Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Atheism

  • Forced to the Extremes

    If I were to respond to only one item in The God Delusion, it would be this one. Put simply, I am a moderate by conviction, and Dawkins is most definitely not.

    To illustrate, let me quote:

    . . . Desits differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins of confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. [emphasis in original]

    Now to some readers this may seem like a gentlemanly opening for dialogue, but based on the remainder of the book, I would have to argue otherwise. Dawkins sees two possibilities–religion of all related varieties on the one side, and atheism on the other. He downplays moderation of all types. There was the time in reading this book that I thought I would respond only to that point, because for me this is the critical issue. Do we look at all the various options across the spectrum, or do we try to reduce them to a binary choice between two extremes? If we reduce them to the two extremes, I wind up with the religious fundamentalists. I’m not going to say that’s unfair. Fairness is not the most important issue. But it is inaccurate.

    No matter how much rhetoric is expended to try to pretend otherwise there is a difference between me and an old earth creationist, and in turn between the old earth creationist and a young earth creationist. There is even a difference, hard as it may be for a defender of the theory of evolution to see, between someone like Kent Hovind and Kurt Wise (pp. 284-286). The world doesn’t divide itself into only these two extremes.

    Now while I consider this an extremely important point, it might be irrelevant to the theme of the book, except that Dawkins regularly attacks those who take a more nuanced position than his. An entire section is titled “The Poverty of Agnosticism” (pp. 46-54) and it is not at all kind to agnostics.

    I would have to admit that this section annoyed me even more than most of the attacks on Christianity. I would regard Agnosticism as an extremely rational alternative. In fact, from a purely intellectual point of view, barring any leap of faith or other such maneuver, I would probably fall into that camp. But Dawkins is fully convinced that there is or will be a natural explanation for everything, and thus even suggesting that one doesn’t know simply strikes him as too weak.

    This results, again, from that simple binary approach. If you make the assumption that there are two alternatives, either it can be demonstrated that God exists, or atheism is true, then if you can show that the demonstration of God’s existence has failed, atheism is the only remaining option. It’s no surprise that agnosticism draws Dawkins’s ire here! It’s the obvious alternative. If you fail to demonstrate that God exists, you don’t assume the alternative; you realize that you don’t know.

    If one forms the question instead as “How do we understand the existence of the physical universe?” the answers are somewhat different. They would include God, a self-existent physical universe (so atheism), and no possibility of coming up with an understanding. Each of these alternatives would need to be examined on its own merits.

    One more note on the issue of moderation:

    As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism. (p. 306)

    One of the most common arguments I face from fundamentalists and also some conservatives is the “slippery slope” argument. If you give anything away, it’s only the first step to giving everything away. But this is a fallacious argument because it has built in the assumption that the correct position will result from choosing one of the extremes. Perhaps the position in the middle is the most correct, and in that case we would have a “slippery slope” on either side.

    This quote is also further evidence that I did not miss the nature of the book in my comments on Plantinga’s review. Put simply, there is no religious position which Dawkins finds tolerable. All of the positions in the middle are simply dangerous compromises.

  • Diversity and Raising Children

    [This is part of my series of responses to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The parent entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    I truly have to wonder to what extent Dawkins is arguing in favor of freedom, and to what extent he is arguing in favor of the enforcement of his own scientific ideas. For example, starting on page 311, Dawkins tells us the story of a young boy taken from his Jewish parents by authorities in 19th century Italy because he had been baptized by a maid, and was therefore Catholic. This is truly an excellent example of something bad done by religion. We can and should deplore what was done. I think he diminishes the impact of his case by in turn criticizes the parents for being faithful to their own religious beliefs:

    . . . It would be grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as good a place as any to note taht the Mortaras could at a stroke have had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests’ entreaties and agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. to some of us, the parents’ refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.

    There are two elements of this criticism that I want to note. First, there is the assumption that the parents cannot truly be convinced of their own position. It is only through indoctrination that they could hold that position. Raised freely, they would, presumably, have agreed with Dawkins. Second, there is an assumption that going along with an irrational requirement is an acceptable option. Now on many issues I would tend to go along with something irrational simply because it was not worth the effort of fighting it. I suspect this second assumption is unconscious, that Dawkins does not, in fact, believe that going along with tyranny is an effective strategy.

    But as we continue through the book, we come to the case of the Amish (pp. 329-331), the shoe is on the other foot, and now Dawkins is going to decide for the parents just how they are to raise their children. Apparently we are to assume that the goals that Dawkins has for society are necessarily better than the goals that the Amish have. For the type of society in which the Amish wish to live, their educational system is quite well suited. But here again we make an assumption that a maximum pursuit of technological and scientific progress is the best route for all of humanity.

    Now I happen to prefer the future that Dawkins envisions on this point. He’s made queasy by the idea of letting the Amish children stay where they are. I’m made queasy by the notion of forcibly removing them and altering their culture simply because he (and in this case I) believe they would be better off. In that battle, my choice is to give up my vision for their lives and allow their parents to make those early choices.

    This is not, however, as easy of a decision as many on both sides will probably believe. Many on the Christian side will argue that we should definitely give parents the freedom to choose how to raise their own children. But we don’t do that in fact. There are many things that a parent is not permitted to do in our society, including various forms of abuse and definitely murder. This has not always been true in all societies. There is a tension here between freedom and diversity and “the best interests of the child” that will always make issues such as this one a bit difficult to settle.

    Nonetheless I find the combination of attitudes that Dawkins expresses interesting, to say the least.

  • From the Land of the Deluded

    A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to reply to a point in Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion, and got caught. The first commenter on that post suggested I should read the actual book “if only to be able to evaluate reviews of a different book going by the same title.”

    Well, I have now read the book, and it was less irritating than I expected, though my expectations were fulfilled. In general, I was not surprised by anything Dawkins had to say. This should not be shocking considering that I have studied Christian theology fairly extensively for a non-theologian (I remind readers that my field is Biblical studies, not theology, and thus at theology I am an amateur), and I have also read a good bit of Dawkins’s writing, and I am very fond of it, even though I recognize that I am precisely the type of Christian theist for which he has the greatest contempt. This latter point is repeatedly emphasized in the text of The God Delusion.

    There is, however, one way in which the book is worse than I expected. I linked earlier to a post by Bruce Alderman, in which he performed a humorous source analysis on this text. I got a good laugh out of it, but at the time I was assuming it was pure humor. Having read the book, I think I can build on his analysis.

    Bruce’s H source writes much like the Richard Dawkins of books like The Blind Watchmaker. He does surgery on ideas with a laser scalpel, coming to specific points, and then rebuilding the structure with care and precision. You may disagree with his conclusions, but you normally do so by debating his premises, not by criticizing his logic. Such a person presumably wrote most of chapter 5. There, even though I disagree with some conclusions about religion in general, we find an excellent presentation of Darwinian explanations for the evolution of religion, or a propensity to religion in humanity.

    I originally intended to say that Bruce’s A source, contrary to H, uses a shotgun approach, but on further reading and reflection I don’t think that is an adequate description. The approach would better be compared to the use of a blunderbuss, a weapon to which I was introduced by Tolkien in “Farmer Giles of Ham.” There the question of what a blunderbuss is received this response:

    Indeed this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied, “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)

    However, Farmer Giles’s blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn, and it did not fire balls or slugs, but anything he could spare to stuff in.

    The aforementioned farmer Giles of Ham used a blunderbuss on a giant with the result that:

    . . . By luck it was pointed more or less at the giant’s large ugly face. Out flew the rubbish, and the stones and the bones, and the bits of crock and wire, and half a dozen nails. And since the range was indeed limited, by chance and no choice of the farmer’s many of these things struck the giant; a piece of pot went in his eye, and a large nail stuck in his nose.

    “Blast!” said the giant in his vulgar fashion. “I’m stung!” . . .

    So DawkinsA has loaded his blunderbuss with whatever was available, pointed it in my general direction (or perhaps I stuck my face in front of it), and fired. And thus, in the words of the giant, “Blast! I’m stung.” Well, actually, not so much, and unlike Tolkien’s giant I have no inclination to turn aside.

    Those who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of source and redaction criticism will perhaps get less amusement from Bruce’s analysis or from my aside, but those who have will recognize the stylistic differences that can make one wonder what happened between one passage and the next. I think this is also the problem that resulted in the exchange in the comments to my previous post. Basically you can get two completely different impressions from reading this book. The first is of a proposed dialog which invites a broad range of people who are opposed to placing religious dogma above science, of indoctrination, of forcing religious beliefs on people, and of limiting the freedom of scientific inquiry. The second is of a desire to suppress religion if it is possible to do so by any means short of violence, and describes all people of any variety of religious faith in disparaging terms.

    There is one basic element that I fully expected, and did in fact find. For Dawkins science is all there is. There is no supernatural of any kind, and his use of the term “supernatural” is not so nuanced as that of some theologians. For him, “supernatural” is anything that cannot in theory at least be fully investigated by scientific means.

    Thus he occasionally indicates that he is not arguing against the guy in the sky with a beard concept of God, yet in practice he is arguing against the philosophical equivalent. His God must be measurable and explainable in natural terms, thus any attributes one supposes God might possess that do not fall within that scope are automatically dismissed.

    Dawkins operates with a thoroughgoing ontological naturalism. This is it. If I were to allow him that assumption, generally implicit, we could simply say, “That’s the ball game.” And in fact most of the book is superfluous for the simple reason that Dawkins never allows a supernatural definition of God to come into play at all. Despite what he says, God is not a hypothesis. He would be a rather bad hypothesis if he were one.

    While Dawkins does not believe in God, he appears to believe he has god-like powers. Repeatedly he suggests that the religious faith of scientists or other thinkers whose work he appreciates were not really sincere, but rather went along with their time. Such is the case with Kant (footnote to p. 231, quoting A. C. Grayling favorably), Mendel (p. 99 becoming a monk was ” . . . equivalent of a research grant.”), the American founding fathers (p. 39 – “. . . the greatest of them might have been atheists. Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours.”).

    It’s astonishing how easy it is to know what someone would have been years after the fact!

    In my view, more even than an attack on belief, this book is an attack on moderation. By moderation I mean any system that does not automatically push for the extremes, but recognizes that there are a range of positions between. I do not mean that one has to accept that those other positions have an equal claim to truth; I simply suggest recognizing that they exist. Dawkins wants the conflict to be between fundamentalists of any religion and atheism. He objects to being called a fundamentalist atheist, but this very attitude suggests that in some ways the title fits. My experience with Christian fundamentalists indicates to me that if you disagree with them in any little thing, you are the enemy. I’m often called an atheist by such people because I accept the theory of evolution. Dawkins has problems with all of the folks in the middle, with moderates being a frequent target. (For notes on my view of moderation, see Moderate Thinking.)

    I’m going to divide this response into several posts, though I will post them all together. A directory follows, though you can find the entire series by choosing category The God Delusion.

    So from the land of the deluded, let me present just a bit of a response. I’m not an apologist. I’m frequently embarrassed by what Christian apologists have to say. My apologetic is very simple, and we sang it in the Easter Sunrise service at my church: “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” It’s subjective. I don’t expect it to convince you. But it’s what I bring to the table. Categorize me as a deluded simpleton, but a joyful one!