Short vacation ...

Hi all, thanks for reading so far. There's more to come, of course, but I will be away for the next two weeks, and will be posting rarely. Check back in May for regular posts!

He reminds me of me

Richard Dawkins reminds me so much of one of my favorite people: me, ten years ago. The arguments are the same, the arrogance is almost identical. Dawkins employs celestial teapots, fairies, and the flying spaghetti monster as equivalent, logically, to God. In my day, I used flying, insensible, immaterial rabbits. We both found St. Anselm's ontological proof of God to be exceedingly silly.

Dawkins notes, confusedly, that one of his heroes, Betrand Russell, took the argument seriously. Dawkins does not note that one of the most famous logicians and mathematicians ever (and good friend of Einstein) Kurt Gödel, produced a modern ontological proof. I cannot pretend to understand it, and thus, be convinced by it, but I certainly can't belittle it, either.

At the outset I said belief in God was not a topic to be decided by experts - so Gödel's incomprehensible proof could hardly end the issue. What is frustrating about Dawkins, and indicated by Gödel's absence from his book, is Dawkins's radical unfairness. Dawkins, however, cannot believe anyone remotely intelligent could take God seriously. Every smart religious person is transformed in Dawkin's eyes to someone stupid, or, more often, a secret atheist, whose true beliefs were buried by religious persecution. But Gödel believed in God, not in "the old days when everyone believed", but in the 1960s and 1970s. And thus, since neither his intelligence, nor his faith, can be dismissed, Gödel himself is dismissed. The resulting book, so far, appears to the equivalent of what happens when partisans write political books. In fact, Dawkins reminds me of someone else. He's the Ann Coulter of atheism.


(In my next post: I agree with Dawkins about several things!)

Who cares about creation?

Dawkins, following the current popular evolution vs creation debate, vigorously attacks the 'hypothesis' of a 'superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed the universe' (p.31). He notes that he is attacking all religions generally, but Christianity specifically. But his hypothesis doesn't really get the point of Christianity. To quote (albeit from memory) the most famous living philosopher, and staunch atheist, Richard Rorty: "Why do people get so worked up about evolution and creation? The center of the Christian religion is not God the Creator, but Christ the Redeemer."

He said this back in my atheist days, but it stuck with me -- and now, I have to say, it is so true. Christianity's truth isn't in the genesis of the world or of the Bible; it's Gospel.

Rorty, shrugging off evolution vs creation

Too much respect for religion?

Dawkins then turns to Islam in Europe, and the cartoon controversy. In his criticism of the cowering accomodations of certain segments of society, we are in complete agreement. The popularity of antireligious sentiment today, as seen in the mainstream reception of Sam Harris's work or Dawkins's, results from the rise of radical Islam.

The question is: is the problem religion generally, or radical Islam specifically? and, is the accomodation being given to radical Islam in Europe a result of respect for religion generally, or fear of radical Islam specifically?

I'd answer the latter in both cases.

Is Freedom of Religion a Good Amendment?

Dawkins attacks the 'special respect' religion gets, making a nice point that, in America, cancer patients cannot smoke marijuana, but obscure religious sects can use hallucinogens. He points out that if aesthetes claim they need hallucinogens to appreciate art, they'd have no legal basis for this. He claims these situations are equivalent. But, in America, we legally acknowledge in the Constitution that these situations are not at all equivalent: religion is not the same as art; there is not freedom of artistic appreciation in the Bill of Rights.

The differing treatment of religion between Europe and America, I suspect, relates to our different histories. Europe suffered through centuries of religious violence and persecution, and as a result, they draw a circle of silence around religion: France will suppress religious expression; Italy has laws against defaming religion. Knowing firsthand the horrors of religious violence, they seem afraid of it. (I would argue that America has an analogous relationship with race - having suffered from centuries of racial oppression and violence, we are sensitive to the issue, in a way Europeans might not be.)

America, however, never suffered from large scale religious violence: in fact, America began, in part, as a solution to Europe's religious violence. I would argue that the Pilgrims' experiment was, by and large, successful - but, just as it is reasonable to question the relevance of the 2nd amendment today, it may be reasonable to question the relevance of the 1st. But the criteria for revoking or curtailing amendments ought to be pretty stiff.

Was Einstein Religious?

The book's first chapter defines, and twists, a few terms:

1) theism: belief in a supernatural creator who then oversees & influences the creation (e.g., a personal notion of God)
2) deism: belief in a supernatural creator who created the laws of nature, and then sits back -- "watered-down theism"
3) pantheism: God is a "non-supernatural synonym for Nature", which is an object of reverence, and, is only "sexed-up atheism".

In this way he tries to round up every religious scientist, Einstein included, into the atheism camp. This seems a bit cheap. 'Einsteinian religion' is the sense that behind experience 'there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection'. This doesn't look like atheism wearing make-up. First: Einstein posits 'a something', not merely 'something' and certainly not 'nothing'. Einstein seems clearly to be talking about a particular entity. That is hardly the same as saying 'the universe is a collection of physical laws, behind which there is nothing, though the laws are quite beautiful and worthy of appreciation'.

Dawkins endorses Einstein's statement, if 'cannot grasp' can mean that it might one day become 'graspable' (presumably through science).

There are at least 2 possible ways to read the Einstein quote:
1) An atheistic version: The laws of nature, knowable through science, are worthy of reverence (Dawkins view)
2) A theistic version: Our minds cannot grasp God, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us as a feeble reflection. God, in this case, is not a metaphor at all, but a thing.

Now, some Christian communities might say (and as Dawkins points out, have said) that Einstein's religion didn't cut the mustard -- which is not all that surprising, since he was Jewish.

I don't know whether Einstein believed in God or didn't. But it seems that the notion of an unknowable God is something that has been kicking around the heads of sincerely religious people for many centuries.

But Dawkins then says "The God Delusion does not refer to the God of Einstein." (p. 20) This seems like a large concession - I certainly identify with Einstein's God, but I'm not an atheist. Dawkin's is dichotomizing, theism vs atheism, in a way that fails acknowledge the heterogeniety of belief. In effect, he is trying to make atheism into the big tent, going so far as including people who freely use the word God, and then stating that these people are being "poetic". I don't know whether this will affect his later arguments, but if the point is to narrow the definition of "religious" to "people who believe Mary appears in visions on toast", it seems to foreshadow some serious straw man arguments.

Preface to God Delusion

Dawkins states 4 objectives, or 'consciousness-raising messages', as he calls them.

1) An atheist can be 'happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled'. So far, so good.

He also points out that without religion, there'd be no 9/11, no Taliban blowing up statues, no Israel/Palestine problem, no Serb/Croat problems, and other fairly dubious propositions. Without religion, true, there'd be no Taliban blowing up statues - in part because there wouldn't be statues in the first place; ethnic conflicts would still be there, I'd imagine ("The Ethnicity Delusion"). But this is nitpicking. Weirdly, he doesn't mention the Inquisition.

2) Natural selection powerfully explains a lot. Agreed.

3) is not explicitly pointed out, but I think is 'Children can't be religious'. More on that later, I guess.

4) 'Atheist pride'. Sounds like (1) - so I can agree with that, I guess. A funny bit about Julia Sweeney's mom saying she could take that her daughter didn't believe in God, but did she have to be an atheist, as well?

Well, so far, out of his 4 consciousness raising points, I already agree with at least 3. I suspect there may be some difficulty when we get to the details.

A word on Dawkins

Dawkins, unlike other famous scientists, is not a great scientist; he's not even a scientist. Most famous scientists (e.g., Richard Feynman, Francis Collins, Paul Berg, not to mention folks like Sherrington, Einstein and Darwin) became famous for their scientific work, then developed into public figures.

Gould, Wilson and Conway Morris all made original contributions to evolutionary theory before becoming public figures. Dawkins didn't - he took a fairly standard Mendelian/Darwinian picture of evolution and popularized it in The Selfish Gene. This work was not scientific, either in the naturalist or experimental tradition.

All of this is not exactly a knock on Dawkins. Dawkins's role has been to make public the dominant strain of evolutionary theory; this work, in some senses, is even more important than refining the theory. I firmly believe that the public needs to come to terms with developments in the biological sciences. As medicine becomes a necessity for optimal living, as neuroscience becomes a factor in criminal cases, as stem cells dominate the news, as the biological sciences come to dominate more of our lives, public understanding of science will be vital for a healthy democracy. Dawkins, more than almost any other figure, has helped biological science come out into the public.

But Dawkins's ideas are just that: ideas. They deserve evaluation on their merits. Doubting evolution is one thing, doubting Dawkins's version of it (as Gould did, and many other scientists do) is another. It should go without saying then, since Dawkins is not trained in philosophy, theology, cosmology, or even experimental science, that his ideas on God reflect no expertise or privilege: they are the ideas of a smart man with a sharp pen. Nothing more, nothing less. Again, that's not a knock - we each have to make our peace with the world without expert knowledge, and that's the way Dawkins has.