How does this play out in the case of contemporary atheism at large? The argument of this presentation will be that radical evangelical Christianity defines the contemporary atheist agenda in a way Dawkins and other New Atheists show few signs of being able to think through; that the sort of way the New Atheists are locked in opposition to the latest, ugliest forms of Christian fundamentalism, the way they conflate what they like least about contemporary fundamentalism with religion as a whole, limits the power and validity of their critique of religion.
That’s not all though. In the form of a movement, New Atheism has several of the characteristic marks of the consumerist society into which it thrusts its message of liberation. And an interesting point of comparison here might be with the rolling festival conditions that went by the name of the Darwin bi-centenary year (2009) – in which the troupe of New Atheism’s standard-bearers played a leading role. Here’s a snapshot of that year-long strangeness, as described by Stephen Shapin in the LRB:
“Darwin had an anniversary Facebook group dedicated to him: its goal was to have 200,000 unique Happy Birthdays posted by 12 February and a million ‘friends’ by the November anniversary of the Origin [of Species]. The group also planned a mass ‘Happy Birthday, Darwin’ sing-along, but I don’t think this actually happened. Then there were the Darwin-themed T-shirts, teddy bears, bobbleheads, tote bags, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, mouse mats, scatter cushions and pet bowls; the ‘Darwin loves you’ bumper stickers, the ‘Darwin Is My Homeboy’ badges, and the ‘I ♥ Darwinism’ thongs. The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’
Like the Darwin Bicentenary, the trade-mark Atheism of Today has its kitsch, its in-jokes, its marketing drives, its mass conventions celebrating the life of Science, Reason and Truth. In the form of Catherine Deveney, it has its easy ironies and preferred obscenities. And in Richard Dawkins it has one of a number of preferred celebrities – an undoubtedly powerful mind that shoots sparks that light up the night sky of the contemporary cultural landscape with ad campaigns, neon-lit help-lines for people trying to quit the church and, of course, popular intellectual products, such as the rollicking 400pp harangue I’m going to talk to you about today.
However, though intended as an indictment of all religion, The God Delusion turns out to be not much more than a tilt against contemporary religious fundamentalism, especially of the Christian variety. At the heart of the book is a concerted and, I think, successful attempt to use evolutionary biology to demonstrate that the theoretical centrepiece of contemporary creationism, so-called “Intelligent Design”, is, as scientifically verifiable theses go, an unnecessary and tendentious folly, while the final three or four chapters provide a catalogue of the vindictive nuttiness of small-town Christian America.
But it’s Dawkins’ opening move in The God Delusion that I want to focus on to begin with. Within the space of 20 or so pages, Dawkins dismisses liberal theology, indeed all ethical and allegorical reading of religious texts, as unworthy of consideration; like the animism of pre-historical peoples or the polytheism of the Greeks, they don’t qualify as religion and nor do the pantheism or the deism of America’s founding fathers (or indeed the deism of the founding father of evolutionary science himself, Charles Darwin). The sense of the numinous that many great scientists have felt – from Kepler through to Einstein and perhaps even the late Stephen J Gould – doesn’t give him pause either, because it doesn’t come with a conception of a benevolent creator of the universe. No form of belief that doesn’t hang its hat on the existence of an active personal supra-mundane God comes within the remit of the main argument. And indeed later in the book Dawkins will go on to suggest that, in promoting the idea that anything at all should be taken on faith, religious moderates are in effect “making the world safe for fundamentalism” and so amount to an almost equal blight on the face of the earth.
We already have a problem. In fact we have several problems. The way Dawkins sets up his very case gives the impression that “young earth creationism” has been at the core of Judeo-Christianity since the beginning, rather than being what it clearly is - a vulnerable defensive structure hastily erected by a militant latter-day Protestantism that feels it’s been pressed into a corner by powerful scientific modes of explaining the world. The greater problem though is that the further you get from the supra-mundane god of monotheism, the more you feel Richard Dawkins’ detested “God hypothesis” and his prosecution of the purveyors of a “God delusion” are simply irrelevant to the experiences of religiously-inclined folk past or present, East or West. It’s not quite that Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Hinduism or Buddhism or Confucianism or, say, the vast intricate patchwork of Aboriginal Australian spirituality. It’s that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. About some strands of Christianity he has an approximate first-hand cultural experience, supplemented with some haphazard general reading and lots of horror stories from the Yankee boondocks. But this passes over into more or less total ignorance when it comes to other of the phenomena of religion. The result? That his claim to be making a case against all religion looks over-inflated from the start and his initial relegation of, for example, Indian and Chinese religion to the status of sub-religious “philosophies of life” a tad too convenient. Religion, I’m arguing, is a target that is much more complex and protean than Dawkins would like it to be. Because he brushes the complexity impatiently aside, any implicit claim to being fair-minded – let alone scientific – about the object of his analysis seems shaky from the start. Thus, for instance, Dawkins has clearly never heard of any of the basic conceptual distinctions developed within the social science of religion - which in any case only come into view once you zoom out to get a cross-cultural picture of multiple religious traditions and their development down the ages. Thus, Buddhism (one certainly doesn’t hear in The God Delusion) was in its early days an explicitly atheist religion and its founder an exemplary rather than an emissary prophet, i.e. a figure who overtly disavowed that he’d been sent by a supramundane god in obedience to whom human beings were commanded to lead lives of goodness. What I’m suggesting is this: if informed scientific reflection is what you’re on about, there is no reason not to grant Buddhism (or, say, Confucianism) the status of fully-fledged religions. Both have certainly played roles in patterning culture and shaping their adherents’ lives in a way that is quite comparable to Christianity, However, neither sets up anything like the Christian dichotomy between a benevolent creator-God and his flawed creation. My first question to RD then is – how do so many widely different conceptions of deity go missing in a book that is intended to be a critique of all religion.
However, it isn’t just the diversity of religious thought and experience but crucially the diversity of ways of conceptualising religious thought and experience that Dawkins is either unaware of or refuses to take up into his argument; and as The God Delusion proceeds, it becomes clear why this has to be the case. Religion has to be made to dissolve into a shapeless mass made up of the ugliest general features of contemporary monotheism because if religion is taken to be one basic thing that speaks to one basic set of human instincts, then it can be accounted for neatly using the reductive Darwinian tools Dawkins has spent a life-time in sharpening. If in other words “the religion thing” is basically one thing and is explicable ultimately, as we’ll go on to see, as a psychological by-product of pre-historic genetic inheritance; moreover, if the elaboration and transmission of religious beliefs within historical cultures can be accounted for as a sort of quasi-evolution (viz. in terms of successful self-replication of quasi-genetic religious ideas, or memes) – then religion on the whole can be knocked on the head by exposing the psychological by-products to the blowtorch of rational argument; hopping out the blowtorch and giving a good flaming to the logical errors of the religious mind becomes the most promising strategy to inhibit religious self-reproduction in the metaphoric or not so metaphoric Darwinian playground that is the cultural life of humankind.
The question then is - if radical atheism is not either a pre-supposition or an unavoidable consequence of any core Darwinian set of ideas, then how has Darwinism come to be used as an intellectual stick with which to beat the religious feelings of the contemporary world? My two initial suggestions would be that neo-Darwinism functions as a sort of defence-mechanism of its own, a defence, specifically, against the insane role that vociferous well-funded religious bigots play in the public life of that once great nation located south of the Canadian and north of the Mexican border. A second explanation would seem to lie in the fervour of the Dawkins counter-lobby – for Dawkins and his associates appear to detect an exasperating hostility to science in the presence of any sort of religion in society.
What is going on with Dawkins himself is something that a rather earlier atheist firebrand described as a case of staring so long into an abyss that after a while the abyss itself starts to stare back into you – a thought that in a self-aware atheist like Nietzsche is as much a suspicion he has about his own predicament as an anti-religious thinker as it is a metaphor for the existential ambiguity of wrestling with deep dark problems. Dawkins, you might say, doesn’t realise that he has an abyss in front of him which is staring back up at him. Instead he carries on like a man who’s quivering with disbelief at a religious rubber chicken that the contemporary culture-world keeps on serving him in lieu of a proper intellectual meal. But sure enough, I think, the abyss is staring. And the various ungodly screeches and howls we hear from Dawkins as The God Delusion proceeds are symptoms of a mind on the edge. In straight terms, you could say that for Dawkins “God” is a problem that simply has no depth. What “God” names for Dawkins is, in classic Enlightenment terms, a series of spectacularly foolish but nonetheless demonstrable errors. In the absence of any methodological hesitation about how to treat God as an object of enquiry – likewise in the absence of any doubt about what interpretative sense to make of the pronouncements of contemporary or historical religious believers – Dawkins assumes that the only way to broach his main topic is to take God as a quasi-physical entity whose existence he ought to be able to verify with reference to bona fides scientific notions of cause and effect. If God existed then we’d be able to see and hear him, or at least detect physical traces of his presence and then say things about him empirically using the apparatus of scientific theory-building.
This brings me to some of the more complicated reasons why radical atheism has become yet another blunt weapon in yet another modern-day culture war. Biology, it is clear, is one of the last redoubts of totalising methodological reductionism in science and in this respect occupies a somewhat exceptional position within the no longer quite so starry scientific firmament. Even physics, in the passage from its classical phase in the age between Newton and Einstein to its post-classical quantum phase, has had to moderate some of its earlier ambitions, as research into ever-smaller sub-atomic universes has demanded ever more paradoxical interpretations of axiomatic physical law – and as the goal of theoretically comprehending all the phenomena of the physical world in its own terms has proved more and more elusive. [1]
No such intellectual inhibitions need trouble biologists. Since WW2, indeed, classical reductionist methodology has come into its own - starting with the discovery of the basic mechanism of biological inheritance (DNA) and culminating in the grand project, currently well underway, to map the human genome. Little wonder, then, that Dawkins is upbeat about the prospects of busting God down to basics and showing those theists who’s who the old-fashioned scientific way. Little wonder too that the gleam of one of the dream-projects of the nineteenth century – that of a physiology of culture – shines brightly in his eyes as if Great Charles still strode the face of the earth. And little wonder that Dawkins’ case against religion re-capitulates the Enlightenment’s basic case – or one side of it – as if the blossoms of that great intellectual movement of the eighteenth century were still in first flower. The rough case was that God is essentially a product of credulity, need and a certain willingness on the part of human beings to let themselves be cowed by priestly authority; that the Bible, far from being a work of ethical instruction or storehouse of tradition, was a shabby work of fiction, an object of superstitious veneration that must be judged by the standards of demonstrative empirical truth – which is to say by the light of reason, or in Dawkins’ case the consciousness-raising power of Darwinian science.
Dawkins, however, doesn’t seem to have fully appreciated how much the world has changed between the Enlightenment and now. His inability to see himself and his intellectual hopes in critical historical perspective means that he doesn’t see that between AD 1800 and ACE 2010 science has essentially been victorious in its cultural struggle with religion – not quite in the sense that the illuminati of the world might like, but certainly in the sense that it defines what nature is, while the Church’s power to stipulate a vision of nature as Divine Creation has been in relatively steady decline. What’s more, the victory of science over religion has been bedded down as a dynamic process of more or less permanent scientific and technological revolution of economic and everyday life. (Another of the complicated problems that Dawkins can’t broach because of the one-dimensional nature of his terms of engagement is that the very way the victory of science over religion has been bedded down might have given people a bit of a need for old-style religion all over again. Of course science as a kind of systematic pursuit of knowledge is not directly to blame for the cultural and environmental destructiveness that the techno-scientific revolution of past centuries has contributed to; and certainly no individual scientist need feel responsible for the further consequences of the techno-scientific revolution: the reliance on experts, the displacement of non-technical forms of knowledge, the overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of the increasing systematic complexity of the modern world. However, if discovering the sources of religious belief is your business, and critical self-reflection is part of the business plan, then a bit of attention to those sorts of broad facts about social modernity is indispensable. Dawkins isn’t interested.
If I had to account for the continuing prevalence of religion in world affairs in a paragraph or less, I wouldn’t point so much to the problems or limits of scientific advancement, but to the fact that religions, including the Christian religion, have established themselves as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are definitely advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in very broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about, and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to get out there and SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.
Of course, the fact that religion is a powerful motivator, doesn’t give any particular set of religious ideas a claim to truth. But it ought to change our view of the origins and continued existence of religion as a meaningful institution of human culture. And it’s precisely those two things – the origins and continued existence of religion as a meaningful institution of human culture – that Richard Dawkins, because of his inability to think thinking, can’t, in my view give a nuanced scientific account of at all.
* * *
Even if you’re chary about having your consciousness raised by the good comrades of the biology faculty, the way Dawkins goes to town against the Intelligent Design idea should nonetheless convey the simplicity and power of Darwinism and its methods. If it weren’t for the suggestion that the proponents of Intelligent Design were universally a group of mendacious dunces, the middle stretch of The God Delusion might almost be a popular-scientific tour de force [2].
It would be remiss of me not to pause for a minute and review the one moment of the book that really does succeed in doing what it sets out to do. Dawkins’ specific bone of contention here in chapter 4 is what goes by the name of “irreducible complexity” – a term used by Intelligent Design theorists, including a small number with bona fides scientific credentials, to talk about intricate biological traits whose origins seem beyond explanation in terms of step-wise Darwinian “descent with modification”. (For those of you who haven’t read The God Delusion, you can intuitively grasp the problem by thinking, say, about animal eyes or wings. Given that the theory of natural selection strongly suggests that numerous steps would’ve been involved in the evolution of such structures – and given that many of the steps would’ve conferred little or no adaptive advantage – how can their evolution but be the work of a being trying to consciously create a certain sort of organ/ism, or perhaps even a being that created them out of nothing in one hit? The proponents of Intelligent Design would seem to have been vanquished as far as the question of eyes and wings goes; as Dawkins points out, for example, there are numerous types of eye of numerous degrees of complexity in existence in the animal kingdom – everything from flatworms’ crude devices for registering light-and-shade to the advanced visual equipment of eagles and eagle-eyed fighter pilots – and these suggest an evolutionary pathway – indeed numerous evolutionary pathways – that species might gradually have traversed in the course of millennia.)
Yet there are isolated examples of other biological structures that defy easy explanation in evolutionary terms. A particular favourite of the Intelligent Design crowd is the flagellar propulsion of common bacteria ( - seemingly an unfortunate beastie for God to grace with signs of his creative intelligence, but let that pass). The bacterium’s equipment for getting about, Dawkins tells us, is a prodigy of nature, driving “the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle.” The question again is: how could a biological mechanism structurally resembling the outboard motor of a speedboat, needing a co-ordinated array of ten moving and fixed parts to function in the first place, have come into existence without outside help? Chapter 4 of The God Delusion contains the convincing answer. And part of the reason it’s convincing is that Dawkins writes with lavish enthusiasm about the sort of complexity of living creatures that creationists might like to think takes us right up to the threshold of the physical act of divine creation. When he isn’t busy wishing his adversaries to oblivion and is simply taking us through the way things around us work from an evolutionary point of view, Dawkins is at his best – he’s the ideal high school science teacher who doesn’t mumble his explanations into his beard.
Having successfully prosecuted the case against Intelligent Design - Dawkins moves on to explaining where he thinks religion comes from. If human beings’ sense of God isn’t actually God-given, then it still needs to find its way into the world somehow and Dawkins rightly thinks he needs to tell us how. This is the point at which the theory of natural selection does double service; Chapter 5 of the The God Delusion borrows from a range of the pet ideas of biologically inclined philosophers and scientists to improvise a rough theory of the evolutionary origins of religious belief itself. To begin with, we get the basic theoretical model – the scientific by-product theory, which considers religion - again on the presupposition that it is a discrete phenomenon with an identifiable essence – as a sort of secondary spin-off of other human capacities with primary adaptive functions such as fear, pain, language-use and consciousness.
Over-writing the psychological by-product theory is a different thesis, also with its roots in recent evolutionary psychology, the idea that religion might be a more specific - presumably in evolutionary terms a much later - psychological by-product, this time of the suggestibility of children – a side-effect, as Dawkins chooses to put it, of the exceptional susceptibility of human children’s brains to being “programmed”. (Crudely – an abstract selective advantage accrues to groups of hominids whose offspring accept a rough imperative to obey their parents and take on face value what they tell them – not just about not straying too far from the pack, but, say, about mysterious spirit worlds as well.)
Next comes an ingenious suggestion from Dawkins’ friend Daniel Dennett – that religion could be a sort of over-development of one type of pragmatic stance vis-à-vis the external world which primitive near-human creatures may have adopted in order to survive in a hostile world with the help of their burgeoning brain capacities. Dennett calls it the intentional stance and contrasts it with a so-called design stance and a physical stance. Comprehending the world from the standpoint of intentionality means viewing things as if they were endowed with something approximating human agency, which in the case of primitive religion might mean attributing agency, for instance, to rocks and trees and places, to the dead or to the world as a whole.
Or could our seemingly ingrained capacity for religious belief even be a side-effect of the human capacity for love? Here it looks as if Dawkins might be shaping up to say how the human affinity for religion is culturally patterned. Love, whether as eros or agape, seems capable of being made to flow in so many different channels, sublimated, given free rein, turned against itself - all facts that are not irrelevant to the genesis of religious belief. That’s certainly not where Dawkins is headed though. For him, the only conclusion sanctioned by the work of anthropologists, biologists and philosophers is that there is a specific and hefty “survival bonus” to be gained from some forms of irrational emotional attachment to (notional) higher powers and religious beliefs might be just that kind of attachment.
As suggestive as each of these part-theories sound, by this stage they do seem to have multiplied a little worryingly. Each moreover takes Dawkins off down a half-cleared speculative pathway, unlike the much more limited solution to the well-defined problem how the bacterium evolved its ten-dimensional outboard motor. As Chapter 5 of The God Delusion moves from a relatively exacting functional account of the evolution of wings, eyes and bacterial flagella to a rather less exacting functional account of religion, it falls into a habit much on display in evolutionary psychology – that of vaguely affirming that some aspect of the human mind or human behaviour (in this case religious belief) exists because it may well have been directly or indirectly useful.
Or, to put the point more sharply – the arguments offered by Dawkins’ favoured stream of evolutionary biology, though operating on radically different pre-suppositions, in a way seem almost as speculative as a lot of the theological literature about the nature and operation of the Christian godhead. In neither case are the core issues amenable to direct empirical investigation in at all the same way as the problem of eyes or flagella; rigorously running the film of evolutionary development backwards using the differential equations of mathematical genetics, as biologists can in many instances to recover past gene pools, has up to now not looked even remotely possible in the way it would need to be to specify the unique set of conditions under which the primitive religion postulated by Dawkins might have developed. The evolutionary account of religion offered in Chapter 5 of Dawkins’ book tells us that religion could have been pre-historically life-enhancing or survival-enhancing – that it can be looked at as a misfiring of animal instinct in a creature with a brain of a particular size and configuration, possessing language and faced with certain natural hazards and challenges. But the step from there down to the molecular or mechanical level of explanation is enormous and the difficulties of the task of re-tracing the links in the causal chain (as opposed to pointing approximately to widely spaced segments of the chain) oughtn’t to be fudged. In short, there is no reason to think on the basis of what Dawkins gives us in The God Delusion that he or any of his colleagues in evolutionary psychology have retraced the linkages using anything but a series of metaphors which point with a certain anti-poetic poetry at the brain as a “collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.”
Atop this dizzyingly high structure of semi-conceptual, semi-metaphoric explanations, Dawkins places another analogical thought-figure: the meme. He hastily whips up a “memetic” theory of religion, or really just the programmatic outlines of one: where straight, old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection provides the brain with what he calls a “hardware platform” for running delusionary religious programmes, it’s memetic natural selection that supplies “low-level system software” and a theory of memetic natural selection that promises to explain which religious ideas (i.e. delusions) survive and proliferate. The drift of the theory will be clear to anyone who has followed the uncertain scientific fate of memes since Dawkins coined the notion in the 1970’s [3]. Like genes and computer viruses, memes are but a subspecies of the genus of so-called replicators, we learn in The God Delusion. For Dawkins they are the basic unit of selection in cultural matters, in the same way genes are the basic unit of selection at the level of long-term biological descent with modification. [4] As with genes in a gene pool, the religious memes that prevail in the quasi-organic environment of human culture will be the ones that provide their human hosts with advantages in competitive cultural environments and are hence good at getting themselves copied. Dawkins is quick to add that the analogy with genetic theory is only partial, for religious ideas do undeniably bear some marks of intelligent design, unlike the genetic material that goes tumbling through the biota down the generations: the way religious memes come into existence and spread is, at least partly, attributable to the conscious intentions of their creators; so having, say, an intelligent perception of what is likely to speak to the minds of religiously needy multitudes might well be working alongside the supposedly impersonal “memetic” mechanisms of cultural variation, mutation, competition and inheritance.
Dawkins goes to lengths to defend memes and memetic selection against their detractors among his fellow biologists. The criticism of those who aren’t signed up to Dawkins’ full reductionist curriculum for biological science has tended to be that no memetic code-script analogous to DNA exists to ensure exact replication as memes are passed from one generation of religious delusionals to the next. Dawkins fends off that objection by saying that mechanically exact reproduction is not required for the successful transmission of cultural representations like religious beliefs from one brain to the next. However, the main challenge to the memetic theory of religion, which comes from outside biology, goes unanswered: it is that the abstract genetic view of religion supplied by the notion of memetic culture-molecules just doesn’t have enough to say about the way religions act as causes within culture to really explain very much about how religions flourish, measure off against each other, die, etc. In a sense this is the point of the argument where the abyss is mistaken for the rubber-chicken – Dawkins is simply not alive to the need to take into scientific account the specifically human character of the religious phenomena he purports to be studying – the way religious beliefs shape people, groups, institutions and whole societies and civilisations and interact with other dimensions of culture like art and politics. Nor does he appreciate the difference between the concrete specificity required to give proper causal accounts of socially complex phenomena and the abstract universality of the general laws of natural science; while it's the latter type of general laws he takes himself to be developing with the help of the notion of memes, it's the concrete specificity characteristic of the explanations of sophisticated social science that he'd need if he wanted his account to have much explanatory power. The result in practical terms is that we’re again confronted with a fairly flat story which doesn’t begin to get at how meaningful relations make a decidedly unpredictable difference to the history of humanity as a religiously inflected ebb and flow.
The point is not that the explanations of religion in terms of memetic culture-molecules given by Dawkins are in any straightforward sense wrong, they just don't say very much causally speaking. All in all, Dawkins seems to be motivated by a naive faith that any proper explanation of religion would reproduce the very pattern of Darwinism's successes in explaining the biological mechanisms of inheritance and change, where possible drawing on much the same theoretical tools. [5] The methodological reflex that has Dawkins in its grip is something like the presupposition that Darwinism provides not just an example of a real scientific explanation, but the one true model of such an explanation.
And in case that sounds like it rules out taking religion in anything but it's own terms, it is important to be clear here - it is quite possible to think that the theory of natural selection gives us perfectly good explanations of certain kinds of phenomena. Indeed it is possible to think that natural selection accounts for some of the pre-conditions of religious thought, experience and development - in a speculative spirit, but no less powerfully for that. My argument is that religious thought, experience and development can only be accounted for in the full sense with the help of a multi-causal picture, and specifically that understanding the events of cultural history depends on an analysis of the way the meanings and values that human beings attribute to events plays an inalienable role in causally determining what happens. They play such an important role that any explanation of those same happenings which bypasses the level of meaning, value and interpretation is bound to be a deficient explanation. To give it an overused label which in this case happens to be entirely appropriate - any explanation of religious origins that bypasses the level of meaning, value and interpretation is bound to be reductive. Dawkins’ problem is that he is looking for one type of cause where only multiple partially efficacious types of causation will do.
* * *
Chapter 7 is about the point at which The God Delusion moves from mildly informative boosting of a wide array of scientific findings to chaotic atheist screed. The catalogue of Biblical nastiness begins in earnest, as do the front-line stories of gun-toting, gay-bashing, white-supremicist religious crazies, whom Dawkins clearly takes as quite characteristic of Religion On The Whole. The famous piece de resistance of his interpretation of the Bible has already come at the top of Chapter 2:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. 31
Chapters 7 and 8 proceed to re-tell the horror stories unleashed by this Brett Easton Ellis figure at considerably greater length – doing so at times in a breathless frat party tone of gleeful sarcasm. Much of Chapter 8 focuses on the violence, particularly the sexual violence, of the Old Testament. Yet the way Dawkins twigs us to the hypocrisy involved in taking all this as morally paradigmatic is also reminiscent at times of what teenage boys do when they discover some the Bible’s – for want of a better word – raunchy bits. Anyone (male) who went through school Religious Education and puberty together will probably recall the excitement of flipping through to Song of Songs and going bananas on all the tits and arse:
To my naïve eyes, “Thou shalt have no other gods but me” would seem an easy enough commandment to keep: a doddle, one might think, compared with “Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s wife”. Or her ass. (Or her ox.) Yet throughout the Old Testament, with the same predictable regularity as in bedroom farce, God had only to turn his back for a moment and the Children of Israel would be off and at it with Baal, or some trollop of a graven image. . . 244
What a wag Richard is.
But what a nag too. By this stage of The God Delusion the preferred offensive strategy is to translate the basic terms of various Biblical narratives into contemporary idiom and use the latter as a stick with which to belt the whole of scriptural religion round the ears. Biblical Canaan becomes a Jewish proto-National Socialist form of Lebensraum. The brutalities of battle detailed in the Book of Joshua become straightforward crimes against humanity, while punishments inflicted for breaches of ancient Levitical ethical code in the surrounding Biblical text turn into scenes from Channel 7 nightly news and start Dawkins huffing and puffing like Andrew Bolt:
What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn’t. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahwe – and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.
On the question of “role models”, Dawkins seems plainly to be in the grip of an interpretative category error – indeed one he shares with the worst of fundamentalists: it should be obvious to anyone, at least anyone capable of reading the Old Testament non-literally as a composite construction with numerous textual strata, that the horror stories belong to a mythologised history – that for instance the tales of Abraham’s chequered progress in the Book of Genesis are not intended to preach morality in any simple sense. Similarly, the way Dawkins exaggerates the blood-thirsty, vengeful, puritanical, paternalistic character of Yahwe obscures the (in scholarly terms) obvious fact (a) that the Old Testament contains multiple partially indicated conceptions of the nature of the Biblical godhead and his relationship to human beings and (b) that these partial conceptions enter complexly into combination and opposition to each other at various points in the text. Still simplifying considerably, we can point to two poles between which the Yahwe conception swings: the historically ancient conception of the warrior God with the changeable heart who is something like the God of the Israelite tribal confederacy and not too far distant from the object of Dawkins’ rage [5]; then, very different from this, the prophets’ God of holy purity, who is much closer to an abstract principled ethical God of the entire universe. To point out that the Old Testament can be read as the historical document of both these conceptions of God as well as numerous intermediate ought to be superfluous in the context of an informed scientific argument about Biblical religion. For Dawkins’ purposes, however, only the first conception is necessary because it’s all he needs to advance his books’ almighty campaign in shit-stirring.
Going on these later chapters, it might well seem strange to anyone coming to Dawkins’ work for the first time that the author of The God Delusion has acquired a reputation as an intelligent and eloquent scientific populariser. What comes to the fore from about the half-way point of the book is a furious adversarialism combined with a certain sort of clichéd moralising of a vaguely left-wing variety, though sounding as if it might veer hard-right at any moment. The genuinely contradictory nature of New Atheism is on display in spades – the whole soapy, softly uplifting tone that sits uncomfortably with the blazing polemics, the compulsive irreligiosity. By the 300p mark Dawkins has got round to the argument that bringing up children in any religious tradition whatsoever is a form of child abuse. His case in point is the nineteenth century tale of a six year old Jewish-Italian boy secretly baptised in infancy by a Catholic maid then removed from the family home with the connivance of the Vatican a few years later. Yet, as wretched as the affair sounds, you still feel the moral pathos Dawkins wants to bring out in the tale of little Edgardo is subservient to his desire to score points against the God-bothering enemy. In no time we've been served with a charge-sheet detailing the intellectual and emotional criminality of religious baptism. And it turns out to be a very long charge-sheet indeed. As becomes typical in these later chapters, once he’s done with his 6-point indictment, he foregrounds himself and his own reactions to little Edgardo’s case, telling us:
As for me, I think only of poor little Edgardo – unwittingly born into a world dominated by the religious mind, hapless in the crossfire, all but orphaned in an act of well-meaning but, to a young child, shattering cruelty. 314 – 15
By this stage, Dawkins is well and truly in the land of tabloid opinion pieces, tritely bandying about details of abuses and outrages, raging at the polemical enemy without noticing that in doing so he’s jumping up and down on victims’ graves. Yes, doubly poor Edgardo, destined to be a religio-political football of future centuries! Triply poor Richard Dawkins, compelled to boil and re-boil the meaty religious scepticism of the Enlightenment until it is ready to be snap-frozen and distributed to the spiritual supermarkets of the entire world! Quadrupally poor world, trapped in the nightmare of its ever-burgeoning op-ed piece of an existence!
Or take this choice passage from Dawkins’ flat irritable onslaught against Christian school mega-manager Nigel McQuoid – the prime mover behind the teaching of creation science in fundamentalist outliers of the British education system:
The level of McQuoid’s scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thousand years old, and also from the following quotation: ‘But to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity of the human body. . . If you tell children there is no purpose in life – that they are just a chemical mutation – that doesn’t build self-esteem.’. . . No scientist has ever suggested that a child is a “chemical mutation”. The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense, on a par with the declarations of “Bishop” Wayne Malcolm, leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, who, according to the Guardian of 18 April 2006, “disputes the scientific evidence for evolution”. Malcolm’s understanding of the evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that “There is clearly an absence of in the fossil record for intermediate levels of development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn’t you have lots of fronkies?” 332
There it is – Richard Dawkins’ specific lack of authorial poise in a nutshell: he just can’t help disapproving/disproving every nutter in sight and, what’s worse, doing so in a horrible snippy tone of intellectual aggrievement as if to say “Look at these people. They don’t even understand BASIC LOGICAL SYLLOGISMS. . .” In every sentence of these later chapters you can virtually feel Dawkins wincing with mental acuity – or wincing at his opponents’ lack of it. In none of them does he display the most basic of the intellectual virtues which would help turn his dispute with the faithful into something more than a nasty boring pillow-fight: the ability to imagine the best version of a non-atheist view of the world. Having watched him pursue the weirdly named McQuoid into half a dozen argumentative potholes in as many paragraphs, you half expect Dawkins to go into refutational detail on the subject of fronkies too.
The standard of the confrontation with religion that gets going in the later parts of The God Delusion is consistently as low as this. What this part of Dawkins’ book sets the terms for is, in an exemplary sense, an ideological debate – a dispute, the main parties to which can never admit any of the flaws in their own positions. As with all ideological debates, the fight is everything, coming across effectively is the criterion of all speech, baiting the enemy and enjoying those warm gusts of sympathy coming your way from fellow travellers are major preoccupations, as is the ever-fresh possibility of a groundswell of public support for your windy rhetorical stances. And so it is that New Atheism is to be found widely imitating the tactics of its adversaries - whose missionary activities, above all in the US, have taken up the whole trashy panoply of commercial techniques of self-representation – from graveyard tv spots to professional lobbying to multi-million dollar spirals of vexatious litigation. So it is that Dawkins’ book has emerged as the manifesto of one of those strange quasi-social movements that make use of all the paramilitary equipment of peace-time war supplied by modern advertising - flip through to the end of The God Delusion and you’ll find the help-lines - flip through to the lifestyle section of your local broadsheet newspaper and you might well find a full-page ad or a full-page interview. (Of course, the most prosaic feature of all ideological debate is that, if you’re not in on a particular debate then – everyone who is in on it seems as bad as everyone else. In this case, the way science in its evangelical Darwinian guise takes the form of commercial publicity seems almost as dubious as the way religion in its creationist guise attempts to take on the form of science.)
To get it all in perspective, it’s useful to remind yourself of some of the high points in the history of atheism – whose long history is itself something of a counterbalance to the impression given in The God Delusion that the arguments between Christianity and counter-Christianity have never amounted to much more than publicity campaigns organised by aggrieved parties who bear a strange resemblance to each other in both taking themselves to be renegades against contemporary society and in living in the sort of eternal present that is the human reality of a state of total warfare. The important thing to remember here is that anti-religious scepticism has been present in most developed cultures in history. One of the oldest recorded examples is Archilochus the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, about whom all we know is that he found the Homeric gods “funny” and set about trying to improve on the myths that told of their various doings.
Or, looking towards modernity again, it's hard to go past Kant, the giant of the Enlightenment who provided the decisive refutation of the ontological argument for the existence of God. (The argument in a nutshell is that God by definition must possess all the perfections; reality is a rather important perfection; therefore God must be real: God exists. The Kantian answer in essence is that “existence is not a predicate”, i.e. existence is wrongly conceived of in the ontological argument as another attribute (or “predicate”) of God comparable, say, to His omnipotence and omniscience.) Things get more complicated the further you get into Kant's monumental Critique of Pure Reason. Along with the notions of immortality and the soul, the concept of God turns out to be (as Kant puts it) antinomian in nature – in other words, a necessary illusion or a sort of predictable extravagance of a human faculty that the Enlightenment’s less subtle atheists would hardly have expected Him to derive from: the faculty of reason itself.
Or, alternatively, we could return to Nietzsche - a thinker whose atheism is full of Promethean intent and whose writings certainly don’t exclude a certain amount rhetorical overkill, though of a rather grander variety than what we get in The God Delusion:
That, as an “immortal soul”, everybody is equal to everybody else, that in the totality of beings the “salvation” of every single one is permitted to claim to be of everlasting moment, that little bigots and three-quarters madmen are permitted to imagine that for their sakes the laws of nature are continually being broken – such a raising of every sort of egoism to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. 166 [6]
It’s worth noting that, as explosive as Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity can be, passages like that come in the middle of an historically informed argument about Christianity and its origins: Nietzsche’s thesis in The Anti-Christ (1888) is that what came to be called Christianity was the result of a radical re-interpretation of Jesus’ vivid sense that active love must be the full criterion of piety – which on the Nietzschean picture is a notion that was misappropriated by St Paul in the fabrication of a theological faith in Christ as the resurrected Son of God. More importantly though, the reason Nietzsche is the sort of thinker that neither theists nor atheists can really get around is because, for all his withering attack-pieces, he is quite as willing to think against atheism as he is to think against the givens of each and every religious interpretation of the world. This isn’t just because he can see into the abysmal depths of the God-problem, nor just because he has a way of compressing the historical, the cultural and the very live emotional aspects of religious belief into an impassioned series of philosophical reflections. Nor is it just because he avoids Dawkins' mistake of collapsing his discussion into a series of legalistic pros and contras. Rather, it is because his apprehension about the consequences of the loss of religion is precisely as strong as his conviction that the loss is inevitable. Nietzsche, in other words, sees the tragedy that any large-scale loss of religious feeling involves and in the case of Christianity he lives that tragedy out in the text of his own philosophy. What he takes as the theme of so much of his later thought is the tragedy of a general cultural loss of pathos and seriousness that follows from a civilisation-wide loss of belief – a tragedy that is likely to leave the average denizen of the post-religious culture-world neither a troglodytic fundamentalist nor an embittered anti-fundamentalist but an insipid hedonist conformist – one of the “last men” Nietzsche pictures hopping around in a semi-satisfied daze, immune to any of life’s deeper problems, be they scientific, religious or philosophical.
Like Dawkins, Nietzsche thinks that Darwinism is true, but he doesn’t think of it as therefore worthy of evangelical proclamation. Nietzsche thinks Darwinism is (as he put it) true but deadly – deadly, namely, to at least one major sense of the seriousness of life. Above all though, Nietzsche is not subject to the confusion of taking the God of the Christian Bible as an hypothesis, let alone a scientifically testable hypothesis; he considers it, in my view rightly, as an interpretative posit [7] – an existential presupposition that cannot be evaluated according to any absolute scientific measure - a presupposition, moreover, that possesses a meaning-giving function that is never entirely separate from its truth-content and has many positive points of connection with the scientific mode of interpreting the world. In Nietzsche’s philosophy the critique of religion undertaken by the Enlightenment is renewed, but at the same time given a paradoxical and enriching turn – with a sort of counter-critique of scientific triumphalism added into the mix of the critique.
For all his anti-Christianity, Nietzsche sees that science and religion give rise to forms of knowledge-and-experience that don’t bear easy or direct comparison. Science starts out from the idea that the world is at bottom nothing but a causal mechanism. Religion, on the other hand, raises the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained and hence somehow a meaningfully and ethically-oriented cosmos [8]. Science doesn’t flinch at the idea that there are no mysteries, or at least none that can’t be dispelled; religion – not just in Christianity but in different ways in art, philosophy and in the wider religious domain – endows the idea that human beings have limits with an ethical significance and sees responsiveness to those limits – to human finitude, to the mysterious and to the ineffable - as the touchstones of wisdom. Richard Dawkins’ disservice to atheism is his uncritical advocacy of the former point of view – that and the facile haste with which he skates over the fact that the disappearance of religious views of the world is an historically largely accomplished fact, the prime consequence of which is what has been aptly described as the disenchantment of the world.
If it’s true that history has a tendency to repeat itself first as tragedy, then as farce, then the tragedy of Enlightenment enacted in the work of Nietzsche has its farcical epilogue in Dawkins’ ever cruder repetition of the gestures of disbelief, his ever more manic attempts to relegate all religion to the dustbin of out-and-out superstition. However, if we’re looking for an alternative to both those intellectual possibilities and neither the embarrassing irrationality of creationism nor the conditional religious devotion of a purely ethical Christianity will do, then it is worth remembering what the world looked like before the tragedy of Enlightenment began. The last word in my presentation today goes to G.C. Lichtenberg, an eighteenth century professor of physics who was the subtle exponent of a scientific-yet-personal view of the phenomena of religion that is neither ridden with pathos, like Nietzsche’s, nor prone to bathos, like Dawkins’:
Religion is really the art of acquiring for oneself comfort and courage in affliction, and the strength to work against it, through thoughts of God and by no other means. I have known people to whom their good fortune was their God. They believed in their good fortune and their belief gave them courage. Courage gave them good fortune and good fortune gave them courage. It is a great loss for a man if he loses his faith in a wise being who directs the world. I believe this is an inevitable consequence of all study of philosophy and of nature. One does not lose belief in a God, to be sure, but it is no longer the benevolent God of our childhood; it is a being whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and this is not especially helpful to the helpless.
There you have it – a sort of moonlit Enlightenment view which knows the necessity of the loss of faith and which sets out, with movingly plain eloquence, both the intellectual tenuousness of a belief in a good active god and the emotional circularity of such belief – that efficacious loop, potentially virtuous, potentially vicious, whereby belief in God brings the world into a sort of God-given motion. Surely this is who New Atheism excludes by taking on Richard Dawkins' ill-considered tone of self-righteous fury: the scientist who is nothing less than a philosopher and nothing more than a human being, who still speaks softly and without calumny of the religious point of view his science has compelled him to leave behind
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