The God Delusion

[khaosworks]

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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Comments

[batyatoon]

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.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

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.

[batyatoon]

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.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Then what are reason and faith according to your dictionaries?

[batyatoon]

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.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

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

[batyatoon]

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.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

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. :)