Vanity of Vanities, All is Vanity and Striving after Emptiness

I was in my favorite local bookstore today, and found out Richard Dawkins had written another book.  I thought it might have just been released, but it was actually published in September.  And while I won't bother to read it (or comment on it that much), the few reviews of it I found (and Google produced almost none) make it sound like another bite at the apple, another attempt to gain some notoriety.

The arguments he uses are just a rehash of those in TGD, as are many of the illustrations and stories. So we have all the old ones – atheists just worship one god less; evolution proves there is no God; you don't need God for morality; and of course the oldie but goldie, 'who created God, then?'.

He's even got the same old stories and illustrations – the cargo cult, the universe where you have a green moustache, the (mis) citation of Hitler etc.

I'm going to assume the reviewer at Christianity Today has at least basic reading comprehension skills, and accept that as an accurate summation of Dawkins' points, at least.  The entire review is telling if only for the ease with which it dispatches most of Dawkins' arguments without having to venture into theology to do it:

Dawkins pontificates as though he were an expert in subjects which he knows very little about. Space does not permit me to list all the subtle and howling errors. But here are a few of the simplistic lowlights.

People worship Jesus all over the world today because of a historical accident in AD 312; the Trinity is polytheistic. Paul says virtually nothing about the life of Jesus. Until now nobody doubted the Gospels. Revelation was the inspiration for the doctrine of the rapture. There is little or no evidence for the existence of Abraham, David, Moses and perhaps Jesus didn't even exist. If he did, he may have said some cool things but he really was not nice.

....

If you want to understand how Dawkins works, take this example: "No serious scholar today thinks that the Gospels were written by eye-witnesses."

Here you need to grasp how Dawkins uses language. "Serious scholar" means 'someone who agrees with me'. If they don't they obviously can be neither serious nor a scholar. Which is why he can dismiss, if he even knows about, Professor Richard Bauckham of the University of St Andrews, whose serious scholarly work Jesus and the Eyewitness is an authoritative piece of academic research.

Likewise when Dawkins confidently asserts that no "educated theologian" believes that Adam and Eve, or Noah is history. But I'm educated (two degrees) and I'm a theologian, and I believe they are history. I may be wrong. But Dawkins' simplistic Emperor's clothes attitude – 'any intelligent person will see that the Emperor is wearing the finest clothes' – is easily exposed. 

That, as they say on the Twitter machine, is just science.  Not exactly the arguments I would make, but Dawkins' metaphorical nudity is easily pointed out.  And yet that's the common discourse on matters religious in public print:

Religious people, even if they don’t believe in a literal place called heaven (“white bean bags, 24-hour room service, fat babies with wings”, to quote Alan Partridge), nonetheless believe that what truly matters most in life belongs to the realm of the eternal and divine. The result is “a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being”. Hägglund’s alternative, “secular faith”, insists that our finite lives are all we have – and that this finitude, far from being a cause for regret, is precisely what gives them meaning.

Actually that's an attitude more true for "evangelical" Christians, or maybe Buddhists (I don't know, to be honest; it fits a stereotype, but I don't mean to trust stereotypes).  I don't believe that what matters most in this life "belongs to the realm of the eternal and divine."  I believe what matters most in this life is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless.  The whole "pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by" stuff is the realm of those who think their most important task is to:

At a personal level I am thankful to Richard Dawkins because he opened the door for me and others to proclaim the Good News of Jesus to tens of thousands who would not have heard it otherwise. In fact, I have met more people who were converted to Christ through Dawkins, than have been converted to atheism. I wrote a book called The Dawkins Letters, which the Lord still continues to use. 

I confess I'm a bit humbler than that, too.  I quite sincerely believe that if the Lord uses me at all, it is despite my best efforts, not because of them.  But that enters the area of the "humble brag," and all I can do is put down a marker trying to distinguish me from the caricature "religious believer" and move on.  But it turns out I'm not moving far from the Guardian reviewer:

There’s a glaring problem with all this as a critique of religion, which is that religious believers manifestly do find meaning in daily life, are devoted to their relationships, and care about the fate of the planet. (Hägglund acknowledges as much, but suggests they are acting from secular faith when they do so, risking the weird conclusion that religion isn’t all that religious.) A more interesting question is how far even the secular among us remain locked in the “eternalist” mindset, thereby inadvertently sapping our lives of meaning. Like any good rationalist, I know I’m going to die, but I’m not sure I really believe it; if I did, I probably wouldn’t spend so much time on Twitter. In other words, I can’t say that I live every moment of my life with an awareness that “everything depends on what we do with our time together”. This Life makes a forceful case – via readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, St Augustine and CS Lewis, among many others – for keeping that truth in mind.

Apparently all that reading has not penetrated Hägglund's understanding enough to make him tread more carefully around terms like "faith" and "religious." But then we find out (no fault of the reviewer's) why Dawkins' new book sounds so much like his old book:

Maybe it goes without saying that reflections on building a meaningful secular life are absent from Outgrowing God, Richard Dawkins’s latest fulmination against religion, this time aimed at a young adult audience. Like other luminaries of what we should probably now be calling the nearly new atheism, Dawkins’s goals are demolitionary. And so a familiar liturgy, recited in a familiar tone of exasperation, fills the book’s first half. Since you already don’t believe in “Jupiter or Poseidon or Thor or Venus or Cupid or Snotra or Mars or Odin or Apollo”, why randomly believe in one other god, the bearded old man of the Bible? Don’t you realise there’s no evidence for Jesus’s miracles, and not much evidence for the rest of the story? Besides, what kind of mean-spirited deity would drown almost every living thing he’d created, sparing only “Mr and Mrs Giraffe, Mr and Mrs Elephant, Mr and Mrs Penguin and all the other couples” admitted to Noah’s Ark? It’s possible, I suppose, that younger readers will find this less condescending than I did. It’s also possible that they won’t. 

Although in the end, the limits of human knowledge, or rather the power of narrative, stand in the way of real understanding:

As for Dawkins himself, his career in evolutionary biology might stand as an exemplar of the kind of life Hägglund urges us to live – a finite existence, devoted to the fragile and collaborative human endeavour of expanding scientific understanding. But atheism alone can’t explain why it should matter to spend your time that way. For that you need secular faith, a belief in the value of our finite projects as ends in themselves. And Dawkins, however intensely this might irritate him, gives every sign of being a true believer.

It's a popular myth that Richard Dawkins has expanded scientific understanding.  The same myth attaches to Carl Sagan, for much the same reasons:  they were both authors of popular books.  Between his books on genetics (wrong, all wrong) and his books championing atheism, Richard Dawkins has shown no more interest in expanding human understanding, scientific or otherwise, than Donald Trump.  The issue of secular faith, however, is an acute one; and worth paying attention to again at this time of year. I won't belabor my disagreements and dismissal of Richard Dawkins as anything but an empty bladder of air (but I will shamelessly link to them),  but I have to add this as almost a footnote, if only to provoke some humility in us all.  It's the opening paragraph of the CT review, and it's probably the most disturbing set of facts in this discussion:

Although its readers were to name him one of the top three intellectuals in the world, Prospect magazine gave a scathing review to Richard Dawkins' anti-religion polemic The God Delusion, writing at the time, "It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works." That did not stop TGD becoming a multi-million copy bestseller.

To name Richard Dawkins a top intellectual is, to return to the current political situation, to name Donald Trump one of the greatest Presidents in American history.  It doesn't say much, in other words, about the readership of Prospect magazine (a magazine I am otherwise unaware of).  Of course, TGD made Dawkins a household name again (in some households, which is enough for most fame), and that's a disturbing fact, too.  But discussions of faith that take the issue of "trust" (which is all faith is) seriously enough to point out the reality of "secular faith," and which include a man of such poor accomplishment being considered a top intellectual of our time, should be enough to humble us all and make us think on our own sins and shortcomings before we make so bold as to declare we have a handle on any "truth."

"...we seem to see..."

Part of the ugliness of the internet is that you see, not the "suffering humanity" of Goya's greatest scenes, but the grotesque inhumanity of individuals.

Case in point: this article at Salon, a very thoughtful and nuanced discussion of raising a child with trisomy 21 (after reading it, I don't even like to use the label "Down syndrome" anymore), couched in the context of the last Twitter firestorm Richard Dawkins set off (for which, as is pointed out here, he never really apologized.)  Most of the commentary argues that the world is better off without children born with trisomy 21, and that's why so many women are aborting fetuses where the syndrome is detected in utero.

I don't know that that is true, but I am skeptical of the claim.  Whether it is true or not is irrelevant, because it means most pregnant women are actually quite comfortable in Omelas, and would rather abort a child and replace it with another, than consider that child a unique human being.  The question of choosing abortion is not on the table here; the question is, why give birth to a child with a condition like trisomy 21?  And the bulk of the conclusions seems to be:  because it's damned inconvenient, which was Dawkins' argument.  The article at Salon provides a rejoinder to that assumption; but the ugliness is that the assumption is so deeply rooted few people commenting on the article take note of that.

They know what they know, and no facts are going to disturb their knowledge.

More telling, then, than the question of how one makes such a moral decision, is the question of what ethics one employs to make such a moral decision.  On that issue, no one wants to speak at all; except in this article at The Daily Beast.

The short version of the article is:  ethics is far more complicated than Dawkins imagines, and "logic" is not the stuff Mr. Spock uses to be unemotional and so reach a better conclusion than emotional humans.  For example:

In the apology Dawkins says, “Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort…I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare….Having said that, the choice would be entirely yours and I would never dream of trying to impose my views on you or anyone else.”

Dawkins’ belief that we should maximize happiness and minimize suffering seems to be a moral theory known as “act-utilitarianism.” For an act-utilitarian, an action’s morality can, in theory, be demonstrated empirically. To discover if an act is moral or immoral, you simply measure the amount of happiness or suffering it causes. The more suffering an act causes, the more immoral it is; the more happiness an act causes, the more moral it is.

"Seems to be" is the telling phrase there, because Dawkins doesn't really have a coherent ethic here; rather like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, Dawkins seems to know what's ethical when he sees it.  But the question of "amount of suffering" raises a critical point:  whose suffering are we considering?  The individual's?  The family's?  Society's?  The world?

Lest you think I exaggerate:

When you really try to understand what Dawkins is saying in his apology, however, you realize that his thoughts are not even fully coherent. He says that continuing the pregnancy is immoral because the child would better be off if she had never been born—but he provides no evidence for this, and it’s flat-out implausible that Down syndrome renders a life so wretched that it’s not worth living. Earlier in the same sentence Dawkins says he believes morality is based on increasing “the sum of happiness,” which presumably means the sum of everyone’s happiness. That is, an action is immoral when it makes the entire world worse off. If that’s true, and he has stated he thinks it’s immoral knowingly to give birth to someone with Down syndrome, does he think the mere presence of people with Down syndrome increases suffering in the world?

If you read the comments at Salon (and I don't advise it), you'll find that it is actually considered quite plausible that "Down syndrome renders a life so wretched that it's not worth living."  Which is precisely what the Salon article is countering, although to no avail with the crowd that knows what it knows and doesn't need to know anything else.  There, however, is Dawkins' argument in a nutshell:  the happiness of the world is diminished because of one child with trisomy 21, so it is immoral to give birth to such children.*

And apparently no small number of people are okay with that.  Which is kind of disgusting; not to mention wildly immature, since the first response to that kind of thinking is:  "The world doesn't revolve around you."

Dawkins, and a lot of the comments at Salon, justify the decision to abort a fetus with trisomy 21 on the grounds that everybody who is pro-choice (and so will have an abortion, if they choose) will decide to abort such a fetus.  Which is another monstrous display of self-centeredness:

It is...possible for someone to be pro-choice and think abortion is generally permissible, but not for certain reasons. He or she may think it immoral to terminate if the decision was based on the fact that a fetus was discovered to be gay, or predisposed to obesity, or dark-skinned, or female. Or disabled. Indeed, Dawkins is so far from the ordinary pro-choice stance that there is no major bioethicist or philosopher who would agree—without far more caveats than Dawkins provides—that the “moral and sensible” thing to do is abort if a fetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome.

I suppose Dawkins, or his supporters, would qualify the decision to abort based on genetic characteristics, to Down syndrome v. being gay, or female, or dark-skinned, on the grounds that the latter don't detract from the sum of the world's happiness, but trisomy 21 does.  Which, of course, is defensible:  if you have no ethics at all.

As for the misery of trisomy 21, perhaps we should ask the people involved:

Among 2,044 parents or guardians surveyed, 79 percent reported their outlook on life was more positive because of their child with Down syndrome…

Skotko also found that among siblings ages 12 and older, 97 percent expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome and 88 percent were convinced they were better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome. A third study evaluating how adults with Down syndrome felt about themselves reports 99 percent responded they were happy with their lives, 97 percent liked who they are, and 96 percent liked how they looked.

But they aren't increasing the sum of Richard Dawkins' imagined happiness, nor of his acolytes, so clearly they are wrong.  And regarding that reference to Mr. Spock earlier:

Among the people who, according to Dawkins, have misunderstood Dawkins, are “those who took offence because they know and love a person with Down Syndrome, and who thought I was saying that their loved one had no right to exist. I have sympathy for this emotional point, but it is an emotional one not a logical one.” Apparently, he thinks people who love someone with Down syndrome simply must be clouded by sentiment, and unable to see reason. But for an act-utilitarian, the emotions of those who know and love people with Down syndrome are not muddying the issue; on the contrary, they are crucial data points. These people are telling him what for some reason he does not seem to want to hear: that their happiness is increased with someone with Down syndrome in the world.

The gravest error in employing "logic" is in assuming logic invariably leads to truth, when logic itself makes no such claim.  Logic, properly employed, will eliminate error in reasoning; but it does not speak to the validity of the information employed.  The old syllogism that:  "All humans are mortal, Socrates is human, therefore Socrates is mortal" is a valid conclusion, but it is as valid as "1+1=2."  The numbers there are merely symbols, they are not statements of immutable fact (and are only valid in certain contexts.  In biology, 1+1=3, at a minimum, unless the female devours the male after copulation.  But in those cases 1+1 usually equals something in double or even triple digits.).  The syllogism doesn't prove that humans are mortal, or that Socrates is human; it simply establishes a valid conclusion from the words that might as well be symbols themselves (and in symbolic logic are merely symbols).  The reasoning may be sound, but is the outcome true?  Logic cannot speak to that.  And if emotions are crucial data points Dawkins simply wants to discard on the way to his conclusion, then what good is this intelligence Dawkins supposedly has?

And besides, Dawkins employs no such logic at all.  His ethics are incoherent and inconsistent.  He would undoubtedly argue that a female child does not subtract from the world's sum of happiness, but if that child is born into a culture which is barbaric to women, is the mother wrong to weep for the suffering she fears her daughter will undergo?  Would we consider that valid grounds for abortion in that culture?  Probably not, but are we any less barbaric because we consider children with trisomy 21 too much trouble to bother with?  Where, exactly, is the distinction in this ethical system Dawkins proposes?

None of this stops Dawkins' ardent supporters from saying he's right because, well, some people have no reason to live, and they know who they are.

Or something.  I dunno; it's all too depressing.....

*Conversely, if the misery of one child will make everyone else happy, Dawkins would be fine as mayor for life of Omelas.

The God Delusion

If ever a book was aptly named to reflect the personality of its author....

Richard Dawkins is trumpeted on the cover of his new book as "the world's most prominent atheist," a title he presumably inherits now that Madalyn Murray O'Hair is dead (honestly, I didn't even know there was a ranking in this field). Neither a theologian nor a philosopher of religion, he spends 80+ pages on the arguments for the existence of the God of Abraham (the Hindu pantheon and other gods of other world religions need not apply, apparently). Neither an anthropologist nor a psychiatrist, he devotes 70 pages to the "roots of religion" and a discussion of whether morality is possible outside of religion (I'll save you the money: yes. That's me. Ignore Dawkins.). Not trained as a scriptural scholar (not all of whom are either religious nor Christian), he devotes another 40 pages to scriptural criticism. The rest of the book is devoted to making clear his straw man is actually a version of Christian fundamentalism, one that exists largely in his fevered perceptions.

Skimming the index, I find no reference to any philosopher of religion outside of Immanuel Kant (and he merits only a page; thus does Mr. Dawkins apparently dispose of both Kant's Idealism and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). The chapter on the proofs of God references Aquinas (whom Dawkins deigns to declare a thinker with an "eminent" reputation. Yeah, and Shakespeare was a pretty good writer, too.) and Pascal. The index betrays no reference anywhere in the book to St. Anselm (creator of what Kant later labelled the "ontological proof"), nor to modern philosophers like Charles Hartshorne (The Logic of Perfection, his updating of Anselm's argument) or Alvin Plantinga. If you want to read a thorough discussion of all the important proofs of the God of Abraham that have been considered in Western culture, you'd do better to turn to Richard M. Gale's On the Nature and Existence of God. So would Mr. Dawkins, who obviously didn't.

Nowhere in his index, indeed, does Mr. Dawkins reference any important philosophers of religion or even of phenomenology. Kierkegaard's argument against proving existence (from the Philosophical Fragments) is not even considered. Mr. Dawkins gleefully sets up his straw men, and proceeds to knock them over, for several hundred pages.

He does, I noted, give ample space to Daniel C. Dennett. Birds of a feather, and all that, I suppose. This is all too familiar.

It isn't that I object to Mr. Dawkins' conclusions. What he believes or doesn't is of no importance to me whatsoever. I must admit a weakness, though: I do not suffer fools gladly. I know more about the arguments against the arguments for the existence of God than Mr. Dawkins has, apparently, imagined. The arguments from free will; omincscience-immutablity; ontology; religious experience; even the pragmatic arguments of Pascal and William James. A very long book can be devoted to this issue alone, if not several books. Mr. Dawkins jumps from an elementary school version of Aquinas' five proofs to Pascal, with just a passing reference to Anselm's argument and no mention of either the Saint or his modern-day defender, Mr. Hartshorne. (Hartshorne's argument is so complex that even Mr. Gale declines to include it in his book, saying it needs separate consideration). What Mr. Dawkins clearly goes after is a caricature of religious faith drawn from his impressions of fundamentalist Christians and, like Mr. Dennett, Mr. Dawkins imagines that all the religions of the world are basically Christianity, of this peculiar and very narrow nature (and one that doesn't even resemble most of the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity). Small wonder then there are no references in the index to Huston Smith, Jaroslav Pelikan, or even Martin Marty (Fundamentalisms Observed). Mr. Dawkins has so clearly failed to do his homework that, were this thesis to be presented to me as a completed research paper, I'd fail the student for failing to do any real investigation of the subject.

Were I as ignorant of science as Mr. Dawkins is of theology and philosophy of religion (as well as psychology, sociology, anthropology, to name a few fields), I'd be embarassed to write a book about the philosophy of science and put my ignorance between hard covers and then ask people to pay good money for it.

But perhaps that's why I'm not a prominent anything.

"There He Goes Again...."

There are times I just really wish the non-specialists would stay out of this discussion:

Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.

Peter Higgs, of Higgs-Boson fame.  You know, the fact that you've made a name for yourself in science doesn't make you a philosopher of science, nor of religion, nor a theologian nor an expert on anything outside of the field you gained your fame in.  But we do love to ask famous people for their thoughts, and then react as if they had showered us with golden wisdom.

Take, since Mr. Higgs brought him up, Richard Dawkins for example.  Please.

In a 2007 post on his website titled "How dare you call me a fundamentalist", Dawkins wrote: "No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may 'believe', in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.

Evidence?  Evidence of what?  Evidence that I love my wife?  What evidence would satisfy Mr. Dawkins of that?  Evidence even that I am who I say I am, and that I am married to my wife?  What evidence would satisfy him on that?  A marriage license with a name on it I claim to be my own?  A driver's license with my picture and that name on it?  Is that name truly exclusive and no one else could claim it?  I know that isn't true, so what evidence of my identify is satisfactory?  Evidence that will stand up in a court of law?  Or evidence that will withstand scientific scrutiny?  Bring me evidence of the existence of Richard Dawkins!  And I don't mean evidence of his identity!

Evidence?  Pah!  As if that refuted the argument that he is a fundamentalist.  Did he even try to define "fundamentalism"?  Books have been written on the topic; did he read them?  Or is this more information he famously doesn't need to be bothered with?  He should since Dr. Marty makes a better argument for why Dawkins is not a fundamentalist than Dawkins does.

This is still my primary concern with Dawkins and questions of religion:  he's an untutored boob.  He's a clueless idiot.  He has no education in the field and thinks his ignorance is proof of his insight.  He would toss any student in his classroom out for such arrogance, but in him it is proof of his intelligence.  Take this, for example, from the child psychiatrist Dawkins:

Responding to a direct question from the interviewer Mehdi Hassan, Dawkins related the story of a woman in America who had written to him about abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a priest, and the mental anguish of being told that one of her friends, a Protestant girl, would burn in hell.

"She told me that, of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse, it was yucky but she got over it. But the mental abuse of being told about hell, she took years to get over," said Dawkins. "Telling children such that they really, really believe that people who sin are going to go to hell and roast forever, that your skin grows again when it peels off, it seems to me intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse, that will give more nightmares because they really believe it."

I don't doubt being told other people will burn in hell is bad, but I never read a description of hell equivalent to the one recounted by Frank McCourt in his memoir, and yet Mr. McCourt seems to have survived that alright.  Of course, McCourt's anecdote is no more an example than Dawkins; one can always find horror stories about any cultural event, from religion to school to holidays to families.  Some of the worst horrors visited on people are done by family members, and yet no one argues we should abolish families.  By Dawkins' argument, I wonder why not; except that it is absurd and not to be taken seriously because families do so much more good than harm in society, and yet abuse and incest are primarily the products of families, so.....

You see what I mean.  Dawkins' "arguments" are not arguments, they are self-refuting nonsense.  And we're supposed to take this stuff seriously?  Why?

But 'twas ever thus.  I mean, even Peter Higgs steps all over himself in that quite I opened with:

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

Mighty damned gracious of him to allow non-dogmatic believers to continue to hold their beliefs.  Now can we have a discussion about what "belief" means?  Maybe get a step or two beyond William James, if we can even get up to Mr. James' conclusion in the first place?  And maybe even allow "dogmatic" believers such as Mr. Dawkins back into the tent?

Well, so long as he quits telling everybody else to get out.  That gets a bit annoying.

Speaking of a "God Delusion"

Tell your child she's going to hell; or leave her alone with this man. 

 Which would be worse? *

The trouble with being a public figure is that people find out what you really think:

In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called “mild pedophilia,” which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes “lasting harm.”

Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,” and that to condemn this “mild touching up” as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

I dunno.  Having experienced "modern" racists, I think I can condemn racism in the 18th and 19th centuries just as firmly.  And as for "mild pedophilia," is that kinda like "mild sexual abuse," or "mild rape," or even "mild physical abuse"?

I know Mr. Dawkins doesn't think he needs to know anything about religion to be able to condemn it outright.  Does that caveat apply equally to abuse of persons?   And, as the Atlantic points out, "Dawkins, a scientist, relies on anecdotal evidence and speculation to 'prove' his point."  He doesn't think it did any of his classmates any lasting harm.  What more proof do you need?

In other words, if you don't know what you're talking about, rely on your own subjective feelings.  Which is fine, so long as you don't extend your conclusions to all others similarly situated.  Can Mr. Dawkins really not imagine other experiences of existence beyond his own?

To be fair, there is a point at which Dawkins' remarks might make sense:

Dawkins has responded to the controvery his remarks caused here, writing, "To excuse pedophiliac assaults in general, or to make light of the horrific experiences of others, was a thousand miles from my intention."

This is indeed a delicate thing to talk about because, of course, it is a big deal when an adult abuses a child in any way—sexual or otherwise. But what this research suggests is that while urgency in detecting and stopping abuse of children is warranted, assumptions that all minors are traumatized by any sexual contact with someone over the age of consent are not scientifically supported. Perhaps more importantly, by sending the message that such experiences are by definition traumatic, we may sometimes be causing suffering even as we try to stop it.

Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  But there are two disparate issues here:  defining all pedophilia as traumatic to the victim, and defining actions as pedophilia.  "Mild pedophilia" means there are gradations of pedophilia, with some to be strongly condemned, and some to be overlooked as "not that bad" and even "boys will be boys" (or "men will be mild pedophiles").  I don't want to live in a world where everyone is treated like a traumatized victim regardless of their particular reaction, but neither do I want to live in a world where some acts of pedophilia are excused because they are "mild" or they didn't do Richard Dawkins any harm, so why are you crying?

You know, maybe truth really is a relationship.  And not one I can enter into with Richard Dawkins.

*Dawkins is more outraged by children being told they'll go to hell than by "mild pedophilia."  As the Atlantic notes, even his claims there rely on anecdotal evidence.  There are actual scientists working in those areas, discerning issues with actual scientific evidence.   Having been raised in a fire and brimstone culture I can say it did me no lasting harm, especially of the kind Dawkins fears.  But even though I feared my parents' anger far more than damnation,  I don't think hell is a harmless cultural artifact, either.  I'd never say a little fear of hell did me no harm, but I do think pedophilia is more likely to be damaging; or is at least just as damaging.

The Library of Babble

Well, this is kind of interesting.

Via Grandmere Mimi, in comments, I get a link to this opinion piece about Richard Dawkins and rape (on which topic perhaps enough has been said).  From that piece I get a link to this review by Stephen Jay Gould from late in the last century (it's so much fun to be able to say that!).  It isn't so much about Dawkins' idea of "selfish genes" (although Gould virtually dismisses that theory out of hand, and for clear reasons.  I'm sure elsewhere he wrote more extensively on Dawkins' "fundamentalism," as he calls it.  Again, that problem of research!), as it is about Daniel Dennet's book from the '90s,' Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Which, oddly enough, is what this review is about.  Yeah, yeah, I know:  same book, two reviews, so what?  But I got that link from this post at Thought Criminal.

Synchronicity?

Anyway, it's interesting if only to find out scientists act just like commenters on blogs:  they find it easier to get personal than to engage in rational considerations of topics, even of scientific topics within their fields.  Jump to the last paragraphs of that review by Gould to see what I mean.

It's also enlightening to analyze Dawkins and Dennett as fundamentalists; ultra-Darwininsts, as Gould labels them.  It explains so much, even if it isn't exactly news.  When Eleanor Robertson writes:

Dawkins’ narrowmindedness, his unshakeable belief that the entire history of human intellectual achievement was just a prelude to the codification of scientific inquiry, leads him to dismiss the insights offered not only by theology, but philosophy, history and art as well.

And you read that in light of Gould's review of Dennett (and comments on Dawkins), you begin to wonder if Dawkins has ever made any serious contribution to science or human understanding, and if his turn into a fundamentalist atheist is really a turn at all.

If you weren't wondering already.

I don't know how many supporters Dawkins has among scientists; I do know he has many fans on the internet (go to the comments at the Robertson link above to see what I mean).  But their devotion is rather ignorant, is based more on Dawkins saying what they want to hear, than on Dawkins actually making a sound argument about anything.  Science, like any human endeavor, is all about interpretation.  You can't say that to most atheists/science "supporters" on the internet; they will scream the heavens down upon your head.  But it is true: any human endeavor comes down to the simple ambiguity of interpretation, of how you explain/understand the material (ideas, facts, what have you) which form the basis of your consideration and explanation.

No explanation is complete and total; it is simply accepted as such.  And all explanations are subject, at least, to the Incompleteness theorem, at the extreme.  So no explanation can be complete and total; it simply isn't possible.

I have a weak (admittedly) but enlightening (I hope) example in the new "Sherlock" series, which I've been re-watching on Netflix.  I love this series, because this Sherlock (unlike the demi-god of the Sherlockian canon) can over-read the evidence before him, leaping to conclusions where a simple application of, say, Occam's Razor might make him consider conclusions are more dangerous things than he realizes.

Moriarty, for example, in this series, first appears to Sherlock's eyes as a gay man.  His dress, more than his manner, allegedly betrays him.  Except it turns out Moriarity exploited Sherlock's willingness to accept material facts (the way he dressed) for the final arbiter of truth; Moriarty reveals to Sherlock that he appeared as a gay man knowing Sherlock would leap to the conclusion, never considering it might be a ruse.

In "The Final Vow," Sherlock confronts a man who allegedly has a vast vault beneath his huge modern country home, a vault containing information on paper about almost every person of importance (or of not importance, it seems) in England.  Sherlock never considers an alternative, which turns out to be true:  that the "vault" legend is just that, legend; and the villain has, not a warehouse of paper, but an eidetic memory and a storehouse of memories, of perfect recall of the documents that can blackmail others (or just knowledge of what can be used against them, like the safety of spouses and friends).

It's not an obvious answer, and it's a bit magical (memory doesn't really work that well, especially eidetic memory), but upon review you think:  if Sherlock were as preternaturally intelligent as he is supposed to be, why didn't he consider that possibility?

But Sherlock accepts his intelligence and ability to observe and reason and deduce, as all the power he needs.  This is an intentional weakness in his character, a flaw that keeps him from being a mere automaton or so supremely super-human he is a fantasy figure like Superman.  But it's also a fair warning:  you never know as much as you think you do, and the certainty of your conclusions is always based on what you don't know you don't know.  Sherlock tells Watson at one point that real life is not as neat and tidy as Watson's stories about him are, but the TV episodes can't help being fiction and providing tidy endings to messy story lines.  That is fine for fiction; but it cannot carry over into real life, and in order to make the stories more realistic and less fantastical, Sherlock has to fail, betimes.  Even if the figure Conan Doyle based the first Sherlock on was a real human being, the diagnoses of that doctor were never as final and certain as those of the fictional character he inspired.

Ambiguity, like the poor, will always be with us.  Murder mysteries will always answer all of our questions; real life will not.

But ambiguity and contradiction are anathema to fundamentalists, of which Dawkins is clearly one.  “Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.”  The first question there has to be:  "what the hell is 'mild pedophilia'?"  But clearly the latter is "worse" because violence has been added, as if "mild pedophilia" were not an act of violence already.  But to Dawkins is isn't; indeed, how could it be, else there could not be "violent pedophilia."  Carry it out with the next topic he brought up, "Date rape" v. "rape by a stranger at knifepoint," and his meaning is quite clear.  Date rape is like mild pedophilia; bad, but fully not an act of violence.  Rape by a stranger with a knife is violent; rape by an acquaintance is merely unfortunate, or at any case a lesser form of rape.

Except, of course, rape is an act of violence.  That's why the criminal statutes don't distinguish between acquaintance v. stranger:  rape is non-consensual intercourse, even if it is with your spouse.  Whether you could prosecute that example or not is a separate question:  the statues don't speak in terms of personal relationships or the necessity of violence additional to the rape itself.  Rape is rape.

Pedophilia is pedophilia.  Dawkins' insistence on distinction in either case, does him no credit at all.  He is not thinking, he is determining, and those who do not determine as he does are the ones with the problem.  It's the world that is wrong, not the Oxford don.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Fundamentalists love to cleave the world into either/or, and one side is right, the other wrong, with no ambiguities or contradictions or shades of grey allowed, and all true knowledge pointing toward one end.  It's a fine method of thought for murder mysteries where the criminal is finally identified, the murders finally stopped and justice fully done.  But in reality there is always that problem of incompleteness, always those questions any system of thought can generate, which only another system of thought can answer.  It's not progressive, moving higher and higher toward a final paradise; it's more like Borges' Library of Babel:  going on endlessly and seemingly repetitively, although it never quite repeats itself, but it never quite reaches an end, a telos, either.

If Plato taught us to think too much of how we might one day achieve the Good, Aristotle taught us to think too much that everything as its goal, its telos; and we took it for a summa, a completion.

Ambiguity and mystery, and the sense that if with God all things are possible then even the contradictions presented by God to our ideas and theologies can be made well by God, are not sources of confusion but comfort; not points where we can be sure we are right or others wrong, but of humility, where we can only be sure we don't yet know all there is to know, and until that time, that telos, we never will.

"Let's See If You Can Spot A Pattern"

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
https://t.co/YtmRG9TkMP

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 8, 2021

 I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

The beam in your eye, the splinter in your brother's eye:

Let's see if you can spot a pattern: 

Hang on to that quote; it's going to be an important one.*

(When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) 

I dare say even a child can see the problem there; and the contradiction.  Not with Harris' thinking (only), but with the argument of this article.

But be careful: Shermer has also acknowledged, in writing, that he's fantasized about murdering people. "Or, if not actually killing the particular bastard," he reports, "at the very least I imagine dislocating his jaw with a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich that sent him reeling to the pavement." This comes from his book "The Moral Arc," which received an extended, glowing blurb from Steven Pinker.

Let me connect that to this:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

What moral clarity is there in an adolescent fantasy about violence, one that reveals the dreamer knows "a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich" only from pulp viction or action movies?  What did happen to the "moral clarity" of "New Atheism?

Let's ask that question again, with the example of Lawrence Krause and the "she looked 16!" defense of child rape:

[Krause] was dismissed from his job as director of the Origins Project after an investigation found that he had violated the sexual harassment policy of the university "by groping a woman's breast while on an ASU-funded trip in late 2016." He has also repeatedly and vigorously defended his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, who "donated $250,000 to the Origins Project over a seven-year span." According to a 2011 Daily Beast article, Krauss claimed, "I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it," adding that he didn't believe the "beautiful women and young women" surrounding Epstein were underage. 

Not much moral clarity there.

The best comes (almost) last:

Richard Dawkins: Once a heavyweight within the world of evolutionary biology, Dawkins energized atheists the world over with his book "The God Delusion."

No, sorry; Dawkins is a zoologist who wrote a book about genetics, a subject he knows nothing about, which wowed non-scientists who thought he must be writing about "evolutionary biology" (a subject I doubt any of his fans could define any better than a random GOP politician can define Critical Race Theory today).  Dawkins was a "heavyweight" among people who thought he sounded clever; people who knew no more about the field of genetics than Dawkins did, in other words.  The same ignorance and appeal to the credulous was true of his “God Delusion” 

Over time, though, it became increasingly clear that he's neither an adult-in-the-room nor a particularly nice guy. For some bizarre reason, he obsessively targeted a Muslim teenager in Texas, who was arrested after a homemade clock he brought to school was wrongly thought to be a bomb. He also flipped out over what came to be called "Elevatorgate," which began with Rebecca Watson calmly asking men to be thoughtful and considerate about how they make women feel at conferences — for example, in the enclosed space of an elevator. This resulted in a flood of rape and death threats directed toward Watson, while Dawkins mocked the situation by writing a shocking letter addressed "Dear Muslima," in which the first line was "Stop whining, will you." More recently, he's made it clear that he isn't bothered by the allegations against Krauss, and posted seemingly anti-trans comments on Twitter. When asked why Twitter has caused him so much trouble, he claimed: "I love truth too much." (For Dawkins' troubling views on aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome, see this.)

I had forgotten Dawkins' catalogue of sins.  And attacking a Muslim,again; imagine that. But Dawkins was never the adult in the room; that was his British accent and Oxonian attitude of superiority.  Nor was he ever a “nice guy.” This tweet, by the way, is still up:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Classic British snobbery and condescension. Not much insight, though.  The pattern cotinues here:

James Lindsay: Once a promising young atheist, Lindsay published "Everybody Is Wrong About God" in 2015 and, three years later, "How to Have Impossible Conversations," co-authored with Peter Boghossian (below). Referring to himself as "apolitical" but boasting a profile page on the right-wing, anti-free-speech organization Turning Point USA, he is now one of the most unhinged crusaders against "critical race theory" (CRT), an idea about which he seems to have very little actual knowledge. (This is unsurprising, given that Lindsay has literally argued that he doesn't need to understand "gender studies" to call for the entire field to be canceled. See #10 here.) 

There are other people referenced in the article, two more I've never heard of, and Stephen Pinker, whose intellectual accomplishments are on par with his apparent racism (I'll leave that evidence to the original article). We have to get back to "religion":

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

The metaphor highlighted there means, of course, a movement devoid of reason and based wholly on unexamined ideas which don't bear the weight of the simplest of critiques.  William James' oft-cited definition (which he rejected) that the young boy knows "faith" is "believin' what you know ain't so" is actually meant to apply here, with "religion" replacing the term "faith."  But that's too easy.  The people listed in this article know that what they think IS so, and they can't understand the benighted ones who don't see it that way.  Then again, that was the "pattern" in New Atheism:  how could anyone believe the foolish ideas they attributed to the religious, from the racist anti-Islam thought of Sam Harris (who was always that way) to the snobbery of Dawkins (ditto), to the rest? If anything, time only revealed them for what they always were: weak thinkers who fall back on vague and glittering generalities.  You can see the pattern here, too:

What ties these people together is an aggrieved sense of perpetual victimhood. Christians, of course, believe that they are relentlessly persecuted (note: they aren't). The IDWs similarly believe that they are the poor helpless victims of "CRT," "standpoint theory" and other bogeymen of woke academia. But really, if "Grievance Studies" studies anything, it should be how this group of extremely privileged white men came to believe that they are the real casualties of systemic oppression.

I've read about a lot of people who display their "Christianity" quite prominently, using it to build their personal and financial power.  They've learned, rather recently, to present themselves as victims, especially in a world where church attendance (the only measure that seems to count in the media) is not what it once was.  Big deal.  When 41% of the American population regard themselves as regular churchgoers, we'll be back where we were in 1906.  Deal with it.  I've never met a "Christian" yet who thought they were "relentlessly persecuted," so spare me the baseless generalities.  They have no more application to reality than the white supremacist rhetoric of most of the "New Atheists" the article critiques; but that's the pattern, isn't it?

To conclude, let me bring things full circle: At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are "markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian" than religious people. It's a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Most of Phil Zuckerman's analysis is based on work by:  Phil Zuckerman (I followed the link in the original).  He misinterprets Psalm 14, too, and cherry picks statements by philosophers whose work I am familiar with, probably taking them wholly out of context.  It'd be in keeping with most of the work of "New Atheists" who don't really know anything, but who know what they don't like.  Hmmmm....rather like Trump, eh?

New Atheism wasn't "swallowed up" by anything; it became what it started out as.  And it did it because it was never about overcoming prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, close-minded and authoritarian ideas: it espoused them.  What else was New Atheism but deeply prejudiced against anyone who didn't think as the individuals identified here did, who were dogmatic in their ignorance? None of them betrayed the least knowledge of philosophy, theology, anthropology (which includes the study of world religions), or philosophy of religion, much less compassion.  Who needs that, when you are closed-minded and authoritarian?  Ideas get in the way of righteous and ignorant rants!  Compassion is for wimps. Just ask Donald Trump!

I could end this with my own righteous screed.  But I came across these words from Pope Francis during a visit to Philadelphia in 2015, and I can't improve on them:

In this place which is symbolic of the American way, I would like to reflect with you on the right to religious freedom. It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own. Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families. Our religious traditions remind us that, as human beings, we are called to acknowledge an Other, who reveals our relational identity in the face of every effort to impose a uniformity to which the egotism of the powerful, the conformism of the weak, or the ideology of the utopian would seek to impose on us. 

I don't see even a ghost of that idea in the work of the "New Atheists," nor of the writer so disappointed that they turned out to be what they always were.  What, indeed, in atheism, was ever going to produce such a change, or "reveal[] our relational identity"?

Just asking for a friend.

*You may notice I skip blithely over the critique of Harris from the article, contenting myself with only two sentences.  Harris actually sets the rule for the New Atheists:  he’s been a rabid Islamophobe and generally an ignorant and uninformed thinker ab initio.  I wouldn’t say Harris influenced the rest of them, but they are all cut from the same bolt of cloth.

lt Must Be So

Richard Dawkins sounds his barbaric yawp:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

I’ve noticed most people who make this argument are not the least bit inconvenienced by the suffering they describe. They are usually beneficiaries of it (is Dawkins a vegan so animals won’t die for his food? Does he refuse to wear leather? Is he concerned with economic injustice?). The universe is as it should be because that is what keeps Richard Dawkins comfortable.

I’m not advocating we all wear hair shirts over the sufferings of living beings, but I am saying Dawkins is making that argument. He would clothe us all in hair shirts and then say “But there’s nothing you can do about it, so tear them off!” Nature is red in tooth and claw and so should humanity be! Well, not to the extent it would inconvenience Richard Dawkins! That would be unreasonable! But trying to alleviate even a few if the sufferings of the world? Why, that’s unreasonable, too! Unless you are one of the ones suffering; then, sucks to be you!

After all, what else can the “pitiless indifference” of the universe teach us?

I happen to agree with Dawkins: the universe doesn’t give a wet snap for me. But it is neither pitiless nor indifferent: it simply is. It is the height of adolescence to imagine the universe is some kind of Uber-parent that is watching out for you. But saying that is not the same as saying things are as they ought to be, any more than being born in England in favorable circumstances means you deserve a more comfortable existence than people born in the former, and sill largely exploited, colonies of England deserve to suffer from the indifference of the English who 

made life comfortable for Dawkins. He has made that argument before, when trying to justify the gulf between Europe and non-European nations in standards of living and other accomplishments Europeans pat themselves in the back for. Can’t be helped, you see. Pitiless indifference of the universe, and all that.

Funny how that makes it so much easier to be pitiless and indifferent.

Now look at it another way. Yes, the universe doesn’t care about you; but what if it? What is the “universe “? Everything? Which is to say, to me personally, nothing. What is something to me? My family, my friends, my neighbors; fellow human beings. We can start there, and expand it as we wish.  But for now, “suffering humanity.” Should I be pitilessly indifferent? Mighty convenient for me, until I’m the one suffering. Does Dawkins want doctors and nurses caring for him in his old age just out of self-interest? Does he want to be treated with pitiless indifference when he is old and grey and full of sleep? Does he not expect other human beings to be a bit more than that?

If we only do what we think the universe would do, what credit is that to us? Are we not capable of more? And if we are, are we constrained by the concept of a pitiless, indifferent universe?

Why?

Dawkins’ point is to say there is no God and do no morality and so we shouldn’t expect kindness from strangers because that’s just the way it is, five cents please. And it’s all balderdash, this “argument.” It doesn’t even meet its own terms, because there aren’t any. It’s a young boy’s cleverness, or rather what he thinks is clever, tossed out to shock and offend but otherwise absolutely hollow and empty of reason. It’s posited purely to say: “See? Now there’s no room for God, and I’ve run rings round you logically.” But there is no logic at all, and he only runs rings 'round himself.  This is the shadow of a straw man which you have to believe in, and think others believe in, in order to begin to accept Dawkins’ argument. It is, in short, circular reasoning, where the inside tries to deny the existence of the outside by demarcating it with the line of the circle. In three dimensions it’s a bubble; and you can leave its adherents in it, until it bursts.

We will not show them the same pitiless indifference they think the universe shows, because we know (at least) that’s not all that the universe allows. As the song of my adolescence sang: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s hardly the whole story; but it’s a good starting point. And a better way to understand our place in the universe, too.

Delusions of Godhood...again

I can be fairly accused of worrying too much about the ignorance of Richard Dawkins, but Thought Criminal sends me in search of Marilyn Robinson's review of The God Delusion.  The original is behind a paywall, so I have to link to a pirated version.  I promise to take only a few bites:

The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so. A reader might find it instructive to start with his last chapter, in which he does acknowledge the fact of quantum theory and certain of its implications. This chapter is an interesting lens through which to consider the primary argument of the book, especially his use of physicality and materiality as standards for determining the real and objective existence of anything, along with his use of commonplace experience as the standard of reasonableness and — a favorite word — probability. He does this despite his awareness that the physical and the material are artifacts of the scale at which reality is perceived. For us, he says, “matter is a useful construct.” Quoting Steve Grand, a computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence, he offers these thoughts on the fluidity of matter: “Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.” Earlier, Dawkins attributes the origins of the illusion that we have a soul to the persistence of a childish or primitive tendency toward dualism — “Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ’soul’ which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body.” Yet the image of deeper reality invoked by him here suggests a basis for the ancient intuition of the persistence of the self despite the transiency of the elements of its physical embodiment.

I do not wish to recruit science to the cause of religion. My point is simply that Dawkins’s critique of religion cannot properly be called scientific. His thinking is reminiscent of logical positivism. That school, however, which meant to carry out a purge of language it considered meaningless, specifically metaphysics and theology, by subjecting statements to the “scientific” test of verifiability, plunged into all sorts of interesting difficulty, as rigorous thought tends to do. Dawkins acknowledges no difficulty. He has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information.

I don't disagree with Robinson's point, but there is nothing innate about dualism.  It is a Platonic concept, and rather peculiar to Western thought.  Perpetuated by the Church (as was Aristotle, who wouldn't have been keen on it.  When Aquinas folded "the Philosopher" into Catholic doctrine, he was writing at a level beyond the ken of almost everyone else in the Church at the time.  So much for "liberal" Christianity and the "true" Christianity found only among the people), it found renewed expression in Descartes' ventures into philosophy.  But Descartes' dualism was later derided as the "ghost in the machine."  Because dualism is not innate, it is cultural and philosophical. Language can be fairly said to be innate; we do seem to have, in Stephen Pinker's words, a "language instinct."  Dualism is a cultural artifact.

This isn't that hard to learn about.  Critiques of dualism are not new, and they aren't arcane.  Dawkins teaches at Oxford.  And yet he's completely clueless on the subject that is his current claim to fame.  Too bad I can't get tenure so I can spout nonsense and make money on it.  P.T. Barnum was right.

“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture.”

Dawkins is writing there of the Amish.   Robinson precedes that quote with a paragraph about Dawkins' apparent ignorance of "the history of modern authoritarianism."  Really, for an Oxford professor, Dawkins seems singularly uninterested in the subjects he writes about.  It isn't really hard to find out the Amish give their children the choice of staying in the community, or leaving.  They prefer members of their community stay voluntarily, not by force.  It may not be a choice you want to make, but it is one freely made by the children themselves (as free as any choice is made).  If Dawkins had a child would he begrudge the child's decision to, say, take monastic orders?  Again, these things aren't hard to find out, or too complicated to consider from more than one point of view; but it is all clearly beneath the research efforts of an Oxford don.

Call it breathtaking condescension, if you will.

Okay, here we go:

Thinking people are not necessarily thoughtful people.

It's not that I disagree with criticisms of Richard Dawkins.  As far as I'm concerned he's an empty head in windy spaces.  That his most famous book is considered one of the most important science books of the 20th century is frightening to me.  On the other hand, there are delightful ironies:

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins suggests, “because we are born selfish.”

Because that's just straight up Christianity.  Not that "monotheism" gets any pass in this analysis of Dawkins:

Ultimately, the crucial issue is not about cancelling his appearance on a radio show* but recognizing that, just as religion has caused millennia of suffering based on delusional ideas, Dawkins himself has created a new delusional framework offering a false rationale for an economic and technocratic system destroying human and natural flourishing. 

Um....yeah.  Uh-huh.  I expect "thinking people" (the kind the author says Dawkins has corrupted) to be better informed and more thoughtful.  That sentence is followed by this one:

The choice is not between religion and science, as Dawkins and his followers suggest. The real choice is between a flawed worldview that leads inexorably to globally destructive behavior and one that recognizes life’s deep interconnectedness and humanity’s intrinsic responsibility within it.

Again, straight up Christianity as I understand it.  Humankind is a steward of the earth, not it's exploiter and destroyer.  Every human being is my brother and sister.  You want concern for nature, look no further than St. Francis, from whom the current pope took his papal name.  Again, thinking people should be more thoughtful than this.

Does what I understand represent all of Christianity?  Well, no; no more so than Dawkins represents the thinking of all biologists (he's gutted in this article, like a fish) or the thoughts of all "thinking" people.  But, you know, declaring somebody dangerously delusional is like pointing a finger at them; with three more pointing back at you.

The speck in your brother's eye, the log in your own.  'Round and 'round that observation we continually go.....

*The essay starts by claiming Dawkins' being banned from KPFA recently because of his anti-Islamic (i.e., racist) views was a controversy that "reverberated around the world."  Well, I'd heard of it.  I never noticed that anybody else did, though.  Mighty small world these "thinking people" live in.

Advent Presents!

Grandmere Mimi sent me here, which very interesting article sent me here, Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. (You should read both the article and the review; Eagleton is an interesting thinker. Of course, for those who want to believe journalism is better elsewhere, I would not that nothing in the article indicates a view of Jesus or the Gospels any different from what I learned in seminary, nor even as radical as liberation theology. Yet the reporter needs an angle, and Eagleton is still a Marxist, and what he's saying is not what you'll hear from the typical Anglican pulpit (I'm sure!), so....

Journamalism is journamalism. Still, it's an interesting article, and a nice gateway to an even more interesting review. Take just the opening paragraph of the latter:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for Dawkins.

Almost. I do love the British idea of literary criticism. So much more blunt and to the point. I mean, this is just marvelous:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Well, it's Advent; I can do penance for enjoying myself in plenty of time for Christmas morning.

Yes, I've said much of this before, but not nearly as well. And yes, I am insecure enough to think that someone else saying it makes a stronger claim than my words could do. I mean, what have I already said about love, and how none of us can prove we love the object of our affections, we can only confess it? Listen:

It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

I'd go one step further, of course; whether or not you accept my confession ultimately means something to me, only if you are a member of my confessing community. Which brings us back to Wittgenstein and the problem of language games; but it's too close to Christmas for that.

Just go read the whole thing, especially when Eagleton starts talking about Christianity instead of Dawkins. I don't say it all stands up to theological examination (theologians are the worst nit-pickers in the world!), nor, certainly, that it will convert the non-believer. But it is a lovely exposition on what is primarily the modern understanding of Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings, at least the one being taught in the better seminaries today.

And this line; well, this line I'm keeping:

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.

Makes you really look forward to that babe in the manger, doesn't it?

*It's a hobbyhorse, in case you were wondering.

Schadenfreude for Lent

This is too much fun to leave in comments below. Once again Sharl comes through for me.

It seems Richard Dawkins has found out that he's not universally "a greatly liked and respected person." To get the story, start with the the Times article, then go to Ruth Gledhill's blog. I'm not really enjoying this, because I don't know Mr. Dawkins and don't really wish him any pain. But I will say, as Ms. Gledhill intimates, that he seems to have attacked only a bloodless concept, and not realized he was addressing actual human beings, and not all of them the people he associates with, and who are his friends, family, and colleagues.

I'm not enjoying this because I've been through it, as I mentioned in comments below. The first lesson a pastor learns is that, while your friends and family may love you, and even your co-workers may respect you, some of the people in the pews will quickly come to despise you, and not necessarily for anything you do, but simply for what you represent to them. And what you represent is authority: some will respect it, some will reject it, and some will simply hate you. They won't think they are vicious; they will assure you it's "nothing personal." But they will sharpen long knives for you, and make you wonder if they don't stay up nights imagining slights they can turn into deceits, the better to ruin you, or at least make their misery, yours.

I see the same thing on blogs all the time. It's terribly easy to imagine anyone in a position of authority enjoys power you don't have, and further that they aren't really people with feelings, but things, objects, which deserve only your derision and curses. Ms. Gledhill touches on this point:

I resisted the temptation to ask him why, if he prefers not to fan flames, he even wrote The God Delusion, or lent his name to RichardDawkins.net. His distress at what has been going on in his forum suggests he has never really understood why so many people of faith found The God Delusion offensive. The strong language he himself uses to describe religious belief has a lot to do with it. Church Mouse recently blogged about how Dawkins upset a lot of Christians with a strongly critical article in The Times where he fastened on the utterances of US preacher Pat Robertson on Haiti to condemn an entire religion, describing Robertson as standing 'squarely in the Christian tradition.'

Do Dawkins' own followers, suppurating their rats' rectums all over his long-suffering staff, stand squarely in his atheist tradition?

See how easy it is to turn a person into "other"? I rejected Pat Robertson's ignorant statements, too. But I know better than to call him the absolute representative of all things Christian. Still, not enough Christians struck back at Mr. Dawkins for him to notice (he would have passed it off, anyway; and perhaps that says something about the nature of Christians. Though I imagine more Christians have heard of Mr. Robertson than Mr. Dawkins, and still the majority of Christians in the world are unaware of the existence of either gentleman.), so he finally hears it from his own "followers." People he probably never meant to have as followers; but then, he probably never imagined he was talking to real people about real people (as The Church Mouse points out*). He probably, like those people in the pews so determined to hate their pastor, never imagined anyone beyond the circle of his attentions was anything than "other." Which is something religion is supposed to teach you about.

I'm thinking evolutionary biology never touches on that subject. But maybe that's uncharitable of me. Ah, well, it's Lent. Add it to my penance; I have a lot of that to do, a little more won't make much difference.

*It doesn't quite fit in the foregoing, but I have to quote The Church Mouse on at least one point:

What seems to infuriate Dawkins most is that he believes he has disproved religion already, so if you are still a believer you must either be a total idiot, or are deliberately trying to fool the general populace for malicious reasons. The thought that other people might listen to his arguments and still disagree simply doesn't seem to compute. In fact, it seems to be making him angrier and angrier.

I don't know about the "angrier and angrier" part; I'll take the Mouse's word for that. But I think the analysis is spot on: unable to conceive of a viewpoint beyond his own, unable, in other words, to conceive of a "wholly other," Dawkins is reduced to vituperation. Which isn't surprising, in the least.

The Faith Delusion

Ed. note: I'm dragging this back up simply because I've been re-reading Annie Dillard's "Holy the Firm," in order to teach it in the morning. And that's left me full of beans. That, and I had to respond to ProfWombat.

You know, I come across something like this, and I realize there is no end of ignorance in the world. First, let's give the devil his due:

When it comes to arguing whether God exists, or whether she is a figment of the human mind, first-year theological students have it all over Richard Dawkins.

Review after review after review after review states this.

Only they never mention why our first-year theological student is correct and Dawkins is wrong. Or, if the [sic] do, it’s a point so peripheral and probably misinterpreted, that the end result is the same.

This is why Dawkins riles so many. Because, in essence, he is absolutely correct in his utterly logical condemnations of God and religion. And because he married Romana from Dr. Who, the lucky bastard.

Yeah. My problem with Dawkins is Leela Ward-envy. I guess somehow I knew they were married. And my other problem is, I'm obsessed with the question of God's existence, without even knowing it! Of course, what follows is peripheral to whatever "proof" Dawkins' submits as to God's non-exsitence, and it's probably misinterpreted, too. Well, misinterpreted by someone.

What is it about God's existence that so riles people? Maybe it's the Turing Test mentality of it: "existence" is known by experience. If I "chat" with you on a blog, then clearly we both have "existence." Right? But consider (again) Kierkegaard's answer to the issue: can I prove the existence of the prisoner in the dock, or can I only prove his identity as the criminal he is accused of being? Careful how you answer: the entire project of ontology, ontotheology, Western metaphysics, and phenomenology, are involved in the issue. The problem is, as I've pointed out before:

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists-worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore, whether I am moving in the world of sensate palpability or in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who does indeed exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium [addition] or the eternal prius [pre-supposition], it can never be demonstrated. We shall take our time; after all, there is no reason for us to rush as there is for those who, out of concern for themselves, or for the god, or for something else, must rush to get proof that something exists. In that case, there is good reason to make haste, especially if the one involved has in all honesty made an accounting of the danger that he himself or the object being investigated does not exist until he proves it and does not dishonestly harbor the secret thought that essentially it exists whether he demonstrates it or not.

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advanace interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed that he exists. But Napoleon is only an individual, and to that extent there is no absolute relation between him and his works-thus someone else could have done the same works. Perhaps that is why I cannot reason from the works to existence. If I call the works Napoleon's works, then the demonstration is superfluous, since I have already" mentioned his name. If I ignore this, I can never demonstrate from the works that they are Napoleon's but demonstrate (purely ideally) that such works are the works of a great general etc. However between the god and his works there is an absolute relation. God is not a name but a concept, and perhaps because of that his essentia involvit existentiam [essence involves existence].

Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments.

Basically, if we're going to approach this from the posture of a scientist (like Dawkins), we'd first need to establish what "existence" is, and to establish it as something falsifiable. Existence, of course, is merely a concept, even to the most hardcore empiricist. Can someone tell me the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse, except that one is "alive," and the other, purely by definition, is not? (If you doubt me, recall Poe's fears of "premature burial," in an age where recognizing what we now call "coma" was a serious medical issue.) Where does the "alive" come from, and where does it go? What is it that animates a body, that gives that body "existence"? Because surely, if someone is dead, they no longer have "existence". What, then is "existence"?

Nexus 6 wants to assert Dawkins falsifies the proposition that God exists by running rings around people like me, logically. Socrates, of course, would have a field day with anyone asserting "existence" is provable or unprovable, and by his relentless logic (and little else), he "proved" the existence of the immortal soul stoutly enough it is still an almost ineradicable part of Western culture (we argue against the proposition to this day, if we argue it at all; no one argues from the assumption the soul does not exist. Such is the one-sidedness of logic, eh?)

Not that you'd know any of that from people who call a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement a "First year theological student." Speaking as a graduate of a theological seminary, I can confidently state that at no time did we have a class arguing or even studying the existence of God, or any of the many proofs thereof. (Of course, what do I know? Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, or Dennett, or the blogger at Nexus 6, I've actually attended a theological seminary. Clearly those who are unsullied by the experience know better than I what goes on there. You want to know what seminary is like? I have an anecdote here that sums it up nicely.) We did have some lively discussions on the nature of God, and of metaphysics, and the faculty included people from traditional theists to process theologians (in terms of metaphysics, of which the subject of "existence" is primary theme, those two barely speak to each other.) . Although, as I pointed out in the post that caused Nexus 6 to include me in his/her/its ignorant diatribe, I've studied all the proofs for God's existence, and find all of them wanting. And for much better reasons than Dawkins managed to elucidate. And despite all that, I'm still an ordained minister and a confessing Christian.

Clearly, however, I'm not as well off as the ignoranti on this subject. Orwell was right: ignorance is bliss.

Google, which is my grate gud friend (N. Molesworth), popped up this link, which is another worthy examination of the topic of belief and biology. One serious question which is never explored as it should be is the simple, empirical one (via Karl Popper or David Hume; take your pick): is the concept of "belief," or "faith," for that matter, falsifiable? If not, it isn't subject to empirical analysis, and therefore, per Hume the uber-empiricist, we can't talk about it because it's nonsense. End of discussion. But, of course, that presumes the empiricism is the only way we can speak validly about anything. And if Christopher Hitchens, for example, only speaks of his politics or his wife and daughter in purely empirical terms, then, well, I'd be surprised (and sad for them). Even Hume didn't think such an end result of thought meant everything had been thought. He concluded it meant an end to philosophy, and a good excuse to take up sheep-herding.

Then along came Immanuel Kant....but that's another story, and another problem.

Because what really interests me here is the continued debate over God's existence, as if determining that argument would end all discussion. It's an atheist's canard, and I don't say that derisively but descriptively. The 19th century idea that, if we eliminated God (God's Funeral, A.N. Wilson called it), morality would cease, was not formulated by a hand-wringing theologian challenged by Enlightenment reasoning (I've yet to find any modern-day critic of religion who shows even a passing knowledge of theology, by the way), but by Friederich Nietszche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Atheists, you see, are forever setting up straw men and knocking them over. And then they are puzzled why all the world's believers don't explode like puffballs. Go figure.

The primary reason is, of course: Christians aren't worried about the question of God's existence. That has become a hot topic in the philosophy of religion and "Christian philosophy" (I'm not sure whether that's really a category of philosophy or not), and Heidegger critiqued such concerns as "ontotheology," claiming the issue confused Being with "a being," a position Tillich took up in describing God as the "ground of being" (as God transcends experience, Tillich argued, it is wrong to speak of God has "having existence.") Tillich also argued that everyone has an "ultimate concern," and so atheism is, strictly speaking, impossible. Given how many atheists wrap themselves around the question of God's existence, it's hard to argue against Tillich's point. But it's always atheists who bring this up as the "logical" demonstration that all believers are fools. It is a topic usually considered to have come from Christians, as the primary "proof" of God is usually considered to be Anselm's. Only problem is, it isn't so clear today that Anselm was engaged in apologetics (intellectual defense of the faith) when he crafted what Kant later labeled (and undermined) the "ontological proof." The argument of Anselm's proof (pace Charles Hartshorne) seems aimed more at providing intellectual (i.e., Greek rationalistic) support to a faith position already taken, rather than an argument for bringing the faithless to faith. Which brings us, mutatis mutandis, back to Kierkegaard:

The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore, whether I am moving in the world of sensate palpability or in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence.

If I don't suppose God exists, in short, how am I to prove otherwise? If I do suppose God exists, why do I need proof? And so the whole obsession with God's existence is an obsession of the non-believers; not the believers.
Yes, yes, I know many Christians who worry themselves over the proof of God's existence, and it's still a lively topic among Christian philosophers (such as Alvin Plantinga's ontological argument from modal logic). But the argument as a form of apologetics is not the same as an argument for the necessity of faith (which is not to be confused with belief). In fact, that's the real problem, and the good Lord willing I'll return to it eventually (promise! promises!): the distinction that needs to be made between "faith" and "belief." Oh, and the problems of epistemology, Christian and otherwise.

I know you can't wait. I'll bring okra.