Wednesday, May 23, 2012

So I read Chapter 1 of The God Delusion, and: no faith crisis, no mental collapse. It took a lot for me to start reading it, not so much because I'm afraid of Dawkins' irrefutable rationalism, but because, in the first place, I tend to be susceptible to the ideas of others, and, in the second, Dawkins has the upper hand in the sense that he's arguing about things he understands and denying the existence of what he doesn't. That's an easier position to maintain than my own, which is that I affirm the existence of something I claim to experience, but haven't seen or heard or touched, that I can't prove scientifically -- since, by my definition, God is bigger than science.

The first chapter of Dawkins doesn't (yet?) reveal the snide, disingenuous character I'd expected -- the bits of rhetorical underhandedness, like congratulating the heretofore Christian reader whose "native intelligence" will allow him to put down Dawkin's book a new atheist (6), are probably unintentional. He's not trying to sway readers eager to feel smart; he genuinely sees atheism as the only rational, and therefore intelligent, response to his work. He does do that thing were he selects evidence to support a claim as though there wasn't a lot of other, contradictory evidence (see, for example, his unequivocal claim that Einstein was an atheist, of which I'm suspicious, but which I think I should write about after reading Jammer's Einstein and Religion for myself). I believe qualifying your arguments makes them stronger than does simply dismissing or obscuring contradictory evidence. In my discussions with atheists of this type (limited!), I've determined that they tend to see this sort of qualification as a kind of weakness.

If it's hard for me to deal with The God Delusion, it's not so much because Dawkins is so unanswerable in his claims and I lack the moral courage to admit it (his take) or because Dawkins is just a smarmy, propagandizing asshat (the take of most of the reviewers who dislike him). It's more that he has a lot of different issues with religion, and should a person respond to one, he's all ready to jumped onto another. Later in the book, Dawkins cites Jefferson in describing the impossibility of responding to vague ideas; I'd add that this is equally the case whether the ideas you want to deconstruct are poorly defined from the start or whether they constitute a moving target -- ie, I'm responding to the tired and incorrect characterization of the Old Testament God, and Dawkins just announced that that's not the point, anyway. (So why open the chapter with it?)

It would be helpful, for example, if Dawkin's critique that religion is damaging, and that religious beliefs that damage others shouldn't be afforded special treatment under the law, had their own book. In one part of the first chapter, he discusses a court case in which a child's right to wear a shirt claiming that gays were going to hell was defended as a religious freedom, as well as a debacle in which Muslims worldwide were incited to violence over some cartoons published in Denmark.

I think Dawkins is absolutely correct about the role religion played in how these situations were addressed. It's entirely reasonable to indict Christianity for allowing people to infringe on the rights of others, often breaking the law to do so, and then to claim that their faith justifies/ demands it. Everyone should be thinking about this argument, however they feel about Dawkins' promotion of atheism as the solution. (They might also want to research the issues he's talking about, though; I don't think that ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia can ultimately be attributed to religion just because the the various groups had different religious beliefs, any more than you could call it an act of racial violence if I get into a fight with an African-American commuter over a subway seat this morning.)

But it's not going to be possible for Christians to respond to that charge without referring back to the Bible and the various ways in which it has been interpreted -- pointing out, for example, that reading Yahweh as a God of vengeance is one of many readings of the Bible, and that responsible Christians read the passages about war and punishments against passages about everlasting love and compassion, one, and in the formal and historical context in which the texts were produced, two. If Dawkins just responds to these arguments by claiming the Bible is not credible, so actually attending to the text is as unnecessary as consulting an expert on "fairyology" (16), then he's moving on to an entirely different issue. It can't be that the Bible is permissible as evidence when he's making the case that religion is destructive, but irrelevant when Christians want to respond to that claim. Both arguments  -- that the Bible incites violence and justifies bigotry and that the Bible isn't a reliable source of evidence --  are legitimate, but each treats the Bible differently and belongs in a different book (or, at least, in its own chapter, kept from creeping into the other argument to queer its premise and terms).

This distinction is particularly important because I don't think any argument that God exists would be legitimate within Dawkin's worldview; he is candid about the fact that he believes everything fits into, and can be explained by, the natural world and (more significantly) scientific discourse. Religious people (as well as postmodernists) don't think that; both think that the scientific and logical discourse he endorses is a structure within a larger material world that can't be described through science. (A postmodernist would say, I think, that this meaninglessness is the ultimate; I believe that beyond Dawkin's science, and beyond the meaninglessness, is God).

There's not really a point, as far as I can see, in having that kind of discussion with Dawkins -- though I think it's probably helpful to read his ideas and understand where he's coming from. But the claims he makes about the various inanities and contradictions of religious people and culture are something that we can, and should, discuss. While his argument includes some claims and references that I think are poorly constructed, or wrong, it also contains some really valid points that directly bear on both atheists and believers. Rather than just pointing out the flaws in his argument, I think someone should address its main points on this topic with more care.

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