Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Bad Faith

I had to return How God Became King , to my disappointment; I would have liked to re-read it. After I finished it, I knocked out Antony Flew's There is a God -- hence the weekend crisis over New Atheism. The book itself kind of got obscured for me by its role in the unsettling public negotiation of Flew's "conversion" to Deism, a side story in which no one came out looking well and I ended up feeling really depressed and hating the word senescence -- although actually, the less-loaded definition at http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/senescence isn't quite as unpalatable as the wikipedia entry.

It's frustrating that, as helpful as biology is in, say, developing stem cell therapy for people with spinal cord injury or pursuing ways toto treat Alzheimer's, the ideology that has grown out of contemporary evolutionary biology is as ugly and destructive as Social Darwinism. This ugliness is reflected in efforts to connect Flew's change in thinking to some sort of inexorable decline by throwing out a word that simultaneously connotes scientific authority and provokes negative associations about aging -- so that, not even knowing Flew, the reader thinks: well, obviously a man in his eighties might be more vulnerable to the spiritual equivalent of ponzi schemes and infomercials; poor Tony.

Anyway, after finishing Flew and tearing myself away from nasty play-by-plays of Flew's coming out on various secular websites, and Mark Oppenheimer's (probably) more balanced account -- it includes references to Oppenheimer's meeting with Flew but only a spliced-up description of the interview itself, and it relies more heavily on Richard Carrier's perspective than I think is justified, given that the guy had to self-publish his books and seems more like a precocious undergraduate than a historian* -- I retreated to the equally problematic but less anxiety-provoking The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail, by Becky Garrison.

Garrison makes interesting points, most of which I already agreed with -- who doesn't like that? But the book is really uneven; I don't know if she's a bad writer or if she just lacks the distance to treat this subject well. She makes a lot of her role as a "religious satirist" -- by which I mean, she mentions it in almost every chapter -- and I feel like announcing yourself as a satirist suggests a certain level of difficulty with the genre.

In point of fact, I don't really think of any of what Garrison's writing as satire: in most of the book, she's directly challenging or mocking New Atheists, then retreating to a plea to "just get along". She seems to think that her dislike of religious dogma gives her common ground with New Atheists like Dawkins, who not only reject the premises of religion but seem to just plain dislike religious people, and that that will make her often lazily articulated criticism of their ideas more palatable. But I think Dawkins would probably be more interested in tearing apart her faith and its sloppy articulation here than in forming an alliance with her against the fundamentalists she dislikes.

Garrison also uses a lot of weird anachronisms that I think are supposed to make her seem hip, but that actually make it seem like she's not really taking her own arguments seriously. Most troubling, she seems to have confused injecting various forms of "come on, REALLY?" or, say, accusing Harris of "putting his fingers in his ears and singing 'Nanny nanny boo boo' " with dealing some kind of death blow to the people she's critiquing. I think she probably is smart -- though probably not as smart as Dawkins -- but her writing in this book makes her seem either dumb, lazy, or both. It's discouraging, since I think actual satire of Dawkins would be really funny, and since the footnotes here suggests that Garrison actually has material with which she could construct a relevent critique of New Atheism.



* I.e., Carrier, who was born in 1969 and got his BA in 1997, only actually finished his PhD in 2008; the two books listed on CV are published through Lulu and Authorhouse, both self-publishing companies; his shorter published pieces are primarily, though not all, either encyclopedia articles or contributions to "secular" magazines and web sites, rather than academic journals; the four conferences he lists include two sponsored by universities and two "special interest" conferences -- no mainstream forums for historical research. This isn't to disparage him -- "historian" seems to be his second career, and good for him, for that. It is to point out that despite his Columbia education, his CV kind of resembles that of a promising and eccentric new post-doc who could have used a better adviser, maybe not someone whose indictments of Flew should be understood as substantive or unbiased. Considering how unsparingly Oppenheimer skewers Varghese, another bizarre player in this strange story, he lets Carrier off pretty easily -- and it's not clear to me that Carrier is any more credible.

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