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.

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."

"A description of something that actually takes place in human life"

Somebody's gonna have to clean this up!

Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says "No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you." If some said: "Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?" I'd say: "No." "Do you contradict the man?" I'd say: "No."
...
Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near. It isn't a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: "You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein."
...
Whether something is a blunder or not--it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

So recently I wandered over to Crooked Timber, where a post announced that Robert Bellah had died.  Bellah is a very important sociologist in the field of sociological studies of religion, and while I don't think such a science (or any science) is dispositive of truth (I'm not, after all, a positivist), I studied Bellah's work in seminary (where I was first introduced do it) and recognized its importance.

And after all, Crooked Timber is an "academic" blog where often the talk is academic gossip of one sort or another, but just as often it is enlightening and informative.  But about the third comment in was a long quote from Bellah critiquing Dawkins's work in The God Delusion.  It wasn't a brilliant critique, but it was eminently defensible; and yet because it was about "religion" it was also eminently foolish, at least in the eyes of the commenter; who wondered why any information arising from an "age of ignorance" (i.e., any time before the Enlightenment) was taken seriously as anything except the prattle of stupid children.

I lodged my complaint with such stupidity and then, feeling I'd actually left a turd in the punchbowl (well, a second one, anyway), I decamped. (I'm argumentative, and that's not always the best way to behave; especially at someone else's blog.  It's too much like walking into a strange bar and picking a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, just because you can.)  But the experience prompted me to re-read Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion, and that's where I found this comment by A.C. Grayling:

Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises (LRB, 19 October). For example, if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one’s character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies. Religion is exactly the same thing: it is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers, which (mainly through the natural gullibility of proselytised children, and tragically for the world) survives into the age in which I can send this letter by electronic means.

Eagleton’s touching foray into theology shows, if proof were needed, that he is no philosopher: God does not have to exist, he informs us, to be the ‘condition of possibility’ for anything else to exist. There follow several paragraphs in the same fanciful and increasingly emetic vein, which indirectly explain why he once thought Derrida should have been awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge.

Eagleton is no philosopher?  Neither, I would say, is Grayling (and yes, I know who Grayling is).  "Religion...is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers"?  Did his education stop in the early 19th century?  He falls, frankly, into the positivist error Eagleton points out in his review:

 Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. 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.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

In a classic example of  a language game (which was the beginning of the end of positivism), Eagleton presents a compact summation of basic theological doctrine, and Grayling swipes it aside as meaningless because it is the product of  "the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers."  They are simply talking past each other, with Grayling refusing to give Eagleton any credence, lest Grayling have to learn something he doesn't know.  He might must as well have said an "age of ignorance;" his would be no less ignorant a remark.  And it fails entirely to get at the substance of what Eagleton said, because Grayling denies there is any substance to what Eagleton says; because theology is the equivalent of astrology or phrenology (which was actually considered a science).  Need one point out the extremist Christians who make the same claims about science?  And the difference in premises between Grayling and the science denier is substance?  or simply subject?

But if we take Grayling more seriously than he takes Eagleton (and dismissing an argument by declaring it without merit is not a product of rigorous logic; it is simply letting your knee-jerk be your answer), we are back  to the argument all atheists think is fundamental, but it is so only to them:  that the "existence of God" is first and foremost the question of religion.  And yet what "existence" means is always presumed, never defined.  Do you exist?  How would you prove it?  You can say you are alive.  You can even prove your identity (if I accept the indicia of papers and photos as proof.  But are they?  If you have amnesia, does a driver's license convince you the name by your picture is yours?  If you present a fake ID, does that prove your identity?  Or just prove your assertion of identity?  I ask simply to know how narrowly we can define this subject.).  Do you exist?  What does it mean to exist?  Is it the same as life itself?  Is it more, less, or neither?

I ask merely for clarification.  What is this concept "existence" and how does one "have" it?  Do I have it as I have the computer before me?  As I have a wife, a daughter, a life, a job?  I can easily define my family and friends in terms of relationships.  Do I have a relationship to existence?  If so, who is the "I" having this relationship, and what is "existence" that I can, or even must, have a relationship with it?

What is "existence"?  Is it "being"?  Then what is that?

We seem to be going in circles, and yet I am told this is the critical question:  if God's existence cannot be established, how do I believe?  But how do I establish existence at all?  Do atoms exist?  Do they exist as my daughter exists?  Her existence is bounded by life and death; does an atom die?  Her existence is bounded by memory; and when no one remembers her, does she cease to exist?

Where do I go to get these questions answered?  Science?  Atheism?

As Kierkegaard pointed out, I can identify a man named Napoleon with a set of actions, and thereby establish the identify of Napoleon with an individual.  But does that mean Napoleon exists, or did?  And what does "exist" mean in that sentence?  That he was "real"?  If a Turing Test program convinces me that a computer program is a human being, does that program have "existence"?  Why?  Why not?

But it's the positivism that is the falsehood.  God must "exist" before anything about the nature of God can be posited?  Why?  Because God must be a being among other beings, and therefore an individual, and therefore a supernatural individual, like Zeus or Apollo?  Does Grayling understand the first thing about monotheism, or radical monotheism?  He doesn't, because he says he doesn't have to:  prove God's existence first, then he'll consider the rest.  I might as well ask him to prove the existence of an atom before I accept the conclusions of modern physics.  What would he show me?  How would he do it?  If I don't accept the existence of the atom, what proof will persuade me?  Eagleton specifically says:  "God is not a celestial super-object of divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in.  Theologians do not think [God] is either inside or outside the universe...."  No, Grayling doesn't touch on that language, on Eagleton's attempts to make a summary of bog-standard Christian theology.  He simply assumes it's bosh and derides Eagleton for not thinking so, too.

Such are the intellectual arguments engaged by most Anglo-American philosophers.  The presumption is an atheistic one; not just a disinterest of denial of complete knowledge, but a denial that such knowledge is even possible.   It is also a blinkered and frightfully limited engagement with reality, which Eagleton describes in terms very familiar to anyone familiar with Anglo-American culture:

 There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

 Dawkins and Grayling replace insight with platitudes, and understanding with cliches.  And they don't wind up all that far away from Rep. Reid Ribble.    There is, as ever, an intellectul argument to be had (but clearly neither Grayling nor Dawkins are equipped for it), but the ultimate question is still:  "How should we then live?"  And if the answer is "As a self-content and self-righteous Oxford don, comfortable with the products of global capitalism and critiquing only straw men of your own creation and only on purely intellectual grounds," then I really have no respect for you.

As if, of course, my opinion on such things matters to anyone else.

There are many valid critiques to religious practice and even arising from religious history:  I learned about many of them in seminary.   I'm also familiar with every published argument over the existence of God, and the refutations of each argument.  But this flat rejection based on an ignorance proud of what it knows nothing about turns Western philosophy on its head. Socrates famously declared that he knew nothing, and so asked those who claimed knowledge to teach him.  What he usually did, of course, was prove they understood less than Socrates did (and he also proved understanding was far more important than knowledge.  The foundations of Western philosophy rested on sophia, not techne; since the Industrial Revolution and the Triumph of the Empiricists, that has shifted.).   Consider the classic syllogism:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore:  Socrates is mortal.

Is it necessary for "Socrates" to exist, to make this syllogism sound?  No; because the syllogism makes no claim to either identity or existence; it speaks merely to a form of reasoning.  Logic cannot establish the validity of the propositions in that syllogism; it can only say that the syllogism itself is soundly constructed, and the conclusion arising from it is valid, within the system of logic.  Does logic automatically apply to the world?  No more than math does.  As I've pointed out to my students before, 1+1=2, except in biology where it =3, 4, perhaps even hundreds.  In biology individuals do not vanish into a new whole on the other side of the equation:  if they did, biology itself would soon come to a halt.  Granted, it isn't precisely the same thing to say that 1+1=2 is to say one male plus one female =?.  But then again, for most species, without one of each, there is never another; and that other is always (at least) the third.  You have to be very precise about how you discuss matters.

Is love, for example, analyzable by logic?   Is desire reducible to a mathematical formula, or to be best understood as the product of genes?  Do I love the music of Bach, or of polyphony and chant, because I am genetically predisposed to do so?  I find it quite unnecessary to explain it in those terms, and I'm not sure any such explanation would make sense, as well as a mockery of Occam's Razor. 

But back to Socrates and the syllogism:  is it really necessary for me to prove the existence of Socrates before I prove that Socrates is mortal?  No, because we are all familiar with the class of "man" and the concept of mortality, and since no one has yet experienced an immortal man (even Jesus died), we have no problem with the conclusion of the syllogism.  What, then, of the reality (or existence) of God? Can we posit that God is an experience like the experience of mortality among men?  No; by definition, God is beyond all categories of human experience.  God is infinite, God is eternal, God is creator ex nihilo, God's very speech is the act of creation; etc., etc.. etc.  All of this is beyond human experience, if not human understanding (to the extent it is, we enter into the realm of negative theology; let's keep this simple).  So God is impossible?

Perhaps.  An unstoppable force striking an immoveable object is impossible, since we can't posit the reality of one or the other.  But, as Wittgenstein said of Christianity:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.--Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).

"A description of something that actually takes place in human life."  If that experience is foreclosed to you, is God impossible?  Well, if you can't love my wife the way I do, is my love for her impossible?  It is beyond your experience.  You have only my word for it.  No visible manifestation of my love is proof of its reality.  In fact, there is no proof of my love for her at all.  You either accept it, or you don't.  Does it, then, exist?  How would I prove it to you?  And more importantly, why would I bother?

 For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that :om. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle' in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: lt is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt as to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don’t mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Wittgenstein uses the term "existence" in that passage, but does he mean it in the same was as we say animals have existence?  No, of course not.  But reading the passage carefully, we can say with Wittgenstein that "...we see now that we have been using the word 'existence' in a relative and an absolute sense," because "The truth is that the scientific way of looking at existence is not the way to look at it as being."  In fact, I'm not sure there is a scientific way to look at existence.  And if we use the word "existence" in both a relative and an absolute sense, we need to nail down which sense we mean when we ask "Does God exist?"  The question is not:  is God's existence absolute, but rather:  is existence an attribute God must absolutely have?  And if it is, what does "existence" mean in that context?

Does science even deal with questions of existence in any but the relative sense?  That is, the platypus or the coelocanth exists in the relative sense that it can be shown to be present in the world; but in the absolute sense, existence requires neither platypi nor coelocanths.  Is there an absolute sense in which existence itself must be present; that the world cannot not exist, therefore it must exist, therefore there is an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing?

And yet, again:  what is more important to us?  Scientific advancement?  Or understanding our own existence?  As Terry Eagleton points out, there is nothing in Richard Dawkin's philosophy (or lack thereof) which compels him to consider questions of justice or equality (or lack thereof) extant in the world, although Dawkins does get quite worked up about the science curricula in American public schools (so his world does extend to at least this side of the pond).  But he's quite complacent about economic injustice and social inequality, so long as it doesn't affect him.  And what is more important to the rest of us:  that Dawkins is right in his science and his atheism?  Or that we consider the substance of our own existence, and what we are doing with our own lives on this planet, among all these people?

How should we then live?  And do we expect science to provide a satisfactory answer to that question?  Or would the right answer to that question explode all the books in the world, including those of Messrs. Dawkins and Grayling?

P.S.  The sculpture in the photo is "The Shattering of the Vessels" by Anselm Kiefer.  It's one of the sculptures I used to admire at to the St. Louis Art Museum.   Follow the link if you want to read about it.

This picture is just to give you a sense of scale.  And no, the pictures don't do it justice at all.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

God's Funeral

has been postponed, as the announcement appears, once again, to have been premature.

Dear old MadPriest (I think that's the properly British form of endearment) put me on to this, and it is interesting, if only because it says (in part) what I've been saying all along. The qausi-interesting point is this:

The danger is that the aggression and hostility to religion in all its forms (moderates are castigated as giving the fundamentalists cover for their extremism) deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/faith debate. The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking, one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary psychologists acknowledged to me recently. Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human wellbeing? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?

Which I would just encapsulate as: world religions. Human beings are not just inherently reasoning creatures (a very Greek view, btw, and not at all universal; nor need it be); they are also, quite clearly, inherently religious creatures. And there are far more religions in the world, Virginia, than Christianity and Islam. And far more versions and types of Christianity than American Protestantism (which has all the critics cited in the article upset) and Roman Catholicism (which is hardly so solidly unitary, either, eh?) So, is religion really going anywhere just because the Enlightenment mind has established evolution as the "grand unified theory" of existence (and when did that happen, by the way?)?

Well, as the article notes, this argument that God is really, really, dead, we mean it this time!, has been going on since the Victorian era. And frankly, it's about as obsolete as the phonograph and the coal-fired steam engine. But I digress.

The really interesting part of the article is here:

This isn't the kind of debate that the New Atheists are interested in (with the possible exception of Dennett, who in an interview last year was far more open to discussion than his book would indicate); theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding. But even on the political front, one has to question whether all the aggression isn't counterproductive. Robert Winston voiced increasing concern among scientists when he argued in a recent lecture in Dundee that Dawkins's insulting and patronising approach did science a disservice. Meanwhile, critics in America argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting the cause of non-deism back rather than advancing it.

This is, of course, the nature of polemics. They do not seek to persuade, they seek to incite; they do not seek to inspire, they seek to enrage. They are the person urging the mob to action, then running out in front of it and claiming the leadership role. So long as the mob lasts, their power lasts. And all in all, it's a pretty shameless display. I've already mentioned that Sam Harris is nuts, and Richard Dawkins's "expertise" is unburdened by any knowledge of the subject he rises to denounce. This bit is particularly funny:

Dawkins is an unashamed proselytiser. He says in his preface that he intends his book for religious readers and his aim is that they will be atheists by the time they finish reading it.

I heard a story in seminary which I took as true when I first heard it. Later I thought it might be apocryphal, but only the last part; the first part I was quite sure was true. The story goes that a pastoral candidate in a particular denomination (that part I'm quite sure is untrue) reached his ordination proceedings after 3 years in seminary, and when asked if he "accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior," said that no, he didn't. After three years of seminary training, he was an atheist, having lost all faith in the religion of his ancestors.

That part, I believe. People imagine seminary is like 3 years of Sunday school, where you learn about Noah and Jonah and David and Goliath. In 4 years of seminary (I took the last two years part-time to work while in school), the only one of those stories I actually studied was Jonah's, and we didn't focus on the "whale." We learned there was no "Red Sea" anywhere near Egypt; that Solomon was not "wise" (he was rich; he kept scholars on staff and bought their knowledge); and that Jesus most likely didn't walk on water or perform miracles. Believe me, seminary is not where you go to get your mythology reinforced. But Dawkins, sure in his ignorance that he is wiser than the trained priest (who, after all, is a brainwashed servant of a vast multi-national institution which is only one grand conspiracy against the laity), overlooks all of that in setting up his straw man and getting out his box of matches.

Bunting mentions, but has little space (alas!) to develop the idea that religion is an inevitable part of politics (Dr. Martin Luther King, in my lifetime, didn't act motivate people to non-violent resistance out of appeals to the reasoning Dawkins and company pursue, nor to the piety of Dobson, Robertson, or George W. Bush. He was much closer to the liberation theologians still busy in Brazil. I can think of many examples outside of my lifetime, too.), so she ends with this:

I suspect the New Atheists are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use religious identity in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension, they may be morale boosters for a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised - the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition - but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand.

I especially like her jab at "the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition." Ouch! But read Sam Harris and tell me it isn't dead on target (or don't bother; I'm not going to waste my time on Hitchens). Of course, I think Bunting's primary thrust is exactly right: Dawkins and Hitchens and all the rest are generating far more heat than light. Indeed, if this is the best eloquence Hitchens can muster against monotheism: "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events" (and does he even understand the concept of radical monotheism?), then he's not even generating sparks. And that heat is not really going to become any kind of wildfire. After all, who really wants to start an atheistic version of jihad aimed at those who believe in any religion whatsoever?

Religion, for better or worse, is a motivator of human conduct. For better, it leads to the American abolitionist movement, and later the Civil Rights movement; for worse, it leads to the Crusades and the brutality of European empire, often conducted on the backs of Catholic monks serving their particular State (and later, Protestants, too. The UCC has atoned for its role, as the Congregational church, in some of the sins of the destruction of culture and life in Hawaii). But the death of God has always been announced prematurely, and the death of religion always has a peculiarly narrow, and wholly Hellenistic, ring to it; as if the Greeks were still the only "civilization" on the planet, the only progenitors of proper human conduct, and those who claim to be their heirs the persons authorized, if not anointed, to declare: "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". That is the position of the "civilized" man pronouncing those who do not think like him "barbarians." The Greeks would understand that well; and understand the hubris of it, too. (Funny how this argument always comes back to: "If we do it, it must be what nature intended!") Indeed, the very idea that religion is merely a vestige of human evolution is laughably reductionist, and apparent only from a very narrow point of view which tries to slice the evidence so thinly it has only one side. No surprise: reductionism seems to be the point of science. But if there is a nuerobiological basis for religion (Dawkins is a biologist), then there must also be a neurobiological basis for atheism:

After donning a helmet wired with electromagnets, some subjects reported experiences they described as mystical, or at least misty. When Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, put on the hood, it only made him a little dizzy. Persinger was quick to note that Dawkins had scored way below average on a psychological questionnaire measuring temporal lobe sensitivity—hints of a neurobiological correlate for atheism.

As Thomas Adams points out (for whom I must also credit the Slate link):

Johnson's last line here is brilliant. After all, if theism is simply a product of neurochemistry, then so is atheism - something that the "explainers of religion" all too often forget. Perhaps, in the end, the neurotheologians will show that it is atheism, not theism, which is caused by a mental defect (this would be the logical conclusion, of course, since the vast majority of the world's current and past inhabitants have been theists). If so, will Slate.com then treat us to articles that attempt to explain the "atheism meme" and the "agnostic delusion"? (emphasis supplied)

That parenthetical is, of course, exactly right. But whether or not Slate, or anyone else, ever attempts to explain the "atheism meme" or the "agnostic delusion" is really neither here nor there, because in the last analysis this entire discussion is not a discussion but is, as Bunting points out, the same old song, and it is only about power. Power, however, serves no one, and makes sure always that its own ends are served. If Dawkins and Harris and now Hitchens, want to claim control over that power, it is my duty as a Christian to let them, to not try to stand in their way, to not try to oppose their power with mine. It is my duty to preach and to observe the power of powerlessness, and to remember that there is no power without resistance.