khaosworks | The God Delusion

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The God Delusion

Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books, on Richard Dawkins' latest, The God Delusion.

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

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.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

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.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins's own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. 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.

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So when I first read this post of yours I thought "Oh, that Fresh Air with Terry Gross" interview I heard must have been with him I guess. Although... it sounded like a woman and somehow didn't seem much like this... hmm...
No no mew. Very different.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6387729
Apparently it is about someone from Saturday Night Live who is doing a one woman show called "Letting Go Of God" which is about her own journey from Catholic to Aethiest.

However, she sounded quite respectful of religion and was talking about her own personal journey not painting broad philosophical treatsies.

Thanks - interesting article!

Sorry - clarification - should have said that Fresh Air interview I heard *part of* in the car... :-)

I haven't read Dawkins, though clearly I need to get around to his book; he's made a lot of people mad, which is a good sign. So far I've read about half of Sam Harris's The End of Faith, which combines a lot of good reasoning with some really horrifying statements about tolerance.

The excerpt you quoted is loaded with fallacies. The claim that everyone must live by faith is one of the standbys of religion. Eagleton seems by turns to be confusing faith with reasonable likelihood and with emotional response. The distinction between reason and science is valid (reason being the broader term), but that just dodges the fact that reason and faith are polar opposites.

Yes, most religious people in the West offer rational (at least in intent) arguments rather than only demanding faith, but this doesn't answer the question: If the rational arguments don't support the conclusion, will they still believe the conclusion? If the answer is no, then faith serves no valid purpose. If it's yes, then the reasoning is just for show.

Polar Opposites in the same way that yellow and purple are. Without the other, each is sociopathic. Faith without Reason is incapable of change, it clings ironcladly to ideas that may or may not be obviously false to everyone else. Lacking Reason, one is utterly insane. Reason without Faith is incapable of action, it clings ironcladly to the pursuit of proof that may or may not be obviously sufficient to everyone else. Lacking Faith, one is utterly insane.

I don't understand why you say "Reason without Faith is incapable of action." Your comment about pursuit of proof suggests that you think reason results in immobility in the absence of ironclad certainty -- that, for example, a "rational" person would starve to death while seeking absolute proof that some food can't possibly be poisonous. But acting that way would simply be irrational.

There's a difference between accepting something on faith and accepting it as a likely probability pending evidence to the contrary.

Everybody does the latter, because if you don't you're reduced to solipsism and paralysis. Not everybody does the former.

Faith is the act of accepting something without proof. accepting it as a likely probability pending evidence to the contrary is an act of faith.

I disagree. I think it's almost an insult to faith to reduce it to a gauging of probabilities.

I don't guess that God exists. I don't assume that God exists. God's existence isn't a possibility I entertain for the sake of argument or empirical experimentation.

It's an insult to faith to dismiss it as an act of reason in all cases but one. Faith is what tells us to continue to pursue any question past "I don't know". Reason tells you, with absolute certainty, that you may never know the answer. Faith tells you that you might.

Reason tells you, with absolute certainty, that you may never know the answer. Faith tells you that you might.

That's not reason and faith, that's pessimism and optimism with regard to knowability.

Then what are reason and faith according to your dictionaries?

Reason and faith are different ways to look at the universe, analyze it, and relate it to oneself. Reason tends to rely heavily on observation, tests, and linear logic; faith relies more often (though not exclusively) on revelation and intuition.

Neither reason nor faith can tell you whether the world is fundamentally knowable or not. Or rather, either one can tell you either one, but based on utterly different criteria.

The trouble is that there's no possible meta-criteria, no possible meta-analysis, to tell you whether reason or faith is a superior means of looking at and analyzing the universe. You can't judge either of them except in terms of one or the other.

And you cannot get by on only one. Each improves the other.

Well, plenty of people do manage to get by on only one. Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "get by."

-- Sorry if we've hijacked your journal here, khaos.

Ah, it's okay. I was expecting this when I posted the link (although my conception of the parties involved were different).

And that's not an act of faith, that's just common sense. :)

Your claim, as I understand it, is that it is not rational to accept a conclusion as probable on the basis of probable evidence.

Let's suppose this is true. Then invoking "faith" to support the conclusion is worthless. If it's rational to (repeating the example I gave before) starve to death because you don't have ironclad proof that you're food isn't tainted, then (by the standard you have offered) that's the rational course. Saying "it's rational to starve, but you must have faith and eat" is just double senselessness.

What you're offering is the straw man argument. You're upholding an untenable notion of reason, showing it can't work, and then offering faith as a rescue from failures of reason which exist only in your straw man.

Reason and faith are polar opposites, but that's no reason one can't use both.

Meanwhile, loaded with fallacies the review may be, but it does make the very cogent point that Dawkins does in fact dismiss religion without studying it. And there are very few attitudes that irritate me more -- one of them being when religious people dismiss certain aspects of science without studying them.

I'm a Christian (albeit heretical in some aspects of doctrine), but I'm also a scientist, i.e. one that believes in the validity of the scientific method. I don't see this position as a contradiction, and if Dawkins or anyone else labels me as irrational because of this, I'm quite happy to wear the badge, just as I was quite happy to be labelled as a godless servant of the Devil in my agnostic days (and hey, there're some Christians who'd probably still say that of me).

Just wondering...Did you go looking for this review because (a) you'd read the book prior to anything else, (b) you'd heard about it and wondered if you should read it, or (c) because you read the Wired article on atheism that features Dawkins and two of his confreres in the militant-atheist movement? (See my LJ for a link if you haven't read the article.)

Actually, the link showed up on one of my mailing lists, 'sall. I'd read the Salon interview with Dawkins a couple of weeks back so I knew the book was coming out.

So not getting into the argument here, but thank you for posting the excerpt. I found it very satisfying.

I went to listen to him give a reading and answer questions today, and though I haven't read the book, it seemed to me from the reading that he knew a great deal more about religion and scripture than that review gave him credit for. I went in expecting a significantly weaker presentation than I in fact got because I read that review earlier. The arguments in the review seem to be referencing to or based almost entirely on fairly esoteric theological arguments. At least, they're more esoteric than the couple of religion classes I took in college required. Real academic stuff. Stuff which most people who profess religion, quite honestly, have never read and never thought about. It's all very well for the reviewer to say "Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that," but most of the religious I've met, and more of the religious that get media attention, absolutely believe unquestioningly. And pick and choose and all that jazz. The reviewer has some good points, yes, but I'd sure make sure to read the book too before you form a real opinion. Whichever way your views.

The, er, "you" here is meant in general, not anyone specific.

My general difficulty with Dawkins is that he's not taking in all the data. He may know a lot of scripture, but that doesn't stop him from stereotyping religious thought. The fact that millions of people are mindless, God-worshiping, slick-haired, fire-tongued, fundamentalist drones doesn't mean that religion itself is evil, or that a belief in God is inherently destructive. That ignores centuries of theological thought and philosophy and apologetics which go all out to try and create a reasonable dialogue between skeptics and believers.

The militant atheists are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. The call should be for a more reasoned religion based as much on faith as theological reasoning.

I don't care for "militant atheists." There's no case for God that hasn't been demolished; I note that and go about my business, as long as the religionists leave me along. Militant atheists, in my experience, make the absence of a god a central feature of their lives, which is just bizarre. I'm an atheist, an a-toothfairyist, and an a-Santaclausist, and see no need to be militant about any of those -- at least till they try to take my money or make me obey their sharia.

But faith is an invalid way of reaching any conclusion, and mixing it half-and-half with reasoning doesn't change that.

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The God Delusion

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reason and faith are polar opposites

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