Category: Atheism

Over at the Flying Crossbeam, Julian considers Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Normally I enjoy his quirky pieces (even though I still haven’t got the faintest idea what his “Sica” stuff is all about), but I found this really irritating. When Julian writes:

As a Christian who doesn’t hold to Dawkins’ formula, I had to remind myself routinely throughout the book that we were talking about a goofy literal Greek-style anthropomorphized god and not the sort of general principle that I (and I think many Christians) understand as God.

I found myself wondering whether he had actually read Dawkins, and if so how he could have missed this passage:

This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would inevitably – as sure as night follows day – turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction, and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever or whenever they have been or will be invented.

Is Julian’s position “not a whole lot less silly”? I don’t know. I have no idea what he means by “a general principle”. Does it involve the supernatural? Does it imply belief in life after death, or non-material souls? (As Haugeland put it, once you take away all the atoms, is there anything left?) Julian describes himself as a Christian, which in ordinary usage implies a belief in a supernatural God and the unique divinity of Jesus. If this is what Julian believes in, Dawkins is talking about him. (The alternative is just Humpty Dumpty semantics.)
Towards the end, Julian considers the root cause of belief in God; while tribalism is undoubtedly a reinforcing factor, I think we need to dig a little deeper. He also tries to explain his dissatisfaction with Dawkins by considering the difference between science and engineering, but I don’t think his distinction works. Personally, I think that scientists want to know why (in terms of causation, not teleology!), while engineers are fundamentally motivated by how. Julian takes a different tack:

Engineering is not easily performed by the pragmatist. There is certainly a discipline to engineering but at the heart of it, the engineer cares about making things better. Once the scientific rigor has identified to the engineer the nature of the problem, getting to its root and resolving it innocently is a joyous sort of hero’s journey. It requires a romantic.

But there have been many joyfully romantic scientists – Richard Feynman leaps to mind – and we all know talented engineers who are obsessed with solving particular technical problems without regard to whether they are “making things better”.
For a completely different approach to Dawkins, Adam Roberts has posted a wonderfully outrageous parody review over at The Valve.

A few days ago I mentioned John Cornwell’s snide article in the Guardian about Richard Dawkins. Of course Cornwell wasn’t just contributing an article at random: he was flogging his new book, “Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to the God Delusion”. Now there’s nothing wrong with doing a little marketing per se, but it was a pretty awful article, replete with the kind of references to Hitler (a good Catholic) and Stalin that Christopher Hitchens skewers so effectlvely in “God Is Not Great”. But from all the reports I’ve seen, Cornwell’s book, with its preposterous title, is much worse.
Taking some time that I’m sure could have been better spent, Dawkins himself has penned a review of the book under the heading ‘Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity’. He points out how Cornwell persistently misquotes passages from “The God Delusion”, and frequently attributes to Dawkins a position that is the exact opposite of what Dawkins had actually advanced. Dawkins initially wondered if this was simply a result of Cornwell responding to what he expected to read, which is a mistake that many reviewers make. It’s sloppy, but it might be an honest mistake. But after a while, prejudice came to seem less likely than outright mendacity:

But if that is irritating, the following is gratuitously offensive. Cornwell is talking about Dostoevsky’s reading of nineteenth century thinkers. He mentions Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Utopian Marxism, and “a set of ideas that you would have applauded – Social Darwinism.” Does Cornwell seriously imagine that I would applaud Social Darwinism? Nobody nowadays applauds Social Darwinism, and I have been especially outspoken in my condemnation of it (see, for example, the title essay that begins A Devil’s Chaplain).

I’ve read “A Devil’s Chaplain” several times, and I have always been struck by the passion with which Dawkins takes on H. G. Wells’ “Social Dawinist” racism.

I prefer to stand up with Julian’s refreshingly belligerent grandfather T.H.Huxley, agree that natural selection is the dominant force in biological evolution unlike Shaw, admit its unpleasantness unlike Julian, and, unlike Wells, fight against it as a human being.

It is hard to imagine that a serious author would have attempted to rebut Dawkins without reading all of his relevant writings. The inescapable conclusion is that Cornwell knew full well that he was completely misrepresenting Dawkins. And the way he repeats the pattern strongly suggests that this is a deliberate strategy.
A lesser man ((A Pivar, for example.)) might view such a sustained barrage of falsehoods as libellous. Personally, I think that Cornwell’s rants simply come across as ridiculous: he’s not worth a millisecond of legal attention. But I suspect that angels aren’t meant to be liars in his mythology: an apology would certainly seem to be in order.

Richard Dawkins has finally written a review of Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. It’s a delightful piece, complementing Hitchens’ points with anecdotes of his own.
There were a couple of things that struck me. First:

The subtitle has suffered from its Atlantic crossing. The American original, “How religion poisons everything”, is an excellent slogan, which recurs through the book and defines its central theme. The British edition substitutes the bland and pedestrian subtitle “The case against religion”.

I hate it when publishers do this. I hope Hitchens gives them hell. And then Dawkins captures Hitchens’ style precisely:

His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

Richard Burton – of course! I’ve been trying to remember who Hitchens reminded me of!!

Christopher Hitchens has a most enjoyable piece in Vanity Fair about the book tour he did to promote God Is Not Great. It sounds like he had a lot of fun, with Jerry Falwell’s death providing a real bonus. (I missed his appearance at the Town Hall in Seattle, which was a shame.) And then when he got home…

June 10, Washington, D.C.: It’s been weeks on the road, and after a grueling swing through Canada I am finally home. I tell the wife and daughter that’s it: no more god talk for a bit—let’s get lunch at the fashionable Café Milano, in Georgetown. Signor Franco leads us to a nice table outside and I sit down—right next to the Archbishop of Canterbury. O.K., then, this must have been meant to happen. I lean over. “My Lord Archbishop? It’s Christopher Hitchens.” “Good gracious,” he responds, gesturing at his guest—“we were just discussing your book.”
The archbishop’s church is about to undergo a schism. More than 10 conservative congregations in Virginia have seceded, along with some African bishops, to protest the ordination of a gay bishop in New England. I ask him how it’s going. “Well”—he lowers his voice—“I’m rather trying to keep my head down.” Well, why, in that case, I want to reply, did you seek a job that supposedly involves moral leadership? But I let it go. What do I care what some Bronze Age text says about homosexuality? And there’s something hopelessly innocent about the archbishop: he looks much more like a sheep than a shepherd. What can one say in any case about a religion that describes its adherents as a flock?

(HT to Dave for the correction to the title.)

From the Massachusetts General Laws ((Hat tip to AtheistPerspective, via Gene.)):

CHAPTER 272. CRIMES AGAINST CHASTITY, MORALITY, DECENCY AND GOOD ORDER
Chapter 272: Section 36. Blasphemy
Section 36. Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.

Good review by Christopher Hitchens of Mark Lilla’s “The Stillborn God“. (You might have caught Lilla’s related piece in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine.) Hitchens’ conclusion:

To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here’s the totalitarian element again) “plan.” Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do. This was not quite the case in previous centuries or even decades, and I do not think that Lilla has credited us with such slight advances as we have been able to make.

I’ve been reading a beautiful new book called Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Antony. It’s a very personal collection of essays, compelling without being confrontational. One particular piece really grabbed me: the kind that links together several small insights into a huge “a-ha!” moment. It’s “Religion and Respect” by the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and a preliminary draft is available on the web here (in PDF). It’s a long piece that will repay careful reading. Time will tell, but I think it’s going to become part of the “atheist canon”, such as it is.
Let me quote at length on two of the ideas that seized me. First, Blackburn highlights the way in which religion claims respect by trying to hijack the – quite legitimate – respect that we give to emotions:

I have said that holding a false belief does not give anyone a title to respect. Insofar as I cannot share your belief, I have no reason to respect you for holding it — quite the reverse, in fact. But the same is not true of emotions. If I happen upon the funeral of a stranger, I cannot feel the same grief as the close relatives and mourners. But I don’t think they are making any kind of mistake, or displaying any kind of fault or flaw or vice. On the contrary, we admire them for giving public expression to their grief, and if they did not show this kind of feeling they would be alien to us, and objects of suspicion. It is fair to say that we ought to respect their grief, and in practice we do. We may withdraw from the scene. Or, we may inconvenience ourselves to let them go ahead (we turn down our radio). Or, we may waive demands that would otherwise be made (we give them time off work). Similarly a birth or wedding is a happy occasion, and it is bad form to intrude on them with trouble and grief (let alone prophesies of such, as in many fairy stories)….
Unfortunately, it is a gross simplification to bring the essence of religion down to emotion. The stances involved are far more often ones of attitude. And it is a fraud to take the space and shelter we rightly offer to emotional difference, and use it to demand respect for any old divergence of attitude. The relevant attitudes are often ones where difference implies disagreement, and then, like belief, we cannot combine any kind of disagreement with substantial respect. Attitudes are public.
Suppose, for example, the journey up the mountain brought back the words that a woman is worth only a fraction of a man, as is held in Islam. This is not directly an expression of an emotion. It is the expression of a practical stance or attitude, that may come out in all sorts of ways. It is not an attitude that commends itself in the egalitarian West. So should we ‘respect’ it? Not at all.

Blackburn concludes with another important idea: the distinction between the transcendant and the immanent: between believing that “the source of meaning transcends the ordinary mundane world of our bounded lives and bounded visions” and the position that…

… there is another option for meaning, … which is to look only within life itself. This is the immanent option. It is content with the everyday. There is sufficient meaning for human beings in the human world – the world of familiar, and even humdrum doings and experiences. In the immanent option, the smile of the baby, the grace of the dancer, the sound of voices, the movement of a lover, give meaning to life. For some it is activity and achievement: gaining the summit of the mountain, crossing the finishing line first, finding the cure or writing the poem. These things last only their short time, but that does not deny them meaning. A smile does not need to go on forever in order to mean what it does. There is nothing beyond or apart from the processes of life. Furthermore, there is no one goal to which all these processes tend, but we can find something precious, value and meaning, in the processes themselves. There is no such thing as the meaning of life, but there can be many meanings within a life.

After analyzing a beautiful passage from Proust which captures the notion of immanence, Blackburn warns us:

Centuries of propaganda have left many people vaguely guilty about taking the immanent option. It is stigmatized as ‘materialistic’ or ‘unspiritual’: the transcendental option uses every device it can to demand respect creep. But one must not allow the transcendent option to monopolize everything good or deep about the notion of spirituality. A piece of music or a great painting may allow us a respite from everyday concerns, or give us the occasion for uses of the imagination that expand our range of sympathy and understanding. They can take us out of ourselves. But they do not do so by taking us anywhere else. The imagination they unlock, or the sentiments and feelings they inspire, still belong to this world. In the best cases, it is this world only now seen less egocentrically, seen without we ourselves being at the centre of it… Such experiences can be called spiritual if we wish, although the word may have suffered so much from its religious captivity that it cannot be said without embarrassment. Fortunately, the phenomenon it describes does not die with it.

Read Blackburn’s essay. And buy the book: in its quiet way, it’s as powerful as anything by Harris, Dawkins or Hitchens – and you know how much I respect their work. ((It also includes Dan Dennett’s beautiful “Thank Goodness”, which I wrote about last November.))

Ken MacLeod links to all the important bits about 21st century atheism. ((Name corrected – sorry Ken!)) (Saves me the bother.) Plus I love the title of his blog, “The Early Days of a Better Nation”. The power of positive thinking, innit?

Here’s one for all of you who think “militant atheists” are making a lot of fuss over nothing. (And for the rest of us, check blood pressure before reading.)

Pharyngula nails the remarkably silly Oxford theologian Alister McGrath for trying to get away with one of the most common tricks employed by religious apologists. The occasion is an interview with McGrath in a Catholic journal in which he is attacking his bête noire, Richard Dawkins. McGrath’s two-step follows a familiar pattern. First, argue that everyday notions of epistemology and ontology don’t apply to God:

I think Richard Dawkins approaches the question of whether God exists in much the same way as if he’d approach the question of whether there is water on Mars. In other words, it’s something that’s open to objective scientific experimentation. And of course there’s no way you can bring those criteria to bear on God.

The next move (usually several paragraphs later, to minimize cognitive dissonance), is to cite in support of your position the kind of evidence that you just rejected:

As someone who has studied the history and philosophy of science extensively, I think I’ve noticed a number of things that Dawkins seems to have overlooked. One of them is this: One of the most commonly encountered patterns in scientific development is seeing a pattern of observations and then saying, in order to explain these observations, we propose that there exists something that is as yet unobserved but we believe that one day will be observed because if it’s there, it can explain everything that can be observed.
Of course, if you’re a Christian you’ll see immediately that that same pattern is there in thinking about God. We can’t prove there’s a God but he makes an awful lot of sense of things and therefore there’s a very good reason to suppose that this may, in fact, be right.

One moment a “pattern of observations”, which is the raw material of all science, cannot be “brought to bear on God”. The next, this kind of pattern provides “a very good reason to suppose… there’s a God”. PZ charitably calls this “inconsistent”; I think “hypocritical” is closer to the mark.
But then consistency is not a strength of McGrath’s. One minute, atheists are supposed to be attacking Dawkins:

The most serious, negative reviews have come from atheists who feel that Dawkins is doing atheism a very bad turn, that Dawkins is portraying atheism as extremely ignorant and prejudicial.

… and the next, they are worshipping him:

Another thing of interest to you, seeing as we’re talking to a Catholic audience, is that I’ve spoken in many lectures about Richard Dawkins and critiqued him. And very often atheists will stand up and say: “How dare you criticize Richard Dawkins!”
It’s almost as if there’s a new dogma of the infallibility of Richard Dawkins in certain circles and I find that bizarre.

No, Dr. McGrath: what is bizarre is your sloppy thinking (not to mention your total misunderstanding of the nature of science).