Friday, May 25, 2012

God Delusion update: Okay, I think this will get better once Dawkins moves on to biology. It's not that it's bad, exactly -- just that it's frustrating to try and read it with an open mind and to suspect that this openness is being taken advantage of, as I tend to when a writer makes claims but then doesn't support them with reasoning or references.

On the most basic level, unless I'm missing something, on page 42 Dawkins reproduces two quotes from Thomas Jefferson for which he offers no source; he goes on, on 43, to string together a number of very short quotes, none of which is cited, and follows up with another uncited quote by Ghandi on 45.

Of the material he does cite, one John Adams quote is second hand, quoted in the context of an online article in which an Ed Buckner discusses the reception of the quote (which seems to me to deal with religious tolerance of Muslims, rather than with atheism; but of course I can't be positive, since I have no way of establishing its context). The same for many of the other citations: for example, I'm confused because I think that David McCullough's biography of Adams starts out by referencing Adams' faith, and I'd like to be able to try and resolve these contradictory elements of his character. But I can't do that, really, because I don't know where or when Adams and Jefferson said the things Dawkins is saying they said.

Dawkins does a marginally better job of citing Christopher Hitchen's biography of Jefferson and David Mills' Atheist Universe -- no page numbers, but at least he gives titles -- but  his synopsis of Mills' work doesn't really suggest to me that the book is particularly "admirable", as he claims. I'm generally suspicious of writers who rely heavily on dialect, especially in nonfiction, especially in nonfiction that is already transparently advancing a specific point of view. I suppose it isn't beyond the realm of possibility that someone would say the following sentence: "Is you gonna protest fir him or 'gin him?" and that this has nothing to do with the author's feelings about the character in question, or that the feelings followed the event, rather than the event being colored by the narrator's feelings. But I have not heard anyone talk like this, ever, and this passage doesn't do anything to effectively make this kind of speech believable. A better writer would have treated the character in such a way that the situation he's describing, and not the antagonist's speech, is the focus. Overall, the book Dawkins describes doesn't seem like reliable evidence for the point he is trying to make here, or for any point that doesn't relate directly to Mills' feelings about the situations he describes.

Margaret Downey's website,* which chronicles abuses against atheists,may be more reliable -- but I  wonder why Dawkins has to cite that website and not, for example, a police report or news article from a mainstream news source, when he claims a man was murdered for being an atheist. If his idea is that prejudice against atheists is so extreme that mainstream news forums do not carry the story when they are murdered, I think he should probably discuss this. Otherwise it just makes the Freethought Society website seem like a suspicious, fringe source of information.

(While I couldn't actually find the reference he cited -- the link doesn't work any more -- I did find a reference to the story on another atheist web site; it probably bears mentioning that the college student committing the murder seems to be mentally ill, one, and was sentenced to 25 to 45 years, two -- suggesting that to me that this might not be the best example of socially-sanctioned persecution of atheists.)

Probably the biggest failing of documentation is Dawkins' claim that the God of the Old Testament is a "psychotic delinquent" (38). However firmly Dawkins believes this statement, and however central it is to the book's argument, it is not so evident as to require no references or examples to back it up. Even a perfunctory list of episodes that support this conclusion would be helpful.

Dawkins doesn't provide them. I don't know whether he doesn't think it's necessary to support this claim, or whether he understands and doesn't want to deal with the fact that most of Old Testament stories that are read by some as proving God's psychosis or delinquency are also read by others in radically different ways -- or whether he doesn't want to afford the Old Testament the same reasonable treatment you would give to another literary text, especially those written thousands of years ago, in a radically different culture and in a foreign language, such as considering the genre or consulting scholarly work about them.

The second out-and-out silly claim -- one for which I think it would be hard to even establish a case, should Dawkins want to (apparently, he doesn't) -- is that theology "has not moved on in eighteen centuries" (34) . I'm not well read in theology, but I would have liked him to either mention the contemporary theologians who led him to this conclusion (at the very least), or, more to the point, to make an argument for how Marcus Borg, N.T. Wright, Paul Tillich, John Shelby Spong, Richard Neuhaus, or Matthew Fox (to name only a few that I've actually read) are fundamentally the same as St. Gregory the Miracle Worker, the single theologian he actually cites. He may have a case, but he doesn't make it.

This isn't a matter of the supposed "courtier's reply" (a thing I can't find discussed anywhere other than on explicitly "rational"/ secular websites). Dawkins is making a claim comparing contemporary theology to third century theology and offers as evidence a single quote from the one, taken from an encyclopedia article, and nothing at all from the former. I did more research for my third-grade report comparing Henry and Gerald Ford. Which I wrote in a two-room schoolhouse operated by fundamentalist Christians. Who taught me Creationism!

 Anyway, I feel like atheists who have taken a basic college writing course should probably be concerned about this book -- and that Christians who dislike its premise should probably not feel the need to castigate Dawkins for writing it. Maybe they aren't, and do, because while the book hasn't been especially well-reviewed (Terry Eagleton is pretty much negative, The New York Times more measured), a lot of people like it. I'd point out that a lot of people like Fox News and Michael Moore movies; this doesn't legitimize them. It doesn't mean they're bad, either; each has to stand on its own merits. So far, The God Delusion doesn't. Lots of smart people are atheists; presumably there's a stronger case against the existence of God to made than this. Maybe Dawkins just hasn't got around to making it?

* I tried to link to the website he cites, http://www.fsgp.org/adsn.html, but it wouldn't link. Then I tried: http://www.ftsociety.org/adsn.html, since when I googled "Freethought Society Philadelphia", I saw that the URL for their main website has changed. No luck. Here is the link to their new main page: http://www.ftsociety.org/ -- and there is why I would be more convinced by arguments drawn primarily from sources that 1. were cited, and 2. were not web sites.

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