic, when really he is insensible to doubt.  It never occurs to him that Mother Teresa might have suffered, not because she feared that God might not exist, but because she was certain that Mr. Christopher Hitchens did.  I'm not being facetious here.  Hitchens is only playing at skepticism -- he draws a nice protective fence around himself.  If he were really a doubter, he might come round, as Chesterton says, to doubting himself.  He might have wondered whether his existence were the cause that someone else should doubt the existence of a benevolent God.  Had he done that, he might have understood a little bit about Mother Teresa.

     They remind me of my college days, when it was the fashion to hole up in a room with some buddies, listen to music to be miserable by, indulge in some depressive substance, and talk for hours on the rottenness of life.  For the refutation of which, the best remedy is not an argument but an open window, a kick, and a laugh.