Another day, another discouragingly off-base critique of Richard Dawkins from an otherwise fine and upstanding person.
I just don't get how people can hold some of these ridiculous ideas about "fundamentalist atheists" like Dawkins...Or Dennett...Or PZ Meyers...Or the late, great Carl Sagan...Or, for that matter, implicitly me, as my views on religion coincide very closely to theirs', although I certainly don't mean to place myself in that august company. These fire-breathing pulpit-pounding New Atheists don't actually say much worth getting worked up about, to be honest. They say there's no rational reason to believe in God. They say that religion is not correlated with ethical behaviour, and is often used as an excuse to do very nasty things. They say that perhaps it's unfair to children to indoctrinate them into any specific religion before they're old enough to make such decisions for themselves and understand the issues and alternatives involved. They say that, all things considered, there's a good chance we as a species would be better off without religion altogether.
Richard Dawkins, despite what some might have you believe, does not go on bloody rampages through cathedrals screaming "AAARGH! HULK SMASH!"
What I'd really like to do today, if I might, is to highlight a complaint I've seen brought forth several times now, including at the blog linked above.
Unfortunately, like every other fundamentalist atheist I’ve ever encountered, he [Dawkins] is profoundly ignorant about religion as a whole. The small part of religion he knows and writes about is not representative of the whole. He’s like a really backward space alien who lands on the North Pole and assumes the whole planet is covered by ice. And, because he doesn’t respect religion enough to study it, he remains willfully ignorant of it. This is, pure and simple, elective ignorance, which is the hallmark of a fanatic.
The next exhibit in our little zoo, boys and girls, is the feral amphora merdae, commonly known as the crock of shit. Oftentimes, as later on the same blog, this is followed up by a complaint that Dawkins fails to address the sophisticated faith of theologians, whom he ought to have consulted. Terry Eagleton did this too in The London Review of Books, which seems to have started some kind of atheist-bashing fad. And it's silly. Very silly indeed.
Silly Thing #1: In point of fact, the religious beliefs of most persons are not terribly sophisticated and Dawkins is quite fair to them. Most of the visible atheists in the US and the UK right now are specifically addressing an English-speaking audience from their own culture and engaging specifically with the sloppy monotheism of such salt-of-the-earth Christians. They do this because this audience is the only one they have any chance of having any real impact upon. No-one is claiming more nuanced forms of religion don't exist. If you yourself have a more nuanced religion, don't take it as a personal insult; but recognise that your own personal take on religion is not the same as other peoples', and it is fair to engage people on their own terms rather than on yours. The Big Boys of Atheism know more sophisticated faiths are out there. They just don't care. Which leads us straight into...
Silly Thing #2: Asking people to pay more attention to sophisticated theology is like asking them to spend an afternoon reading your Buffy fan fiction which finally and for all times works out a consistent theory of souls and dimensions in the Buffyverse. And includes a Doctor Who crossover that sorts out UNIT dating once and for all. Theologians are undoubtedly very clever people with keen intellects and a real eye for detail, but the fact remains that there is no rational reason in the universe (that any human has yet articulated) to accept any beliefs that would commonly be labelled "religious". It doesn't matter how sophisticated some peoples' concepts of God are, when there's no reason to believe in any sort of God whatsoever! When atheists ignore theologians, they aren't being rude or fanatical or fundamentalist, they're simply being logical. What on Earth does it matter what theologians say, when the topic of their study is vacuous in the first place? What about theology should an atheist pay attention to, exactly? Which leads us to...
Silly Thing #3: Let's be fair. Theology is intrinsically silly. Let's suppose I ask a stupid question about God. "What is God made of?" A theologian may tell you your question is makes no sense, as God isn't made of anything the way entities in our everyday experience are. God, they will tell you, belongs to a different category; even to say "God is," is fundamentally different from an assertion like "This chair is." God is a sort of being who is not composed of any conventional substance, who does not exist in time, et cetera. If you take this way of thinking somewhat farther, you end up with Valentinus and the most sophisticated of the ancient Gnostics, who can only discuss their God in negative terms: neither this nor that, totally alien to the created world in which we are trapped. The trouble is...Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You're inventing new categories that don't correlate to anything we can observe in the world around us. This, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from making shit up. Christian theology is Bible fan-fic. You can postulate a new category of being that is outside of time and independent of substance and supplies an acausal First Cause all you want, but you cannot supply even one good reason why anyone else should take you more seriously than the LiveJournaller who finally wrote the Buffy/Willow love scene the world has been waiting for. If by some miracle you can, then please tell the rest of us so we can settle this whole religion business once and for all.
This is what's so immensely appealing about mocking the religious: they take God so seriously, and put so much thought and effort into their faith, when it's all built on making shit up. If religious folk would just admit they make shit up to serve some purpose in their lives, and stop expecting everyone else to take their shit seriously, I think the world would be a much happier place for us all.
Congratulations, Britain. Between this and "Torchwood", you are finally catching up to America in the Stupidity Race.
Reach for the stars.
What better way is there to ring in the jolly new year of 2007 than by denying the Lord?
The Internets certainly are strange places. Sometimes something will come down the tubes that really gropes your brain with sweet knowledge that there are thoughtful, intelligent, erudite and articulate people out there in the big wide world who have fantastic and exciting thoughts defying the mediocrity of the commonplace. There are heretics out there, and you may even agree with some of them.
Richard Dawkins does that to me. What an amazing man. Amazing, in the sense that he's a wonderful expositor with a real knack for cutting through nonsense and an unwillingness to pull punches or suffer bullshit. And he keeps his temper better than I can. He's a real charmer. Just get a load of him, here on Youtube fielding some questions from kooks. Or you can watch his television special, "The Root of All Evil?", via Google here and here. He catches a lot of flak from certain people for being so outspoken, but I find this to be entirely to his credit.
Fundamentally he's extremely honest.
If you accept that there is a universe out there that exists in some objective sense which is common to all of us...
(...and I'd be very interested in hearing how you can meaningfully interact with other people if you don't...)
If you accept that the processes of rational, scientific enquiry can furnish you with information about this common, objective reality...
(...and, let's be honest, everyone who catches a ball or expects the sun to rise tomorrow does...)
If you accept that dreams are not a reliable source of factual information about the outside world...
Then it's hard to see how you can be anything but an atheist.
We can talk more about that later, if you'd like.
Dawkins published an op-ed in the LA Times just recently, in which he puts forth the idea that, not only was hanging Saddam Hussein barbaric and beneath civilised human beings, but it deprived us of a valuable source of data on how and why evil dictators manage to do the terrible things they do. Dawkins thinks Hussein should have spent his life in prison, and while he was there facing justice we might as well have tried to extract something good from the monster by interviewing him to figure out how it all happened. Which sounds quite reasonable to me. His piece was another of those neat exciting little things coming down the Internet tubes, I thought...Unconventional, but provocatively rational.
But then sometimes the tubes are clogged with other things, things which make you do a full-fledged Wile E. Coyote eye-popping jaw-dropping double-take, when otherwise reasonable people say something less than reasonable. There seems to be rather a lot of this going on in response to Dawkins' op-ed. And it baffles me.
Here for example we have an otherwise charming weblog on palaeoanthropology, the author of which now feels "revulsion" for Dawkins, and says...
Am I overreacting? Dawkins doesn't say that Hussein should have been tortured, or that psy-ops methods should have been applied -- he describes "psychological research" in nothing but the most neutral terms. A charitable interpretation is that he just means that psychologists should be kept talking to Hussein, sort of Hannibal Lecter-like?I say "charitable" because an uncharitable interpretation involves the imagery that foreseeably results from the words "dictator," "prison," and "research" in one paragraph. What Dawkins would envisage in the scope of his "psychological research" is an unanswered and important question.
...Which is so fundamentally, jaw-droppingly wrong I just don't know what to think. It's not a charitable interpretation of Dawkins' op-ed to claim he wanted Hussein interviewed, and maybe given some free-association tests, asked about his mother, MRI-scanned at the most (with Saddam's consent). And it is not "uncharitable" to interpret it as calling for torture or vivisection. It is totally irrational. This "charitable" interpretation is simply the interpretation we would give by default to anyone we didn't suspect of being some kind of nutter. Non-nutters do not advocate torture or vivisection or cruel mind games. That is one of the ways we pick out nutters from non-nutters. Nothing Richard Dawkins has ever said or done should give anyone any grounds for thinking he is a sociopath. He's outspoken and has very strong views, but he is a sane man who is very capable of engaging in discussion even with people with whom he disagrees. The worst you can say about him is that he can be angry and absolutist, but he's never given anyone the slightest cause to think he's in any way amoral. To interpret his words--which I encourage you to read for yourself--"uncharitably" in this way is to do a profound disservice not only to Richard Dawkins, but to the very idea of civil discourse.
I don't think the author of the passage I quoted is in any sense a bad person, and I don't want to start some kind of blog war or offend anyone, but I think something very important is going on here which we ought to pay serious attention to.
It is not possible to carry on civil discourse at all if you're going to accuse people you disagree with of being beyond the pale without a really, really, really good reason. If you really think Richard Dawkins advocates psychological torture, then--and let's be clear about this--you think he is the kind of "revolting" monster who should be shunned by civilised people. This is manifestly not the case, and to say so, even to say that this is an "uncharitable" interpretation one could give to his words, is to succumb to hysteria and scare-mongering. It leads eventually to the sort of hostile, hateful rhetoric one hears from Ann Coulter or Michael Savage or the truly vile eliminationist figures of the far right, where "liberals" and gays and atheists and anyone who dares to disagree is smeared as a villain and a traitor. It sickens the body politic; it is truly a disservice to the common-weal.
I know people like their flamewars on the Internets, but this is just silly.