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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

The Fate of a Delusion

10/24/2006 19:49:01

Richard Dawkins, who stole my heart and never gave it back with The Selfish Gene, has just kicked off the anti-God crusade into high gear with his new book, The God Delusion. Like his recent documentary that aired in Britain, The Root of All Evil?, Dawkins makes strong claims against religious believers, fundamentalist and moderate alike. Among them, he describes religious indoctrination as child abuse.

There are a lot of senses, actually, in which I agree with him. Dawkins's fury is certainly inspired by his long participation in controversies about evolution with religionists. He has seen again and again the way religions make people unwilling to move forward together with scientific insights whose usefulness should be clear to anybody. His recognition, also, of how moderates, despite their best intentions, often legitimate radicals in such a way that calls into question whether religious moderates, from a secular perspective, even exist. (I think they do, though not in the usual sense.) Very often people described as moderates are simply those whose problematic beliefs just happen (by chance or deft maneuvering) to not cause conflicts in the present state of things. Basically, like Dawkins, I am a material materialist. Material things, like the existence of the universe, usually seem to have material explanations lurking beneath them.

On the other hand, I dislike Dawkins's approach to religion not because he is destroying the world and ushering a new age of immorality and so on, but because he is thoughtlessly dismissive of something that I think can be very beautiful and very true. He encourages hatred toward a discourse that needs to be handled more delicately, even if a lot about it needs to be revised. On the other hand, I am willing to admit that Dawkins's kind of fury might be what is necessary to bring the needed revisions about. But I wouldn't want to be left with a world full of Dawkinses. It would be an act of forgetfulness.

In the London Review of Books, the prominent critic Terry Eagleton writes a surprisingly strong attack on Dawkins, which in some senses captures my own sentiment. Eagleton faults Dawkins for his theological ineptitude, for not making the effort to know in detail the tradition he criticises. I imagine secularist Jacques Berlinerbau would answer similarly.

It is not to say that false and misleading claims about divinity should not be corrected. But that in the process we should not reflect on the meanings of divinity itself, and the energies and creativity that people in the past and present put toward it. Atheism of Dawkins's kind, as I am not the first to say, comes to look like a religion in itself. The alternative is a religion, finally, that accepts its own religiousness, its dealings in the unknown and the imagination, while continually searching for the known and the to be known.

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re:The Fate of a Delusion - 10/24/2006 21:24:22
Posted by BT

Yeah, it's a sign of the times that it takes Eagleton-the-Marxist to teach a complete reductionist like Dawkins about theology 101.

I do think there are ways to correct misleading claims about divinity while still reflecting on divinity, but it's just not the type of discourse that sells a lot of books I guess...

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re:Fate of a Delusion - 10/27/2006 00:31:03
Posted by David McConeghy

It seems like fury is chic. At least Dawkins isn't the only one to be fuming. The conservative wing has a number of recent furies which lambaste the so-called "essence" of Islam as irretreivably faulted. On the liberal side authors like Sam Harris have also embraced fury as the primary mood of their discourse. I think the sensitivity of most of these works is the real issue. It's a lack of empathy and it impairs their ability to be fair and even reduces their persuasiveness. Of course, on the other side of the table, I don't wish for any more apologetics.

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re:The Fate of a Delusion - 10/27/2006 01:57:44
Posted by Nathan

Yeah, there is an article in the Washington Post today about Sam Harris. It ends with a story about a man whose mind was opened by him. It may be this is a process we need to go to, a little disenchantment within the religions.

I keep coming back to Harvey Cox and his secular religion books, though I know he's rather out of fashion.

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re:The Fate of a Delusion - 10/27/2006 14:16:53
Posted by Nathan

I found another interesting review of the Dawkins book, Marilynne Robinson, which was published in Harper's. At the end it makes an interesting case for religion as diversity, which I have sympathy with.

Which is to say: I am not, for instance, a Hindu, and I am glad not to be one, but I do like that they are there, and they like being there, because what they learn from their way of life can become an insight in mine.

That is a subjectivist account. On the larger scale, diversity of beliefs makes life interesting in general, even if it does make it more wearisome sometimes.

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