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A Mission to Convert
by H. Allen Orr, NYBooks.com
You may also enjoy reading:
Jason Rosenhouse's response to this review:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2006/12/orr_on_dawkins.php
PZ Myers' response to this review (and many others!)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php
Reposted from:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $27.00
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Norton, 243 pp., $25.95
Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist
by Joan Roughgarden
Island, 151 pp., $14.95
Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.
During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.
Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that "this storm was sent by God because we sinned." While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing.
Joan Roughgarden, on the other hand, is sold on religion. An evolutionary biologist at Stanford University and a recent convert to Christianity, she attempts in Evolution and Christian Faith both to explain evolutionary biology to fellow believers—laying out what is known, what is speculative, and what is unknown—and to discuss what the Bible has to say on matters relevant to evolution. These are ambitious aims, particularly for so brief a book, and Roughgarden's own views—that, as she writes, "what evolutionary biologists are finding through their research and thinking actually promotes a Christian view of nature"—are not supported by sufficiently detailed arguments.
1.
Among these books, Dawkins's The God Delusion stands out for two reasons. First, it's by far the most ambitious. While Wolpert and Roughgarden preach to the choir—each has his or her own audience, rationalist and religious, respectively—Dawkins is on a mission to convert. He is an enemy of religion, wants to explain why, and hopes thereby to drive the beast to extinction. Second, Dawkins has succeeded in grabbing the public's attention in a way that other writers can only dream of. His book is on the New York Times best-seller list and he's just been featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), was a smash hit. An introduction to evolutionary theory, it explained a number of deeply counter-intuitive results, including how an apparently self-centered process like Darwinian natural selection can account for the evolution of altruism. Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology—some of it truly subtle—in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.) While Dawkins has published several other popular books on Darwinism, he has, in recent years, turned to larger issues. In such works as Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and A Devil's Chaplain (2003), he's explored our sense of wonder before the natural world and, increasingly, the tension between science and religion.
His new book continues this last theme. Dawkins clearly believes his background in science allows him to draw strong conclusions about religion and, in The God Delusion, he presents those conclusions in language that's stronger still. Dawkins not only thinks religion is unalloyed nonsense but that it is an overwhelmingly pernicious, even "very evil," force in the world. His target is not so much organized religion as all religion. And within organized religion, he attacks not only extremist sects but moderate ones. Indeed, he argues that rearing children in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.
Dawkins's book begins with a description of what he calls the God Hypothesis. This is the idea that "the universe and everything in it" were designed by "a superhuman, supernatural intelligence." This intelligence might be personal (as in Christianity) or impersonal (as in deism). Dawkins is not concerned with the alleged detailed characteristics of God but with whether any form of the God Hypothesis is defensible. His answer is: almost cer-tainly not. Although his target is broad, Dawkins discusses mostly Christianity, partly because this faith has wrestled often with science and partly because it's the tradition Dawkins knows best (he was reared as an Anglican).
The first few chapters of The God Delusion are given over to philosophical matters. Dawkins summarizes the traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas through pre-Darwinian arguments from biological design, along with the traditional arguments against them. In a later chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," Dawkins himself plays philosopher, presenting the chief argument of his book. The God Hypothesis, he tells us, is close to "ruled out by the laws of probability." Dawkins's demonstration involves what he calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is his variation on a standard creationist argument. By tweaking that argument in a clever way, Dawkins claims it now leads to a conclusion that's the opposite of the traditional creationist one.
The creationist argument works like this. Living things are enormously complex. Even the simplest of present-day organisms, like bacteria, are far more complicated than anything found in the nonliving world. All organisms carry genes, built from a replicating molecule like DNA (which is itself very complex). But DNA alone doesn't make an organism. Organisms also possess many different proteins (each, in turn, made of amino acids), as well as other molecules that help make structures like cell membranes. Moreover, all these parts must be arranged in just the right way: membranes on the outside of the cell and DNA on the inside, and so on. Creationists argue that the idea that such organized complexity could arise by natural means—without the intercession of a designer mind— is absurd. In particular, they argue that the probability that life could assemble itself spontaneously is extremely close to zero. To dramatize this, they suggest that thinking life could arise by natural means is like thinking a tornado could tear through a junkyard and assemble a Boeing 747. Such an event is not, strictly speaking, impossible but it's so extraordinarily unlikely that it is, according to creationists, unworthy of serious consideration.[1]
Dawkins's variation on this argument involves a judo-like move in which he turns its logic against itself. In particular, Dawkins claims that rejecting natural means to explain life and instead invoking a designer God leaves us with a hypothesis that's even more improbable than the naturalistic one:
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
In short, only complicated objects can design simpler ones; information cannot flow in the other direction, with simple objects designing complicated ones. But that means any designer God would have to be more complex —and thus even more improbable— than the universe he was supposed to explain. This argument, Dawkins concludes, "comes close to proving that God does not exist": the God Hypothesis has a vanishingly small probability of being right.
The latter half of The God Delusion is partly devoted to Dawkins's discussion of religion as practiced. Not surprisingly, he finds little good to say about it: religion for him is the root of much evil and its disappearance from the world would be an unmitigated good. Religion, he tells us, is certainly not the source of our morality (indeed the God of the Old Testament is, he claims, nothing short of monstrous) and believers are no better morally than nonbelievers; in fact they may be worse. Dawkins regales us with tales of Christian cops who threaten to beat up an atheist; presents statistics on the higher rates of crime in regions that are religious; and argues that, when considering religiously inspired violence and terrorism, "we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent re-ligion." Late in his book, Dawkins defends a faith-free morality and provides his own, secular, Ten Commandments. (For example, "Do not indoctrinate your children" and "Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else).")
As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers. What may be less obvious is that, on questions of God, Dawkins cannot abide much dissent, especially from fellow scientists (and especially from fellow evolutionary biologists). Indeed Dawkins is fond of imputing ulterior motives to those "Neville Chamberlain School" scientists not willing to go as far as he in his war on religion: he suggests that they're guilty of disingenuousness, playing politics, and lusting after the large prizes awarded by the Templeton Foundation to scientists sympathetic to religion.[2] The only motive Dawkins doesn't seem to take seriously is that some scientists genuinely disagree with him.
Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.
2.
The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.
The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).
Instead, Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow. Dawkins's intellectual universe appears populated by the likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science popularizer,[3] both of whom he cites repeatedly. This is a different group from thinkers like William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein—both of whom lived after Darwin, both of whom struggled with the question of belief, and both of whom had more to say about religion than Adams and Sagan. Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question."[4]
The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote. Dawkins's discussion of religion's power to console, for example, is interrupted by the story of the Abbott of Ampleforth's joy at learning of a friend's impending death; speculation about why countries, such as the Netherlands, that allow euthanasia are so rare (presumably because of religious prejudice); a nurse who told Dawkins that believers fear death more than nonbelievers do; and the number of days of remission from Purgatory that Pope Pius X allowed cardinals and bishops (two hundred, and fifty, respectively). All this and more in four pages. Gone, it seems, is the Dawkins of The Selfish Gene, a writer who could lead readers through dauntingly difficult arguments and who used anecdotes to illustrate those arguments, not to substitute for them.
3.
One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.
The most important example involves Dawkins's discussion of philosophical arguments for the existence of God as opposed to his own argument against God, which he presents as the intellectual heart of his book. Considering arguments for God, Dawkins is care-ful to recite the many standard objections to them and writes that the traditional proofs are "vacuous," "dubious," "infantile," and "perniciously misleading." But turning to his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument against God, Dawkins is suddenly uninterested in criticism and writes that his argument is "unanswerable." So why, you might wonder, is a clever philosophical argument for God subject to withering criticism while one against God gets a free pass and is deemed devastating?
The reason seems clear. The first argument leads to a conclusion Dawkins despises, while the second leads to one he loves. Dawkins, so far as I can tell, is unconcerned that the central argument of his book bears more than a passing resemblance to those clever philosophical proofs for the existence of God that he dismisses. This is unfortunate. He could have used a healthy dose of his usual skepticism when deciding how much to invest in his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument. Indeed, one needn't be a creationist to note that Dawkins's argument suffers at least two potential problems. First, as others have pointed out, if he is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging—as when Dawkins asks "who designed the designer?"— cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?
Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary, and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity." We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.
Dawkins's problems with philosophy might be related to a failure of metaphysical imagination. When thinking of those vast matters that make up religion—matters of ultimate meaning that stand at the edge of intelligibility and that are among the most difficult to articulate—he sees only black and white. Despite some attempts at subtlety, Dawkins almost reflexively identifies religion with right-wing fundamentalism and biblical literalism. Other, more nuanced possibilities— varieties of deism, mysticism, or nondenominational spirituality—have a harder time holding his attention. It may be that Dawkins can't imagine these possibilities vividly enough to worry over them in a serious way.
There's an irony here. Dawkins's main criticism of those who doubt Darwin—and it's a good one—is that they suffer a similar failure of imagination. Those, for example, who argue that evolution could never make an eye because anything less than a fully formed eye can't see simply can't imagine the surprising routes taken by evolution. In any case, part of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be that one can't conceive that one's imagination is impoverished. It's hard to resist the conclusion that people like James and Wittgenstein struggled personally with religion, while Dawkins shrugs his shoulders, at least in part because they conceived possibilities—mistaken ones perhaps, but certainly more interesting ones— that escape Dawkins.
4.
Putting aside these philosophical matters, Dawkins's key empirical claim—that religion is a pernicious force in the world—might still be right. Is it? Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children's minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.
But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a systematic way. Tests of religion's consequences might involve a number of different comparisons: between religion's good and bad effects, or between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence— with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.
Part of Dawkins's difficulty is that his worldview is thoroughly Victorian. He is, as many have noted, a kind of latter-day T.H. Huxley. The problem is that these latter days have witnessed blood-curdling experiments in institutional atheism. Dawkins tends to wave away the resulting crimes. It is, he insists, unclear if they were actually inspired by atheism. He emphasizes, for example, that Stalin's brutality may not have been motivated by his atheism. While this is surely partly true, it's a tricky issue, especially as one would need to allow for the same kind of distinction when considering religious institutions. (Does anyone really believe that the Church's dreadful dealings with the Nazis were motivated by its theism?)
In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.
What of the possibility that present-day churchgoers are worse morally than those who stay away? They might be. Indeed C.S. Lewis, in perhaps the most widely read work of popular theology ever written, Mere Christianity, conceded the possibility. Emphasizing that the Gospel was preached to the weak and poor, Lewis argued that troubled souls might well be drawn disproportionately to the Church. As he also emphasized, the appropriate contrast should not, therefore, be between the behavior of churchgoers and nongoers but between the behavior of people before and after they find religion. Under Dawkins's alternative logic, the fact that those sitting in a doctor's office are on average sicker than those not sitting there must stand as an indictment of medicine. (There's no evidence in The God Delusion that Dawkins is familiar with Lewis's argument.)[5]
In any case, there are some grounds for questioning whether Dawkins's project is even meaningful. As T.S. Eliot famously observed, to ask whether we would have been better off without religion is to ask a question whose answer is unknowable. Our entire history has been so thoroughly shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition that we cannot imagine the present state of society in its absence. But there's a deeper point and one that Dawkins also fails to see. Even what we mean by the world being better off is conditioned by our religious inheritance. What most of us in the West mean—and what Dawkins, as revealed by his own Ten Commandments, means—is a world in which individuals are free to express their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so. But this is assuredly not what a better world would look like to, say, a traditional Confucian culture. There, a new and improved world might be one that allows the readier suppression of in-dividual differences and aspirations. The point is that all judgments, including ethical ones, begin somewhere and ours, often enough, begin in Judaism and Christianity. Dawkins should, of course, be applauded for his attempt to picture a better world. But intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that his moral vision derives, to a considerable extent, from the tradition he so despises.[6]
5.
One of the most interesting questions about Dawkins's book is why it was written. Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably needed to say it at book length? The God Delusion certainly establishes that Dawkins has little new to offer. Its arguments are those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell's more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers. Dawkins is obviously entitled to his views on God, ballet, and currency markets. But I doubt he feels much need to pen books on the last two topics.
The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective "So what?" to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James putit, "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.
None of this is to say that evolutionary biology cannot inform our view of religion. It can and does. At the very least it insists that the Lord works in mysterious ways. More generally, it demands rejection of anything approaching biblical literalism. There are facts of nature—including that human beings evolved on the African savanna several million years ago—and these facts are not subject to negotiation. But Dawkins's book goes far beyond this. The reason, of course, is that The God Delusion is not itself a work of either evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking.
We should not, though, conclude that there's no debate whatever to be had between science and religion. The view championed by Stephen Jay Gould and others that the two endeavors are utterly distinct and thus incapable of interfering with each other is overly simplistic. There have been, and likely will continue to be, real disagreements between legitimate science and authentic religion. Some of the issues involved are epistemological (Do scientific and religious claims simply begin with different premises, the first material-ist and the second not?), and others ethical (Where do we draw the line between what medicine can accom-plish and what it should be allowed to accomplish?). These questions are difficult and might well merit extended discussion between scientific and religious thinkers. But if such discussions are to be worthwhile, they will have to take place at a far higher level of sophistication than Richard Daw-kins seems either willing or able to muster.
Notes
[1] Most evolutionary biologists would argue that we do not need to explain anything as complex as present life to explain the origin of life. We need only explain how a self-replicating molecule could arise. Given such a molecule, natural selection can operate and complex life could then evolve. Although the details are difficult and the case is not proved, there is reason to believe that the origin of life may have involved a replicating molecule called RNA. According to this theory, this RNA was able to replicate by itself —without the assistance of any proteins or other molecules. See James P. Ferris, "From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life," in Life's Origins: The Beginnings of Biological Evo-lution, edited by J. William Schopf (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 113–139.
[2] For more on this, see Dawkins's interview at Salon.com (www.salon.com/ books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index .html).
[3] For an interesting look at Sagan's thought, see Richard C. Lewontin's "Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, January 9, 1997.
[4] T.S. Eliot: "The unbeliever starts... as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter." (From Eliot's introduction to Pascal's Pensées, Dutton, 1958.)
[5] Even when comparing believers and nonbelievers, Dawkins is curiously silent on one of the best-known differences. Believers give far more to charities—even nonreligious charities— than do secularists. See, for instance, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (www.cfsv.org/communitysurvey/results.html).
[6] Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of "memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult.... There is no distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge. Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of memes, or what they are selected for."
Jason Rosenhouse's response to this review:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2006/12/orr_on_dawkins.php
PZ Myers' response to this review (and many others!)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php
Reposted from:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $27.00
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Norton, 243 pp., $25.95
Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist
by Joan Roughgarden
Island, 151 pp., $14.95
Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.
During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.
Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that "this storm was sent by God because we sinned." While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing.
Joan Roughgarden, on the other hand, is sold on religion. An evolutionary biologist at Stanford University and a recent convert to Christianity, she attempts in Evolution and Christian Faith both to explain evolutionary biology to fellow believers—laying out what is known, what is speculative, and what is unknown—and to discuss what the Bible has to say on matters relevant to evolution. These are ambitious aims, particularly for so brief a book, and Roughgarden's own views—that, as she writes, "what evolutionary biologists are finding through their research and thinking actually promotes a Christian view of nature"—are not supported by sufficiently detailed arguments.
1.
Among these books, Dawkins's The God Delusion stands out for two reasons. First, it's by far the most ambitious. While Wolpert and Roughgarden preach to the choir—each has his or her own audience, rationalist and religious, respectively—Dawkins is on a mission to convert. He is an enemy of religion, wants to explain why, and hopes thereby to drive the beast to extinction. Second, Dawkins has succeeded in grabbing the public's attention in a way that other writers can only dream of. His book is on the New York Times best-seller list and he's just been featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), was a smash hit. An introduction to evolutionary theory, it explained a number of deeply counter-intuitive results, including how an apparently self-centered process like Darwinian natural selection can account for the evolution of altruism. Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology—some of it truly subtle—in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.) While Dawkins has published several other popular books on Darwinism, he has, in recent years, turned to larger issues. In such works as Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and A Devil's Chaplain (2003), he's explored our sense of wonder before the natural world and, increasingly, the tension between science and religion.
His new book continues this last theme. Dawkins clearly believes his background in science allows him to draw strong conclusions about religion and, in The God Delusion, he presents those conclusions in language that's stronger still. Dawkins not only thinks religion is unalloyed nonsense but that it is an overwhelmingly pernicious, even "very evil," force in the world. His target is not so much organized religion as all religion. And within organized religion, he attacks not only extremist sects but moderate ones. Indeed, he argues that rearing children in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.
Dawkins's book begins with a description of what he calls the God Hypothesis. This is the idea that "the universe and everything in it" were designed by "a superhuman, supernatural intelligence." This intelligence might be personal (as in Christianity) or impersonal (as in deism). Dawkins is not concerned with the alleged detailed characteristics of God but with whether any form of the God Hypothesis is defensible. His answer is: almost cer-tainly not. Although his target is broad, Dawkins discusses mostly Christianity, partly because this faith has wrestled often with science and partly because it's the tradition Dawkins knows best (he was reared as an Anglican).
The first few chapters of The God Delusion are given over to philosophical matters. Dawkins summarizes the traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas through pre-Darwinian arguments from biological design, along with the traditional arguments against them. In a later chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," Dawkins himself plays philosopher, presenting the chief argument of his book. The God Hypothesis, he tells us, is close to "ruled out by the laws of probability." Dawkins's demonstration involves what he calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is his variation on a standard creationist argument. By tweaking that argument in a clever way, Dawkins claims it now leads to a conclusion that's the opposite of the traditional creationist one.
The creationist argument works like this. Living things are enormously complex. Even the simplest of present-day organisms, like bacteria, are far more complicated than anything found in the nonliving world. All organisms carry genes, built from a replicating molecule like DNA (which is itself very complex). But DNA alone doesn't make an organism. Organisms also possess many different proteins (each, in turn, made of amino acids), as well as other molecules that help make structures like cell membranes. Moreover, all these parts must be arranged in just the right way: membranes on the outside of the cell and DNA on the inside, and so on. Creationists argue that the idea that such organized complexity could arise by natural means—without the intercession of a designer mind— is absurd. In particular, they argue that the probability that life could assemble itself spontaneously is extremely close to zero. To dramatize this, they suggest that thinking life could arise by natural means is like thinking a tornado could tear through a junkyard and assemble a Boeing 747. Such an event is not, strictly speaking, impossible but it's so extraordinarily unlikely that it is, according to creationists, unworthy of serious consideration.[1]
Dawkins's variation on this argument involves a judo-like move in which he turns its logic against itself. In particular, Dawkins claims that rejecting natural means to explain life and instead invoking a designer God leaves us with a hypothesis that's even more improbable than the naturalistic one:
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
In short, only complicated objects can design simpler ones; information cannot flow in the other direction, with simple objects designing complicated ones. But that means any designer God would have to be more complex —and thus even more improbable— than the universe he was supposed to explain. This argument, Dawkins concludes, "comes close to proving that God does not exist": the God Hypothesis has a vanishingly small probability of being right.
The latter half of The God Delusion is partly devoted to Dawkins's discussion of religion as practiced. Not surprisingly, he finds little good to say about it: religion for him is the root of much evil and its disappearance from the world would be an unmitigated good. Religion, he tells us, is certainly not the source of our morality (indeed the God of the Old Testament is, he claims, nothing short of monstrous) and believers are no better morally than nonbelievers; in fact they may be worse. Dawkins regales us with tales of Christian cops who threaten to beat up an atheist; presents statistics on the higher rates of crime in regions that are religious; and argues that, when considering religiously inspired violence and terrorism, "we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent re-ligion." Late in his book, Dawkins defends a faith-free morality and provides his own, secular, Ten Commandments. (For example, "Do not indoctrinate your children" and "Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else).")
As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers. What may be less obvious is that, on questions of God, Dawkins cannot abide much dissent, especially from fellow scientists (and especially from fellow evolutionary biologists). Indeed Dawkins is fond of imputing ulterior motives to those "Neville Chamberlain School" scientists not willing to go as far as he in his war on religion: he suggests that they're guilty of disingenuousness, playing politics, and lusting after the large prizes awarded by the Templeton Foundation to scientists sympathetic to religion.[2] The only motive Dawkins doesn't seem to take seriously is that some scientists genuinely disagree with him.
Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.
2.
The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.
The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).
Instead, Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow. Dawkins's intellectual universe appears populated by the likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science popularizer,[3] both of whom he cites repeatedly. This is a different group from thinkers like William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein—both of whom lived after Darwin, both of whom struggled with the question of belief, and both of whom had more to say about religion than Adams and Sagan. Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question."[4]
The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote. Dawkins's discussion of religion's power to console, for example, is interrupted by the story of the Abbott of Ampleforth's joy at learning of a friend's impending death; speculation about why countries, such as the Netherlands, that allow euthanasia are so rare (presumably because of religious prejudice); a nurse who told Dawkins that believers fear death more than nonbelievers do; and the number of days of remission from Purgatory that Pope Pius X allowed cardinals and bishops (two hundred, and fifty, respectively). All this and more in four pages. Gone, it seems, is the Dawkins of The Selfish Gene, a writer who could lead readers through dauntingly difficult arguments and who used anecdotes to illustrate those arguments, not to substitute for them.
3.
One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.
The most important example involves Dawkins's discussion of philosophical arguments for the existence of God as opposed to his own argument against God, which he presents as the intellectual heart of his book. Considering arguments for God, Dawkins is care-ful to recite the many standard objections to them and writes that the traditional proofs are "vacuous," "dubious," "infantile," and "perniciously misleading." But turning to his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument against God, Dawkins is suddenly uninterested in criticism and writes that his argument is "unanswerable." So why, you might wonder, is a clever philosophical argument for God subject to withering criticism while one against God gets a free pass and is deemed devastating?
The reason seems clear. The first argument leads to a conclusion Dawkins despises, while the second leads to one he loves. Dawkins, so far as I can tell, is unconcerned that the central argument of his book bears more than a passing resemblance to those clever philosophical proofs for the existence of God that he dismisses. This is unfortunate. He could have used a healthy dose of his usual skepticism when deciding how much to invest in his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument. Indeed, one needn't be a creationist to note that Dawkins's argument suffers at least two potential problems. First, as others have pointed out, if he is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging—as when Dawkins asks "who designed the designer?"— cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?
Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary, and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity." We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.
Dawkins's problems with philosophy might be related to a failure of metaphysical imagination. When thinking of those vast matters that make up religion—matters of ultimate meaning that stand at the edge of intelligibility and that are among the most difficult to articulate—he sees only black and white. Despite some attempts at subtlety, Dawkins almost reflexively identifies religion with right-wing fundamentalism and biblical literalism. Other, more nuanced possibilities— varieties of deism, mysticism, or nondenominational spirituality—have a harder time holding his attention. It may be that Dawkins can't imagine these possibilities vividly enough to worry over them in a serious way.
There's an irony here. Dawkins's main criticism of those who doubt Darwin—and it's a good one—is that they suffer a similar failure of imagination. Those, for example, who argue that evolution could never make an eye because anything less than a fully formed eye can't see simply can't imagine the surprising routes taken by evolution. In any case, part of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be that one can't conceive that one's imagination is impoverished. It's hard to resist the conclusion that people like James and Wittgenstein struggled personally with religion, while Dawkins shrugs his shoulders, at least in part because they conceived possibilities—mistaken ones perhaps, but certainly more interesting ones— that escape Dawkins.
4.
Putting aside these philosophical matters, Dawkins's key empirical claim—that religion is a pernicious force in the world—might still be right. Is it? Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children's minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.
But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a systematic way. Tests of religion's consequences might involve a number of different comparisons: between religion's good and bad effects, or between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence— with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.
Part of Dawkins's difficulty is that his worldview is thoroughly Victorian. He is, as many have noted, a kind of latter-day T.H. Huxley. The problem is that these latter days have witnessed blood-curdling experiments in institutional atheism. Dawkins tends to wave away the resulting crimes. It is, he insists, unclear if they were actually inspired by atheism. He emphasizes, for example, that Stalin's brutality may not have been motivated by his atheism. While this is surely partly true, it's a tricky issue, especially as one would need to allow for the same kind of distinction when considering religious institutions. (Does anyone really believe that the Church's dreadful dealings with the Nazis were motivated by its theism?)
In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.
What of the possibility that present-day churchgoers are worse morally than those who stay away? They might be. Indeed C.S. Lewis, in perhaps the most widely read work of popular theology ever written, Mere Christianity, conceded the possibility. Emphasizing that the Gospel was preached to the weak and poor, Lewis argued that troubled souls might well be drawn disproportionately to the Church. As he also emphasized, the appropriate contrast should not, therefore, be between the behavior of churchgoers and nongoers but between the behavior of people before and after they find religion. Under Dawkins's alternative logic, the fact that those sitting in a doctor's office are on average sicker than those not sitting there must stand as an indictment of medicine. (There's no evidence in The God Delusion that Dawkins is familiar with Lewis's argument.)[5]
In any case, there are some grounds for questioning whether Dawkins's project is even meaningful. As T.S. Eliot famously observed, to ask whether we would have been better off without religion is to ask a question whose answer is unknowable. Our entire history has been so thoroughly shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition that we cannot imagine the present state of society in its absence. But there's a deeper point and one that Dawkins also fails to see. Even what we mean by the world being better off is conditioned by our religious inheritance. What most of us in the West mean—and what Dawkins, as revealed by his own Ten Commandments, means—is a world in which individuals are free to express their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so. But this is assuredly not what a better world would look like to, say, a traditional Confucian culture. There, a new and improved world might be one that allows the readier suppression of in-dividual differences and aspirations. The point is that all judgments, including ethical ones, begin somewhere and ours, often enough, begin in Judaism and Christianity. Dawkins should, of course, be applauded for his attempt to picture a better world. But intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that his moral vision derives, to a considerable extent, from the tradition he so despises.[6]
5.
One of the most interesting questions about Dawkins's book is why it was written. Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably needed to say it at book length? The God Delusion certainly establishes that Dawkins has little new to offer. Its arguments are those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell's more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers. Dawkins is obviously entitled to his views on God, ballet, and currency markets. But I doubt he feels much need to pen books on the last two topics.
The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective "So what?" to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James putit, "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.
None of this is to say that evolutionary biology cannot inform our view of religion. It can and does. At the very least it insists that the Lord works in mysterious ways. More generally, it demands rejection of anything approaching biblical literalism. There are facts of nature—including that human beings evolved on the African savanna several million years ago—and these facts are not subject to negotiation. But Dawkins's book goes far beyond this. The reason, of course, is that The God Delusion is not itself a work of either evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking.
We should not, though, conclude that there's no debate whatever to be had between science and religion. The view championed by Stephen Jay Gould and others that the two endeavors are utterly distinct and thus incapable of interfering with each other is overly simplistic. There have been, and likely will continue to be, real disagreements between legitimate science and authentic religion. Some of the issues involved are epistemological (Do scientific and religious claims simply begin with different premises, the first material-ist and the second not?), and others ethical (Where do we draw the line between what medicine can accom-plish and what it should be allowed to accomplish?). These questions are difficult and might well merit extended discussion between scientific and religious thinkers. But if such discussions are to be worthwhile, they will have to take place at a far higher level of sophistication than Richard Daw-kins seems either willing or able to muster.
Notes
[1] Most evolutionary biologists would argue that we do not need to explain anything as complex as present life to explain the origin of life. We need only explain how a self-replicating molecule could arise. Given such a molecule, natural selection can operate and complex life could then evolve. Although the details are difficult and the case is not proved, there is reason to believe that the origin of life may have involved a replicating molecule called RNA. According to this theory, this RNA was able to replicate by itself —without the assistance of any proteins or other molecules. See James P. Ferris, "From Building Blocks to the Polymers of Life," in Life's Origins: The Beginnings of Biological Evo-lution, edited by J. William Schopf (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 113–139.
[2] For more on this, see Dawkins's interview at Salon.com (www.salon.com/ books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index .html).
[3] For an interesting look at Sagan's thought, see Richard C. Lewontin's "Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, January 9, 1997.
[4] T.S. Eliot: "The unbeliever starts... as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter." (From Eliot's introduction to Pascal's Pensées, Dutton, 1958.)
[5] Even when comparing believers and nonbelievers, Dawkins is curiously silent on one of the best-known differences. Believers give far more to charities—even nonreligious charities— than do secularists. See, for instance, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (www.cfsv.org/communitysurvey/results.html).
[6] Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of "memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult.... There is no distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge. Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of memes, or what they are selected for."
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Posted: Sunday, December 24, 2006 | PermalinkComments 1 - 28 of 28 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers2. Comment #14744 by Jared on December 24, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Aussie:The sheer extent of this article alone is flattering.
No kidding.
Is this the complete article? If so, I'd hate to be Lewis Wolpert or Joan Roughgarden. Some review, here! A summary one-paragraph dismissal and perhaps another mention each somewhere within a sprawling mass of text dedicated to Dawkins. Why even bother to mention Roughgarden's or Wolpert's books at all, I wonder?
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3. Comment #14749 by denoir on December 24, 2006 at 10:08 pm
A common criticism against TGD is that Dawkins' arguments against religion are neither very sophisticated nor original. That is perfectly true but also completely irrelevant.Demanding sophisticated arguments against religion is like demanding a sophisticated argument against the existence of Santa Claus. The basic premises of religion are so trivial that it does not need any particularly sophisticated arguments. There are of course people who try to make religion into something more sophisticated - but all they are doing is making arbitrary constructions upon a deeply flawed foundation. A metaphorical approach to say the Bible is futile as a) it never was written to be metaphorical and b) the metaphorical interpretations are completely arbitrary. This unfortunate type of approach to religion happens when people can't let go of the traditional beliefs but also can't accept the blatant absurdity of it.
It reminds me of a great comment that I read on an Internet forum a while ago. A person asked:
What's a "progressive Christian"? Is it like a critical fairy tale believer?
As for Dawkins' arguments not being original, that's true as well. Given the state of religion today, they are however arguments worth repeating. Again, we're not talking about any advanced philosophical topics - there isn't very much to be original about.
Edit: Doh! I read PZ Myers' review only after posting this. The comments above are obviously redundant.
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4. Comment #14757 by brilyn on December 24, 2006 at 11:10 pm
The reason Dawkins doesn't come up with "his own Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit" is that *his* gambit is as equally valid as the pro-god gambit.To spell it out: any rebuttal to *his* gambit is *also* a rebuttal to the pro-god gambit.
Thus, it's unanswerable.
Talk about suffering from several problems when trying to reason philosophically.....
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5. Comment #14765 by Bob Johnson on December 25, 2006 at 12:26 am
To answer his question of why so many books and article now? - Dover.Other Comments by Bob Johnson
6. Comment #14776 by Zaphod on December 25, 2006 at 1:56 am
I'd be someone upset if I was an author of the other 3 books in this review because he concentrates on Dawkins so much more. Other Comments by Zaphod
7. Comment #14780 by Sancus on December 25, 2006 at 4:01 am
At first, this appeared to be another sanctimonious defense of religion, but the author thoughtfully addresses the appropriately disturbing question of whether Dawkins' attacks on religion are at all meaningful.Even what we mean by the world being better off is conditioned by our religious inheritance. What most of us in the West mean—and what Dawkins, as revealed by his own Ten Commandments, means—is a world in which individuals are free to express their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so. But this is assuredly not what a better world would look like to, say, a traditional Confucian culture. There, a new and improved world might be one that allows the readier suppression of in-dividual differences and aspirations. The point is that all judgments, including ethical ones, begin somewhere and ours, often enough, begin in Judaism and Christianity. Dawkins should, of course, be applauded for his attempt to picture a better world. But intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that his moral vision derives, to a considerable extent, from the tradition he so despises.[6]
In agreement with the final statement, I've used the term "moral leech" to describe Dawkins and atheists in general. At first, I figured it would be a meaningful yet playful pejorative that would highlight this glaring weakness of new atheism. Unfortunately, this weakness does not appear to unsettle Dawkins or other new atheists very much. Dawkins offers a Hegelian notion of a "changing moral zeitgeist," which comes dangerously close to historical relativism when combined with memes. The author expands on this footnote (emphasis mine):
[6] Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of "memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult.... There is no distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge. Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of memes, or what they are selected for."
Dawkins argues that Christian morality memes are not actually moral because they are not compatible with the modern zeitgeist. In order to do this, he must assume some very crucial things, namely that the modern zeitgeist is actually here to stay and will not be permanently replaced by another that is more compatible with Christian memes. This is a very shifty argument in light of the rise of fundamentalist religion. Dawkins should not expect anyone to accept it, especially because it is so eerily reminiscent of Hegel's influence on Marx.
Those who bring up Marx, Stalin, and Mao, when arguing with Dawkins do so legitimately. Dawkins dismisses these historical events as "sawtooths" in the changing moral zeitgeist that are not relevant anyway because these individuals did not do what they did in the name of atheism and were dogmatic to boot. Unfortunately for Dawkins, Marx also used Hegel's notion of the zeitgeist to justify his moral values. Dawkins is talking like a Marx in another zeitgeist. All the communists were not created equal. They all believed they had new ideas to offer the zeitgeist. What distinguishes Dawkins from them?
Is it the rejection of dogma? If that's all that's left, then the attack on moderate religion has failed completely, because moderates don't take much stock in dogma either. Worse, postmodernism waves its ugly face.
What's left are Dawkins' new ten commandments, which the author said amount to, "a world in which individuals are free to express their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so." Here is our point of contention! The author believes that these commandments come from the Judeo-Christian tradition (as opposed to another like the Confucian) but he is wrong. The Judeo-Christian tradition does not value individuals and it certainly doesn't value the free expression of passion, even when it does not infringe on the ability of others to do so. Dawkins sloppily concedes that our morality stems from Christianity through memes because he considers the existential question of God's existence more important than the moral one.
Both are wrong and through criticism they almost say it for one another. The reviewer is annoyed by the confusion and the fact that it's not happening on a more sophisticated level and Dawkins is annoyed that the existential question of God has anything to do with morality for so many people. When examining the meaninglessness of each other's positions, they are able to find a meaningful issue.
That is this: morality does need to come from somewhere, but it does not need to come from previous moral systems. It only has to come from the fact that individual human beings exist, and since there is no need to coerce them to do good things, we ought not to.
Other Comments by Sancus
8. Comment #14781 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 4:07 am
I have always liked Orr as a reviewer and commentator, but I think he has missed the point here. Rosenhouse hit half the nail on the head when he made the point that TGD is a popular work. But the other aspect is that it is polemical rather than explanatory in design. The success of a book must in part at least be judged in accord with its intent, and Richard's clear and stated intent was to raise consciousness about the flimsy basis of the claims made by the Abrahamic religions. And in this he has surely succeeded beyond I suspect even his own expectations.
Orr some years ago in his excellent critique of Gould's position adopted the same stance as Richard - namely that the religion Gould had defined actually bore no relationship to the what people in the pews or on the prayer mats actually believed. Now he falls into the same trap himself when RD writes a book that actually does address that real religion. William James? Wittgenstein? Are they the stuff of real religious belief?
While I, like Orr, actually disgree on many specific aspects of the analysis in TGD (which is one of the reasons I enjoy the discussions at this site), neither he nor I are the real target audience. So this major review, in failing to recognise the actual scope and aim of the book, opens itself up to charges of self-indulgence and lack of balance. (Less balanced, in fact, than the well-known review by Terry Eagleton, which while also raising intellectual differences, gave TGD due praise.) A pity.
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9. Comment #14800 by Jared on December 25, 2006 at 7:08 am
JohnC:"William James? Wittgenstein? Are they the stuff of real religious belief?"
I know some academics who can't even slog through Wittgenstein. I hardly think that my ultra-religious, Roman Catholic grandparents have him in mind when they think about their faith or their god. That, indeed, is one of the biggest repeated flaws in reviews of TGD: ignoring the fact that MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW PHILOSOPHY OR THEOLOGY!
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10. Comment #14812 by denoir on December 25, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Sancus:Those who bring up Marx, Stalin, and Mao, when arguing with Dawkins do so legitimately.
Bringing up Marx, Stalin, Mao or any other immoral atheists as an argument for religion as a source of morality is a sequence of logical fallacies. First we have the association fallacy (If P subset of S,T then S subset of T). This is an equivalent argument:
Marx, Stalin and Mao all have the letter "a" in their first name. Hence people that have "b" in their first name are moral.
The fact that they were atheists and immoral can only implicate that some atheists are immoral or that not atheists are moral. It can in no way imply that theists are moral.
The second fallacy is an implication fallacy called "Affirming the consequent" (If P then Q. Not Q therefor Not P). An equivalent argument:
"If Bob is illiterate then he didn't write the Bible. Bob is not illiterate hence he wrote the Bible."
Even if you would argue that atheists are immoral it would not imply that theists are moral.
Generally speaking, the argument is pointless as Dawkins is arguing that morality does not stem from religion. He does not claim that atheists possess some morality that religious people don't have. Atheism does not have the ambition to provide a moral framework. Dawkins only points out that religion can corrupt morality. As for his examples and "ten commandments" - they are just examples of a set of secular moral rules one could imagine. He doesn't present them as the rules to follow. It's just an example that it can be done without invoking anything supernatural.
Is it the rejection of dogma? If that's all that's left, then the attack on moderate religion has failed completely, because moderates don't take much stock in dogma either. Worse, postmodernism waves its ugly face.
It is the rejection of supernaturalism. The whole Stalin/Hitler story and the rejection of them has little to do with the main theme. It's mentioned because it is a common theist argument. The perhaps only relevance it has is to show that an atheist can have moral values that go beyond condemning religious immorality.
Other Comments by denoir
11. Comment #14816 by PASOB on December 25, 2006 at 12:51 pm
I don't see the original article, just the comments. Can everybody else see it?Other Comments by PASOB
12. Comment #14819 by gcdavis on December 25, 2006 at 1:21 pm
In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins - one of orders of magnitude - suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.
The first task for the totalitarian leader is to crush internal opposition to their regime, so it is not surprising that religious groups should be targeted as they have an organisation and an infrastructure that is a potential conduit for opposition. Atheism isn't an issue.
[5] Even when comparing believers and nonbelievers, Dawkins is curiously silent on one of the best-known differences. Believers give far more to charities - even nonreligious charities - than do secularists. See, for instance, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey
The nub here is whether believers are "genuinely" altruistic or whether they give more generously than atheists in order to secure their place in heaven.
Other Comments by gcdavis
13. Comment #14820 by denoir on December 25, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Plus, it is nonsense.Aid donations per capita:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_eco_aid_don_percap-economic-aid-donor-per-capita
As you can see secular Europe is way ahead of any other donors.
Other Comments by denoir
14. Comment #14824 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 3:21 pm
gcdavis writes: "The nub here is whether believers are "genuinely" altruistic or whether they give more generously than atheists in order to secure their place in heaven."Well that's not the "nub", since such motivation would still support the claim of the positive ethical value of belief. So let's take this seriously. In fact, Orr is guilty of highly selective interpretation, to say the least. Of course there are differences between how communities of faith and the more secular behave; we would expect that. But those differences cut both ways. Here is what the survey he cites actually says:
Whether their views stem from their conservatism or their religiosity, our survey suggests, as earlier research has as well, that intense involvement in communities of faith is more likely to be associated with intolerance: i.e., favoring banning unpopular books from libraries, antipathy to equal rights for immigrants, lower levels of support for racial intermarriage and lower levels of friendships with gays. Religious involvement is linked to greater support for needy individuals, but it is not necessarily associated with greater support for social justice. The "social capital" embodied in religious communities is more likely to "bond" individuals with those like them than to "bridge" them to those unlike them. Communities of high religiosity are generous in their giving and volunteering, but they are relatively low on measures of social action (marches, petitions, rallies) and relatively low on tolerance (for immigrants, gays, unpopular ideas in general).
And before anyone goes rushing off to make any more generalisations, let me add that no one has established that these sociological differences between the different community types are generated by differences in belief. Indeed religious faith may itself be a consequence (rather than cause) of closer knit communities, at least in the US. Simply demonstrating a range of behavioural corellates actually tells you nothing by itself. Dawkins was wise, in my view, to not wade into this terrain, and we would do well (as would Orr) to follow his suitably circumspect example. It is sufficient to note that there is no empirical basis for asserting any kind of compelling link one way or the other between ethical behaviour and religious faith.
Other Comments by JohnC
15. Comment #14827 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 4:12 pm
And this is probably as good a place as any to deal with the Stalinist canard. Orr attempts to move beyond the usual vacuous finger-pointing by specifically linking Stalin's atheism to the liquidation of religious opposition. On face value this has some validity, since other left-wing movements (think for example of the Spanish Civil War) have engaged in similar behaviour.But one must say straight away that there is still a long distance to travel before one can trace a causal link between this behaviour and the (atheist) ideology of the perpetrators. First of all, forcible liquidation of religious institutions is by no means a component of the Marxism in whose name it was carried out. To quote at somewhat greater length from that most famous passage of Marx:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Marx's view was that religious illusions would be abandoned as a consequence of the withering away of class differences. And this position was clearly articulated before the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" had even been coined.
The regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were authoritarian dictatorships which - as do all such regimes - sought to crush all opposition by deploying the full power of the State against civil society. They did not play favourites in this regard - there was nothing special about their suppression of religious dissent, as the Left Opposition (and the murdered Trotsky) could well attest. And while nuns were raped and churches desecrated in the Spanish civil war, have we forgotten El Salvador, Archbishop Romero and the murder of nuns by American-backed death squads?
How different then are right-wing dictatorships (from Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, to Pinochet and the Shah of Iran), whose leaders were usually at least nominally religious and in recent times often supported by the US? In fact all such authoritarian regimes, leftwing and rightwing, ruthlessly liquidated opposition regardless of its ideological source, and Orr's claim that there is some "order of magnitude" difference in the "severity of sins" is spectacularly and wickedly wrong.
In reality, religion (and opposition to religion) did not play a central role in the innumerable killing fields of the 20th century, and it is probably time people on both sides stopped cynically summoning the ghosts of the murdered in this debate.
Other Comments by JohnC
16. Comment #14835 by John Phillips on December 25, 2006 at 6:37 pm
JohnC: Excellently written and any literate and honest theist reading it should listen, though hell will likely freeze over first :). However, I would take exception with your last pargaraph, inasumuch as it is not the atheist who argues that the killing fields of the 29th. century were or were not he result of relgion or lack of. That is a canard reserved for the supporters of religions who rotuinely throw it in our face, purpotedly as a warning of the dangers of an atheistic society. However, when the theist insists on raising this canard, we do then make the point that the reason for these killing fields did have one commonality with religion. That being a dogmatic belief by the ruler or rulers that theirs way was the only way to salvation and thus it was only right that all opposition be eliminated. I.e. As you point out so well, whether the instigators of the killing fields were or were not atheists had no bearing on the reasons for the killing fields though their dodmatic belief in the rightness of their cause did, sounds like religion by any other name to me.Merry yuletide.
Other Comments by John Phillips
17. Comment #14837 by hopeful on December 25, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Regarding Comment #14749 by denoir:"Demanding sophisticated arguments against religion is like demanding a sophisticated argument against the existence of Santa Claus. The basic premises of religion are so trivial that it does not need any particularly sophisticated arguments. There are of course people who try to make religion into something more sophisticated - but all they are doing is making arbitrary constructions upon a deeply flawed foundation."
Very well said!
The fact that legions of biblical scholars have invested their lives studying and discussing the minutae of religious doctrine does not make their beliefs one bit more valid. It does however make them extremely determined to protect their personal investment.
Pretending that religion and faith are mysterious, deeply complex topics that require expert understanding (and therefore could not be addressed satisfactorily by an "amateur") is simply another ploy to protect religion from criticism.
Other Comments by hopeful
18. Comment #14873 by Lionel A on December 26, 2006 at 7:53 am
Orr appears to be taking some very strong medicine.What a diatribe, or dire tribute if you prefer for dire it certainly was.
I am heartily glad that Orr did not write 'The Little Red Hen' for I would still be reading it to my kids, the youngest of whom is thirty.
Other Comments by Lionel A
19. Comment #14892 by Riley on December 26, 2006 at 12:36 pm
JohnC wrote: "In reality, religion (and opposition to religion) did not play a central role in the innumerable killing fields of the 20th century, and it is probably time people on both sides stopped cynically summoning the ghosts of the murdered in this debate."It's a point worth repeating I think, and should be applied to more than just the 20th century.
I hear atheist-evagelists (Dawkins and Harris included) claim that a belief in a personal god has been a (the?) decisive factor in many of the word's large-scale killings, and I think this claim is not very well supported by evidence and worse leads to pointless pissing matches. Numerous historical examples exist of people oppressing, killing and willingly sacrificing their own lives for the cause of familial, national and/or ideological interests conspicuously without appeal to any sort of god (e.g. Stalin-led Russia, et al) and should be evidence that a belief in a personal god is not a necessary requirement for "good people" to do bad things.
Prof. Dawkins, you had me at: "faith is not a virtue", your other political* arguments weaken this simple and powerful truth.
--Riley
---------------------
* notably distinguished from scientific arguments about the improbable existance of God.
Other Comments by Riley
20. Comment #14894 by Mr. Mark on December 26, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Hopeful wrote:Regarding Comment #14749 by denoir:
"Demanding sophisticated arguments against religion is like demanding a sophisticated argument against the existence of Santa Claus. The basic premises of religion are so trivial that it does not need any particularly sophisticated arguments. There are of course people who try to make religion into something more sophisticated - but all they are doing is making arbitrary constructions upon a deeply flawed foundation."
Hopeful then expanded:
"Very well said!
"The fact that legions of biblical scholars have invested their lives studying and discussing the minutae of religious doctrine does not make their beliefs one bit more valid. It does however make them extremely determined to protect their personal investment.
Pretending that religion and faith are mysterious, deeply complex topics that require expert understanding (and therefore could not be addressed satisfactorily by an "amateur") is simply another ploy to protect religion from criticism."
Good thoughts. Richard covered this in TGD with his section on asking meaningless questions (Ex: "Why are unicorns hollow?"). Religion does this all the time, no more so than in the tradition of midrash.
BTW - is anybody surprised that so many negative reviewers of Dawkins belittle his work as middlebrow? Even if we were to grant them that TGD is middlebrow, what does it say about the reviewers when they can't even get the point of a "middlebrow" book? It seems that many of them are holding Dawkins to an impossible & unscientific standard, ie: Dawkins must write the be-all-and-end-all book, a book that totally demolishes the concept of god in a way that instantly and totally makes non-believers out of any and all who care to read it. Since Dawkins hasn't written that specific book, then TGD must be a failure. One wonders if they hold every individual book ever penned on religion to the same impossible standard, ie: to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that god does indeed exist, and to prove it to the point that all believers and non-believers alike embrace the one religion that such a book expounds. By such a standard, any book would be a failure, even if the world had only one religion...but it existed with two competing sects.
No, what Richard has done has been to start a dialogue, a dialogue that is long overdue and far from over. There are other books out there that complement Richard's, and they are well worth a read.
The power of what Dawkins has penned is clear, no more so than in the shallow reviews of certain writers who hope the whole thing will just go away. It's the literary equivalent of labeling John Kerry a flip-flopper or Al Gore as wardrobed-challenged. As in those cases, once the power of the soundbite has faded, we're left with the bitter truths that both of those politicians expressed while their character was under assault (ie: bush's war is wrong & global warming is real).
The point is that it's up to those making the claim for god to prove it. That Dawkins demolishes the sophistry of such beliefs (and the attendant processes and politics that keep such beliefs alive) so effortlessly makes one wonder why it took so long to do so in the first place.
Other Comments by Mr. Mark
21. Comment #14902 by Nikki on December 26, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Reguarding the issue of morality. Are christian missionaries still preaching against the use of condoms in areas of developing countries which are rife with AIDS? Africa for example?Other Comments by Nikki
22. Comment #14904 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 3:37 pm
The Pope requested a "study" of the matter, which was submitted last month. The world is now waiting for the Bishop of Rome to make a statement on the matter. Current Catholic policy rejects the use of condoms in all circumstances. And the Vatican study only examined the possible use of condoms by sero-discordant married couples. An unknown number of US evangelical organisations seem to have adopted a similar policy to that of the Holy See.This is a shocking scandal, a clear case of a religious dogma having genocidal consequences.
Other Comments by JohnC
23. Comment #14910 by Nikki on December 26, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for the update JohnC. It's an issue that always comes into mind, whenever I read xtians banging on about their superior morality. I did read quite an interesting article on the web recently, (dated 2005), reguarding how the money from Bush's 15 billion dollar AIDS funding package was likely to be distributed. It started off with this:"In 2003, President George W. Bush asked Congress for $15 billion to fight AIDS in developing countries. During the 1990s, HIV spread rapidly, especially in Africa, where some 250 people were dying from AIDS every hour. The US had been accused of not doing enough to fight the epidemic, and when the bill passed, many conscience-stricken Americans, moved by images in the press of dying women and children, praised the administration. But some were not sure. Much of the money will go to church-affiliated charities or faith-based organizations, including some evangelical Christian groups that have very little experience with AIDS."
Taken from:
"God and the Fight Against AIDS"
By Helen Epstein
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17963
Everytime, I have brought this issue up with xtians taking that high moral stance, I have been met with silence.
Other Comments by Nikki
24. Comment #14915 by Nikki on December 26, 2006 at 5:00 pm
19. Comment #14892 by Riley on December 26"I hear atheist-evagelists (Dawkins and Harris included) claim that a belief in a personal god has been a (the?) decisive factor in many of the word's large-scale killings, and I think this claim is not very well supported by evidence and worse leads to pointless pissing matches."
Perhaps Riley would like to comment on "God and the Fight Against Aids"?
Other Comments by Nikki
25. Comment #14923 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Riley, it should be noted that Richard and Sam are not the same person, and that perhaps your reservations (and mine) may not be particularly applicable to TGD. Dawkins' outrage has always been at the baseless intellectual privileging of religion, while Harris's End of Faith was actually a direct response to 9/11 and his concerns are very much about the political dangers religion poses. This places Sam, who by the way I regard as an unsurpassed polemecist, much more in the political crossfire. Richard, for instance, is content to show that Hitler and Stalin did not commit atrocities because of atheism. But Sam's agenda is about specifically linking religious ideology (particularly Islam) to a clear and present threat to Western civilisation itself, a much taller order.For example, the mujahideen as an international fighting force was in the fact the direct creation of the CIA, forged as an instrument against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To use a political nomenclature currently out of fashion, Bin Laden is a creation of US imperialism. Sam cannot say this, even if he believes it, given his intended audience. So he strains to causally link the emergence and behaviour of Al Qaeda and Hamas to the contents of the Koran, against a large body of empirical evidence that directly indicts US foreign policy. Nonetheless, as the recent congressional elections attest, his might be the right intervention at the right time: much of the American public is becoming increasingly nervous - and rightly so - about where religious dogma (Muslim and Christian) will take them.
There is little intellectual purity in politics: I admire Harris while being critical of some of his specific positions; and I am also grateful that Richard treads somewhat higher ground, as is appropriate for an Oxford don :-)
Other Comments by JohnC
26. Comment #15019 by willerror on December 28, 2006 at 7:15 am
--Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question."--I like these kinds of "banal" questions, because they point up the absurdity of most religious beliefs. Why are we wrong to wonder about such questions? Is it just because the answer we atheists get is one the theists dislike?
Other Comments by willerror
27. Comment #15494 by Sancus on December 31, 2006 at 8:33 pm
denoir,Bringing up Marx, Stalin, Mao or any other immoral atheists as an argument for religion as a source of morality is a sequence of logical fallacies. First we have the association fallacy (If P subset of S,T then S subset of T). This is an equivalent argument:
Marx, Stalin and Mao all have the letter "a" in their first name. Hence people that have "b" in their first name are moral.
The fact that they were atheists and immoral can only implicate that some atheists are immoral or that not atheists are moral. It can in no way imply that theists are moral.
They were not merely individuals who may have been immoral. They used moral philosophy to take control of states and cause their systemic collapse, leading to a minimum of a half century of global instability.
If you prefer, instead of saying Marx, Stalin, and Mao, I will say Marxism, Stalinism, and Maoism, which are major subsets of atheistic moral philosophy, but that is not important. What is important is that they are all based on Hegel. When Dawkins brings up the moral zeitgeist, he puts himself in close and dangerous company with these philosophies. So, it is not because they are atheist, but because they are Hegelian, and since Dawkins does not say anything that would discriminate himself from them, he invites responses about them.
The second fallacy is an implication fallacy called "Affirming the consequent" (If P then Q. Not Q therefor Not P). An equivalent argument:
"If Bob is illiterate then he didn't write the Bible. Bob is not illiterate hence he wrote the Bible."
Even if you would argue that atheists are immoral it would not imply that theists are moral.
This fallacy only applies to moral philosophies where it is accepted. You have already made a declaration of what it means to be moral by saying that this does not apply. I mention this not to express disagreement, but to remind you that the religious disagree, and no amount of presenting this as fallacy will reach religious ears.
It is the rejection of supernaturalism.
And that is not enough! There are very natural forces opposing one another right now in this world. They manifest as large groups of people with opposing moral philosophies and the potentially harmful means of executing them.
Couching one's moral philosophy in a vague Hegelian notion means to not participate in the natural forces of moral discussion. Worse, it is to timidly and sloppily appear to ally one's self with the most dangerous movements of the 20th century.
Dawkins is still a spectator in the moral discussion. His consciousness raising about children is extremely commendable in my eyes, but he has provided no moral basis to call indoctrination wrong except to say that children are "too young." That's exactly the basis that the religious use for indoctrinating and, when examined, quite embarrassing. Coerced education and indoctrination of innocent people is immoral for people of any age and at any time in history.
Dawkins does a great deal of help to reply to the existential question and give people the courage to deny God's existence, and I admire him for spreading that courage. However, there is very little discussion happening about morality. For his vague adoption of the moral zeitgeist, he deserves all the Marxist, Stalinist, and Maoist criticism he gets.
Although not the Hitler criticism. That one's unacceptable.
Other Comments by Sancus
28. Comment #17328 by Riley on January 12, 2007 at 11:46 pm
24. Comment #14915 by Nikki on December 26:
"Perhaps Riley would like to comment on "God and the Fight Against Aids"?"
Involved in this AIDS mess are political organizations led by complex ideologies and motives. It just so happens that George Bush and the Catholic Church claim their decisions are guided by God. If they were'nt claiming authority from God, they'd find some other faith based reason: "Conservatism", "Family Values", whatever.
My point is that religion is just an emergent property of the underlying problem, and that there's no special case to be made about the evils committed in the name of God that can't be equally made for the evils committed in the name of loyalty to a charsmatic leader, institution, or ideology. Belief in God is not the decisive factor - take away belief in God and large populations of people will still do evil things.
The root problem that seems to exist across the board is faith. Faith which leads people to follow ideologies despite evidence, and to kill and be killed at the command of charismatic leaders and institutions.
-------------------------------
25. Comment #14923 by JohnC on December 26:
"Riley, it should be noted that Richard and Sam are not the same person, and that perhaps your reservations (and mine) may not be particularly applicable to TGD. Dawkins' outrage has always been at the baseless intellectual privileging of religion, while Harris's End of Faith was actually a direct response to 9/11 and his concerns are very much about the political dangers religion poses. "
I'm speaking generally about Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the current atheist movement, not just the content of TGD. And in this broad movement, I see a counterproductive claim being made that "belief in God" is the decisive factor in much of the evil committed in the world - and I think this is a mistake.
Its far stronger to attack "faith" (which by extension combines an attack on the belief in God and the belief in Stalinism alike) than to single-out an attack on the belief in God. As a result of Sam Harris singling-out belief in God as a decisive factor in the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., Richard's very own message (which at one time I think was more selectively targeted on "faith") is now distracted by the need to argue that Stalinist atrocities are not related to Stalinist atheism. Theists then retort by using the very same arguments to disconnect Theist atrocities from Theism.
Can no one else see what an unproductive mess this creates?
---
Other Comments by Riley
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1. Comment #14743 by Aussie on December 24, 2006 at 9:39 pm
The sheer extent of this article alone is flattering.Other Comments by Aussie