Geoff Arnold's Blog

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!!